Got antioxidants?

Caught a rerun of one of my all time favourite tv shows last night, the second episode of Stefan Gates' E numbers; an Edible Adventure. I've seen in before, my discovered that I didn't catch the end of it last time and was in for a lovely surprise. Gates looks at what's hiding behind all those Es we eat, and since 90 of them can be found in our own body he set out to make some Es out of his own sweat, tears, hair, vomit and body fat. And then he made a cake with them.



(Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00tl4qk)

 



He also talked about antioxidants, which is probably one of my favourite things ever.
As the name tells us, they stop oxidation and oxidation is what happens when the oxygen in the air around us react with other substances. One of the most important antioxidants is ascorbic acid (or vitamin C if you like), which is found in a whole bunch of stuff. Like oranges.
You've probably noticed how oranges stay nice and fresh when you cut it up, whilst apples or bananas starts turning brown (and essentially rot) right away.

We're no different. Stay off the oranges for too long, and you'll feel your body rotting away like an old apple. This was a common problem when it came to sea travel a few hundred years ago, and it's estimated that more than two million sailor rotted to pieces between 1500 and 1800.
Now, scurvy is rather uncommon in our society, as it's rather hard to avoid these antioxidants on a daily basis. We find them in tea, coffee, fruit, vegetables and ascorbic acid is also used in a myriad of food to stop fat from oxidation. (So be happy if you got E300 in your food.)

(Like with everything else we need, a whole bunch of companies tries to make money by selling antioxidants in pill form. Rather expensively, too. But it's been well established that these so-called antioxidants don't work, so please, buy some fruit or vegetables instead of pricey pills.
Tastes better too.)

I don't know about you, but I absolutely love the idea that without the right type of food, the air that we breathe will slowly kill us. So forget about zombies, what we need to fear is a plant uprising.