As a former University of California student, Berkeley Campus, I used to define a "free radical" as a transient person I'd encounter when strolling down Telegraph Avenue. These individuals were broke, aimless, and looking for a place to land – usually a place called People's Park, which was the site where anti-war rallies and marches were held in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

There is another kind of free radical in the news today. These radicals are chemical energy fragments, usually lone rider oxygen molecules, though renegade nitrogen and carbon elements are similarly plagued by their unwanted presence. When randomly circulating, a healthy surveillance system captures them with chemical buffers, allowing them to be metabolized and moved safely out of your body. If buffers are not available in an overstressed system, the radicals crash land on sensitive vital membranes.

A certain amount of free radical generation is part of your everyday physiology. They occur as metabolic waste; we expect them. But the number is way up. Some mathematicians estimate that each and every one of our cells is getting bombarded with up to 10,000 hits during each 24-hour period.

If the radicals cannot be held at bay, our system undergoes "oxidative stress," which begins as an energy imbalance, but ends up as real disease—heart disease, arthritis, stroke, and dementia. This occurs from overexposure to all kinds of toxic challenges, mostly notably discordant energies such as solar, electromagnetic, and thermal. Add cobalt radiation to our fresh vegetables and chemical insult from mercury exposure (eg, through fresh water fish, dental amalgams) and aluminum (eg, from deodorants, aluminum pots and cans) and what we have is the production of too many free radicals—our bodies become overwhelmed. Too much is too much, and over the edge we go.

When membranes get marred by free radical craters, and oxidation does not go as expected, the battlefield begins to fill up with casualties. Do you know that the most common cause of heart disease—coronary artery disease—is caused by cholesterol? Of course you do. What you probably don't know is that "oxidized cholesterol" starts the process. The facts behind Alzheimer's disease paint a similar picture. When beta-amyloid is oxidized, unwanted waste is produced. This waste is then deposited in brain tissue, mostly inside blood vessel walls.

Failure to protect against oxidative stress could be the most important reversible cause for chronic degenerative and inflammatory illnesses. Taking this preventive step is immensely valuable to you in your quest for a pain-free long life.

What is vastly under appreciated is that this protection is easy to obtain. Gird your system with enough anti-oxidant protection. This can be done by boosting your intake of yellow, green, and orange vegetables or by taking ample vitamin C and E. Consider selenium, beta 1-3 Glucan, pro-anthrocidin or alpha-lipoic acid—these supplements have very strong anti-oxidant properties. Eating properly and taking vitamin supplements are proactive positive steps.

Stop your cells from squawking. Listen when they are painfully crying out for attention. Stock your shelves with sensible essentials—healthy food and supplements. Doing so is key to your obtaining salubrity—i.e. "enviable health."