What is Active Oxygen ?
Active oxygen is something like the exhaust fumes produced
by automobile engines.
If we liken gasoline to food and air to oxygen, active oxygen would correspond
to the
exhaust fumes produced after the gasoline has combusted.
As already mentioned, it is believed that in burning up our food,
around two percent
of the oxygen we breathe in through our lungs becomes active oxygen.
We breathe about twenty times per minute, and active oxygen is being
produced in
our bodies each time we breathe. Since the volume of air we breathe in with each
breath is 500 cc, we are breathing in about 10,000 cc of air per minute. As twenty
percent of this air, or 2,000 cc, consists of oxygen, two percent of this amount,
or 40 cc, becomesactive oxygen.
Thus, each minute about 40 cc of active oxygen is being produced
in
our bodies. This amounts to 24,000 cc per hour and 57,600 cc per day of active
oxygen.
Considering this moment-by-moment production of large amounts of active
oxygen
in our bodies, it is no wonder that we tend to fall prey to disease.
We, on the other hand, have in our bodies several enzymes, such as
SOD(superoxide dismutase), catalase and glutathione peroxidase, which remove this
active oxygen.
As we get older, however, the function of these enzymes alone becomes
insufficient to dispose of the active oxygen effectively. As a result, we fall
to prey to various
diseases. This means that if we could dispose of the "active oxygen"
effectively, we
would be able to achieve good health and longevity.
The functional mechanism of active oxygen is oxidation. In order to
suppress the
(particularly strong) oxidizing function of active oxygen, it follows that we
require
a substance that has the opposite function to oxidation.
The opposite function to oxidation is reduction, and reduction originally
refers to the function of hydrogen. Consequently, we can say that the originator
of reduction is
none other than hydrogen.
