The apex anti-oxidant you have never heard of?

First, I will be at the Lions of Chiropractic on Saturday, on stage at 9.15 talking all things magnesium, the good, the bad and the myths.

I will then be on a trade stand for the rest of the day, please come & say hello.

Second a correction from last week:

I made a joke about “the King” being Elvis and not Charles.

I want to take this opportunity to apologise, the king of rock and roll is, of course, Little Richard.

What a fool I was, Little Richard was the architect, the innovator, the emancipator of rock and roll.

Without Little Richard there is no Elvis, no James Brown (his back singing), Jimi Hendrix (his guitarist), no Beatles, and no rolling stones.

Ever wonder where Prince got his look from?

Oh, and it turns out Tutti Frutti was not always the wholesome song you know and love, here are the original first line lyrics, I’ll let your imagination work out what he is singing about: “Tutti Frutti, good booty”……this is 1955 America.

Rest in peace Richard.

In our body, the most well-known anti-oxidant we mentioned last time is glutathione, and it surely is vital as a potent detoxer, immune supporter and “master” anti-oxidant.

But the apex anti-oxidant is actually a molecule virtually unknown to most, Super-Oxide Dismutase or SOD to their friends.

In your cells, every second, your mitochondria is making energy and your immune system ,when attacking perceived threats, makes a potent free radical called Super-oxide.

And the antidote to this is, of course, Super-Oxide Dismutase.

SOD converts it to hydrogen peroxide, which you may find in your peroxyl mouthwash, it is very potent at killing stuff.

Not as damaging as super-oxide, but still nasty.

So we need catalase and our old friend glutathione to turn it into water and oxygen.

Thus we can say that SOD, catalase and glutathione are primary or apex anti-oxidants.

If you have a sustained low-grade inflammatory response to a perceived threat and/or your mitochondria are inefficient at making energy, then you are going to a make a lot of superoxide free radicals and wreck your cells and your body.

Remember, your number one source of free-radicals is always mitochondria, as you have to break bonds and release electrons (electron transport chain, remember).

This then generates oxidative damage, which generates inflammation.

But inflammation generates free radicals, thus more damage and thus more inefficient mitochondria.

This is the vicious cycle of the un-holy triad, the cycle of accelerated ageing towards ill-health and disease.

So if we could mop up those superoxide molecules, we could really take pressure off the system, reduce inflammation and damage.

To see how we are going to achieve this I need to talk to you about melons.

You see once upon a time, farmers in France were growing melons, and some were going off quicker than others.

But one variety just seemed to stay fresh and juicy for longer than all the others.

The reason, it turns out, is one variety contains lots of SOD.

23 days old and still fresh.

So they harvested the SOD from the melons and now we can give you EXTRAMEL as a whole food ingredient to reduce your stress on a cellular level.

70 people over 28 days, SOD as EXTRAMEL vs placebo, measuring perceived stress, quality of life, pain and much more.

Remember in clinic we do not give just one thing, we want a multi-layered approach, but in research, this is often what you need to do to show effectiveness.

Percived stress scale (PSS), in the EXTRAMEL group started at 34 and dropped at day 28 to 23.61, a 30% drop.

Did the placebo group improve? Yes, in the first 7 days, then plateaued (quite common in RCT’s), dropping from 36 to 30 at day 28, a 18% drop.

And a similar story in the quality of life questionnaire (SF-12), lowers means better QOF.

Plus, the pain dropped and sleep improved:

This is exactly why we have SOD in the form of patented EXTRAMEL in our new product Meta Boost, due out first week of June.

This is a truly unique supplement, amazing for nerve pain (which is why I developed it) but also, via its mechanism, a true WELLNESS supplement.

This makes your mitochondria work more efficiently and mops up all the free radicals causing oxidative stress, causing pain and damage.

Next week we will continue on our journey into SOD and Alpha Lipic acid (ALA).