I Don't Know Shit About: Antioxidants

I was recently reading an article in the New Yorker called Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds. In it, they talk about how reason is primarily used to dissect other people's beliefs and not our own, which leads to confirmation bias and Trump. Then they mention this toilet experiment. Some dudes decided to ask some peeps how well they understood toilets, and everyone thought they understood toilets fine just fine. But then they asked the peeps to write out a detailed step-by-step explanation of how toilets work, and nobody could fucking do it. I can't say exactly how this connects to confirmation bias but the morale of the story is that when you write an explanation of how something works, it requires you to ACTUALLY know how the thing works. I am also aware of many massive gaps in my understanding of things. So in the interest of being less dumb, I've made a list of some of things I want to be able to understand as well as I possibly can. As I write this, I come to terms with the fact that I have essentially given myself homework essays for fun. And my first assignment is Antioxidants.

I. WHAT THE FUCK DO I KNOW

I know the green tea I drink has antioxidants. I have seen this heralded as a good thing. I assume antioxidants prevent or reverse oxidation, which I believe is the process that makes rust. I also know that I don't want my bones to get rusty. Honestly that's all I can say I know about anti-oxidants right now so on to the next section.

II. WHAT THE FUCK IS AN ANTIOXIDANT

Thanks, WebMD. So I still don't know what an antioxidant is, but I know what it does. It protects the goddamn body from goddamn damage caused by goddamn free radicals. The good news is that I know what "the body" is. The bad news I do not know what a free radical is or what the damage is or how the antioxidant protects the body. ONWARD TO KNOWLEDGE!!!

III. WHAT THE FUCK IS A FREE RADICAL

Ok so a free radical seems like it's basically a molecule with an unpaired electron. And thus let us venture into the world of electrons to figure out what the fuck this means.

(If you don't want to get down to the nitty gritty, we can just say that certain atoms/molecules have a certain amount of unpaired electrons, and electrons really like being paired, so an atom with an unpaired electron is gonna steal that electron from another molecule, or give its unwanted electron to another molecule, and that's gonna fuck that other molecule up. And in the case of your body, that molecule might be a cell membrane molecule, or it might be a cell nucleus molecule, or it might be a DNA molecule. So if you're continuously fucking up DNA molecules, at a certain point they're not gonna get repaired in time (DNA is constantly getting repaired), and they're gonna start propagating mutations, yada yada cancer. If you're satisfied with that, meet me in section V. In the meantime...)

IV. WHAT THE FUCK ARE UNPAIRED ELECTRONS

So, unpaired electrons. This gets into the theoretical structure of atoms. Atoms have different "shells" of electrons, with each shell corresponding to a different energy level of the electron. Shells are referred to by numbers. Each shell/energy level can contain up to four different types of orbitals. Think of an orbital as the shape of the electrons' path around the nucleus. The four orbitals are referred to by letters (S, P, D, and F). And each orbital can contain a certain amount of electrons, which are referred to by little superscript numbers.

This takes us back to something we probably learned in high school chemistry, and then immediately forgot. Basically, to uncover the unpaired electrons, you have to write out the electron configuration of the atom. So let's say we're figuring out how many unpaired electrons are in Co.

 

The different orbitals correspond to certain columns, and the shells basically correspond to the rows. Why? Because the periodic table is beautiful. Anyways, you pretty much just fill out the atom from the top.

Co is atomic number 27. I put a little green box around it above. We basically just have to work our way down to 27 through all the other atoms. So starting in the top left, you have shell 1 (1 because we're in row 1 of the table), orbital S (S column), and two atoms in that row, which means two electrons. So your first shell is 1S². Row 2 has orbital S with it's next two atoms, and orbital P with six atoms, so you have 2S²2P⁶. Row 3 has the same orbitals and number of atoms, so you have 3S²3P⁶. Row 4 is where our Co atom lives. So starting from the left you have 4S². Then Co is 7 atoms deep in the D orbital section. BUT for those middle D atoms, you subtract 1 from the row number, so instead of 4D⁷ it's 3D⁷. So the final electron configuration you have is 1S²2S²2P⁶3S²3P⁶4S²3D⁷. That's step one.

