The Secret Life of Rust


When we think of rust, we think of old cars and decaying highway bridges. Perhaps the Tin Man from Oz pops into your head. One thing you probably don't think about is the inside of your own body. Nevertheless, that talk you hear about eating antioxidant-rich vegetables is really a matter of rust reduction.

Part of the reason old age kills is because you are, at this very moment, in a lifelong process of rusting out. And reaching for the WD-40 isn't going to help.

Your body is a complex soup of chemical reactions. At an atomic level, your cells try to maintain stability. Unfortunately, they are forever being damaged from pollution, stress, junk food, the sun, ozone, electrical appliances, x-rays, smoking, alcohol, and just about anything else you encounter on a day to day basis.

Our cells are quietly under siege 24/7. Even your own metabolic processes like breathing and digestion add to the damage. Use or abuse of a cell weakens it. If the structure is too badly compromised, it can release what's known as a free radical. Free radicals attempt to reestablish stability by stealing an electron from a neighboring molecule. (Remember high school chemistry?) This sets off a chain reaction of electron theft, spreading instability.

Free radicals that contain oxygen are known as reactive oxygen species, or ROS. They are some of the most common free radicals found in our bodies, and they're responsible for oxygenation, also known as rust.

How can you stop yourself from rusting out like the Tin Man? Antioxidants found in fruits and vegetables serve as your own little chemical SWAT team by apprehending and soaking up these renegade oxygen molecules, escorting them away to be eliminated through your waste reduction system.

All of this works pretty well, provided the destruction doesn't exceed what your SWAT team can handle. When the chaos outpaces your body's ability to fix it, chances start to decrease that you will be able to remain above room temperature on this spinning watery rock called earth.

TV's late night pitchmen hawk the superior cleaning power of antioxidants in a wide variety of products. The principle is the same: the sprays and cleansers fight tough stains by bonding up with everything from the dirt in your clothes to the rust on your barbecue grill. 

Oxygen: it's a classic double-edged sword. On one hand, we need it to breathe, but on the other hand, it's what will inevitably take us all down. So the next time you're deciding whether or not to reach for that spinach or those berries, remember what aging rocker Neil Young warned us so long ago: "Rust never sleeps."


Check out Robb’s new book and more 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Robert Frost Quandary, or How Irrational Thinking Might Save Your Life

Image
You stumble out of the wilderness, having had no contact with humans for at least ten days. You’re weak from hunger and fatigue and you find yourself at a crossroads, power lines stretching out along each of the separate roadways. It’s decision time. You think about Robert Frost’s poem, and wonder if his advice to take the road less traveled might not just lead to your demise. What do you do, or more importantly, which brain system should you use to make this crucial decision? Daniel Kahneman, famed psychologist, winner of the Nobel prize for prospect theory and author of Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow might be the one guy to call, assuming your existential crossroads gets cellphone reception. Kahneman explains that we have two systems for making decisions. He refers to them simply as System 1 and System 2. System 1 is reflexive, automatic, and impulsive. It takes a constant reading of your surroundings and generates short-term predictions, all operating on a level beneath yo
Read more

Who Are You: Does Personality Change as We Age?

Image
Are you the same “you” that you were twenty years ago? Thirty? Forty? What about fifty years ago? While science still struggles to quantify, measure, and categorize personality, some have a different question: how stable is personality in the first place? Do the high school version of yourself and the retiree version of yourself still have some common immutable core? It depends how you look at it , says a paper by lead author Rodica Damian of University of Houston and her co-authors Marion Spengler of the University of Tuebingen in Germany, Brent W. Roberts of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and UH grad student Andreea Sutu. The paper in question goes by the catchy title “Sixteen going on sixty-six: A longitudinal study of personality stability and change across 50 years.” Damian and her colleagues compared the results for 1,795 U.S. adults who had taken a personality test as teenagers and then again, five decades years later. The team found that yes, there is a
Read more

The Best Painkiller Isn't What You Think It Is

Image
When we say that listening to the right song makes us feel better, usually we mean it in terms of emotions. However, a new study from the University of Utah Health suggests that combining certain painkillers with certain music boosts the pain-fighting effect of the medication a measurable amount. This recent bit of research was conducted specifically on models recreating two types of pain: inflammatory and post-surgical. (Nerve pain, or neuropathic pain, was not addressed.) Low doses of four medications were explored: ibuprofen, cannabidiol, levetiracetam, and NAX 5055. As for music, the researchers went with one artist only, while the control groups were given one of the four drugs and subjected to white noise. What music would you choose for optimal painkilling effect? The experimenters went with Mozart. (Interestingly, the phrase “Mozart therapy” already exists, referring to the beneficial effect ol’ Amadeus can have on patients with epilepsy. For instance, a 2018 st
Read more