There are always two sides to every story, and this is definitely true when it comes to nutrition. I got a call from a friend the other day, and apparently the info I've been sharing about free radicals had incited a bit of panic for her. She was having nightmares about browning apples and afraid to use her new juicer. That's actually the complete opposite reaction I was going for...

Although free radicals can cause some serious damage, they can mostly be avoided and counteracted by antioxidants. This is pretty simple to do, it just takes a bit of awareness.

At this point in human evolution, most of us have heard of antioxidants. Like free radicals though, do the majority of people know what antioxidants really are? And more importantly, what they do? Because unless we understand them, they're just another fad diet tactic and could lead people to make the wrong choice thinking they are being healthy.

There is such a thing as getting too many antioxidants, and there is certainly such a thing as eating too much of a single food when it gets promoted as the fountain of youth or some other such craziness.

You may want to read Why Free Radicals Aren't All Bad  and How To Stay Away From Free Radicals before you read this.

It wasn't so long ago that no one knew about free radicals. Now that scientists have figured them out and information has been put out to the public by the media, we're all pretty free radical-phobic. I wonder if there's a word for that - like oxyreactophobia. Maybe I should submit that to Webster's...

Last week I went over the basics of how they damage our bodies and the most destructive types. Today I'm going to go over where they come from and how you can minimize your exposure to them since the unknown is really the basis of a lot of our fears.

Free radicals get into our bodies in lots of ways. One way is through our diet. Remember, free radicals are molecules that react with other molecules, and often with oxygen. You can see fruits and vegetables react with oxygen when you cut them. They start to turn brown, and apples and avocados are two of the fastest to react.

There's a lot of talk about free radicals these days, but the term isn't often explained. Radical gets you thinking about Che Guevara, and my dad figures that as long as he gets expensive radicals they can't be that bad. He has his own brand of humor... I love it, but its subtleties are sometimes lost.

Free radicals usually get cast in the role of the evil villain of the wild west, with antioxidants playing the hero. As always, things in the human body aren't quite as black and white as that.

Chemically, free radicals are molecules that are looking for other molecules to pair up with. This means that they want to react with things, and unfortunately they can wind up reacting with the cells of our bodies in a way that isn't good.

See how simple chemistry can be? There's a more technical explanation, but I think for our purposes that's as deep as we need to go.

What kind of damage can free radicals do in our bodies? Well, there are some things they tend to be attracted to, depending on their chemical structure. They can react with molecules of the cell membrane of any cell in our bodies. The cell membrane is the skin of a cell, and it does the same thing as our skin: it protects the cell from whatever is outside of it.