In step two, you take the highest energy electrons and pair them off into funky little boxes. I know it would be nice if the highest energy electrons were in the highest energy shell, which in this case would be the two in 4S², but the universe doesn't give a single fuck about who you are or what you think. For the atoms in that D section (which are also called transition metals), the highest energy electrons are whizzing around UNDER the fourth shell, in the third shell. Fortunately, that shit we did in step one makes them easier to identify because it's just whatever the last number is. So we're working with 3D⁷.

So about those funky little boxes. Basically each box can contain up to two electrons, and a full box represents a happily-married electron pair. So each orbital has a different number of boxes. Like the S orbital only ever has two electrons, so that fella has one box. The P orbital gets three boxes. We're working with the D orbital, which can have up to ten electrons, so it gets five boxes. So we get five boxes, and we have 7 electrons to box up (the 7 in 3D⁷)(God bless you if you're still reading this holy shit). So what you do first is give each box an electron.

For some reason people draw the electrons as arrows. I think it has something to do with quantum spin but at this point who the fuck wants to figure out what that means. So now we have five shitty, lonely-ass electrons, but two of them are about to get motha fuckin girlfriends, because we started with seven electrons. In the spirit of the times, I will say that the two left-most electrons are Adrian and Deanna, while Scott, Rich, and I are represented by the three arrows on the right.

And there you have it. This atom has three unpaired electrons, making it unstable and ready to mangle.

This represents copper in its neutral state, meaning it has the same number of electrons as protons. It's possible for it to have less electrons than protons, so a free radical can probably be any atom that has its electrons fucked with. But I'm not gonna look into specifics because I want to finish this goddamn

V. WHAT THE FUCK WAS I TALKING ABOUT

So where I left off the reasonable readers, I was saying how these free radicals, with their unpaired electrons, are ready to steal electrons away from wherever they can. If you're wondering where they come from like I was, I should mention that these free radicals come from ordinary metabolic processes, immune system responses, and external sources like fried food, alcohol, tobacco, pollution, etc. So you can't avoid them.

Since this post is supposed to be about antioxidants, I should probably talk about those. An antioxidant is a molecule that comes in and A: takes that unpaired electron away, B: donates an electron to the unpaired one to calm that shit down, C: nip the formation of free radicals in the bud, D: break down the entire free radical molecule, or E: some other shit that seems complicated and I don't want to get into because I really want to finish this goddamn post.

Antioxidants are very complicated and scary looking molecules. What you're looking at here is Phytic Acid, an antioxidant found in grains, corns, and legumes. It is complicated and looks scary. Maybe someday I'll dive deeper into the chemistry of how this works, but today I really want to finish this goddamn post. Suffice it to say, somewhere in this behemoth monster is a mechanism that deals with a free radical.

VI. I REALLY WANT TO FINISH THIS GODDAMN POST

Ok let's get to the takeaways, because I have to go to work in ten minutes, and since I started this post I've thought of like ten other, funner things I want to write about. So free radicals: some occur naturally, some come in from the outside, bad if you have too much of them. Antioxidants: same deal. I guess a bunch of studies show that antioxidant supplements that just dump mass amounts of antioxidants into your bod end up causing more harm than good. Besides Vitamin C, which you can pretty much just pee out if you have too much. But then you'll have to pee more and who the fuck wants that. Anyways what we have here is a classic yin and yang situation. Your bod is ready for the free radicals it produces, and creates the proper antioxidants to deal with those, but since you're getting more free radicals from pollution and shit, you should help your bod out and eat foods and drinks that can offset these radicals with more antioxidants. As with all things in life, nature works in a perfect harmony within and without our bodies, and since we fucked the world without, we gotta try to unfuck the world within.

VII. BYE.

Thanks for reading. I hope you learned something. I'm not sure if I learned anything.