The Importance Of Antioxidants
A key function of your liver is to remove toxins from your bloodstream and get them out of our system. This vital function is essential to maintaining health and ensuring that whatever you consume, be it healthy or otherwise, toxins are prevented from building up in your body.
Of course, if you have an unhealthy diet or consumer too much alcohol, you can put your liver under strain. This is how, for example, persistent excess drinking can cause disease and lead to you requiring a transplant.
While being wise about what you consume is part of the equation, this is not just about eating or drinking less of the wrong kinds of things. It is also about adding in good things, such as antioxidants. This is where De-liver-ance can help, as the powerful antioxidants it contains help boost the capacity of your liver to carry out its function and keep your body healthier.
The way antioxidants work is by suppressing the chemical process known as oxidation. While this process is necessary for producing free radicals - molecules that help produce energy from food and air - too many of these free radicals leads to health problems ranging from cancer to Alzheimer’s disease.
All this means that the liver, while also dealing with various toxins, has to tackle the effects of oxidisation too. When this is happening to a high level, the liver cannot cope and is placed under oxidative stress. That in turn makes you more vulnerable to disease.
This does not just include the things that might hospitalise you, but also lesser yet troubling issues ranging from fatigue to headaches, wrinkles to brain fog.
Alcohol is just one of many things that can place a liver under oxidative stress. So too can viruses, obesity, drugs and insulin resistance.
The body does produce antioxidants itself, and in a healthy system these balance out the free radicals. But when substances are introduced that add oxidative stress, more antioxidants are needed to provide balance. These can be obtained through diet and supplements.
Antioxidants can be found in a large number of different foods. Particularly high quantities can be found in fruit, veg and white meat like fish, especially oily fish.
Vitamins such as A, B and C all boost your body’s production of antioxidants. For example, vitamin C helps boost levels of an antioxidant called glutathione, which is why fruit and vegetables such as citrus fruit, bell peppers, asparagus and avocado are all beneficial. Vitamin B comes from oily fish, leafy greens, milk and eggs.
Many of the same foods that provide vitamin B - including eggs, greens like lettuce and oily fish - also provide vitamin A.
A number of minerals also help the body to produce antioxidants, including iron, zinc and copper. Chicken, turkey and beef provide iron and copper, while dairy products offer a good supply of zinc.
Including all these in your diet will help a lot, but taking a supplement rich in antioxidants will give you a huge boost straight away, helping to power your liver to do its job and keep your body’s internal workings in the best possible balance.