Free Radicals

What IS a free radical? We are scared to death of them and know they must be pretty bad news to get a villainous rep of this magnitude. Is the fear worth all the hype?

I say that it depends. Free radicals are unstable molecules in the body. As we’ll talk about today, they are byproducts of normal, everyday processes we encounter just by being alive. Even respiration produces free radicals. If that’s the case, how can they be that terrible for us?

The problem occurs, like so many other scenarios, when we have too many free radicals. Let’s talk more about what they are, how they are produced, and what we can do to keep things in balance.