Unrelated but the bottom navbar in that screenshot makes me long for the Alien Blue days of Reddit. I also just miss that iOS design (along with the OS X Mavericks design)

Oxidation is how red blood cells collect oxygen to pass to the rest of the body. In fact it is iron in hemoglobin that "rusts" to collect the oxygen. You would die if your blood didn't "rust".

Antioxidants have nothing to do with this.

Oxidation is the loss of electrons, whereas reduction is the gain of electrons. The mnemonic is OIL RIG: Oxidation Is Loss, Reduction Is Gain.

Oxygen is highly electronegative (second only to fluorine), meaning that it will strongly attract electrons. So, oxygen is good at oxidizing things. It's good at stealing their electrons. (When the oxygen takes the electron, the oxygen becomes reduced!)

The reason that oxygen is so important in your body for respiration is because of its high electronegativity. It is used as the final electron acceptor in a chain of chemical reactions that are used to convert high energy molecules that you've eaten into different high energy molecules that your body can use.

Think of the analogy of a staircase and a ball. The ball is an electron and the stairs are energy states of different molecules along the metabolic pathway. As the ball goes down the stairs, the electron loses energy (which is usually converted to ATP or NADH). At the bottom of the stairs is oxygen, once the electron gets there, it doesn't have anymore potential energy to lose, unless maybe you have some fluorine around. The final, reduced state of oxygen in this pathway is carbon dioxide. It's no longer useful for respiration and thankfully can just be exhaled. How convenient!

An oxygen missing an electron (an oxygen radical) is highly reactive. This is not good. It'll just steal an electron from whatever molecule is nearby. That may be DNA or any other molecule that it's in your best interest to keep intact. Antioxidants are helpful as electron donors, neutralizing radicals before they do damage.

Cell mechanisms cause oxidative stress in the body which can lead to inflammation and faster aging. Antioxidants provide the body with an easy way to neutralise the bi-products.

I actually thought about this a few years ago, is it possible that we age because of oxidation to some degree? Is there a way to prevent that? I thought about it, how blood can rust and just had the connecting thought but I'm not smart enough to know if there's any actual correlation.

Edit: Got some really cool responses out of this to think about, thank you everyone!

Those damn electrons!

More information about this dangerous chemical: https://dhmo.org/facts.html

This is a valid athletic technique. Usually achieved by training at altitude.

I got my oxygen intake down to single digits! My family wasn’t supportive however and got me a new pair of lungs, haters

Or an extremely deadly poison. Or an explosive, flammable gas.

Wait till you hear about this ancient roman curse called gravity.

To sum up - because I taught this to a kid yesterday - for a period, basically all life photosynthesized and oxygen was toxic to most living things. There were large growths of photosynthetic Cyanobacteria that pumped the air full of oxygen. Living things at the time (like, bacteria and microbes, nowhere near vertebrates) couldn’t handle all the O2 and died.

Iron had been taking in most of the oxygen, but it got all rusted up. There’s beautiful geological evidence of this.

This pic sexy as fuck:

hyper - meaning high,

ox - meaning the animal Ox,

-ia - meaning presence in blood.

High Ox presence in blood. You can imagine how dangerous that is.

Have you ever seen asbestos catch fire? Me neither. So it's your choice what you'd prefer breathing in.