The antioxidant recycling process

[Guest guest]

I just read this good article that laid out how all the different antioxidants interact with each other to all recycle each other.  It really helped me understand why low glutathione or glutathione that cannot recycle impacts the whole system of antioxidants.  I liked this article bc it was in layman's terms and I could understand it...

http://www.nutritionreview.org/library/lipoic_everything.phpThis was the part I found most interesting: " Recycling Antioxidants

In recent years, Dr. Packer, a ground-breaking researcher who has studied vitamin E and exercise-induced free radical production, has focused on how lipoic acid and other antioxidants interact in a complex recycling process in the body. He first discovered several years ago how vitamin E is 'recycled' by vitamin C in the body.

Vitamin E is a potent antioxidant that works primarily to stabilize dangerous free radicals (lipid peroxyl radicals and lipid alkoxyl radicals) that form in fatty (lipid) tissues and membranes. In order to quench these reactive molecules, vitamin E first absorbs the excess unpaired electrons, but in so doing vitamin E becomes a free radical itself, though far less reactive or damaging than the original radicals. At this point, vitamin C now interacts with the free radical form of vitamin E, and by absorbing the excess electrons, converts it back to its natural form as stable vitamin E.

The newly regenerated vitamin E molecule can now go back to work, leaving behind a new free radical in the form of unstable vitamin C (a semiascorbyl radical). In the next stage of the recycling process the semiascorbyl radical is regenerated into vitamin C by a class of sulfur-containing compounds called thiols. Glutathione, the body's primary protective antioxidant inside of cells and the most important member of the thiol group, is next in line to be recycled by another antioxidant coenzyme called NADPH. From here the cycle continues in a step-by-step process until all free radicals are quelled. "