Thirty years ago, if you had asked a top medical scientist to tell you what the items in the following list had in common, he or she would have been hard pressed to give you an answer:

• Heart attack
• Angina
• Heart failure
• Stroke
• Aging
• Brain damage
• Kidney disease
• Cancer
• Cataract
• Poisoning
• Radiation sickness
• Rheumatoid arthritis
• Male infertility
• Retinopathy of prematurity
• Malnutrition
• Common cold

Today, we have the answer. All these conditions are either caused or contributed to by free radicals.

Free radicals can do your body a lot of harm. If your body fails to combat them effectively, they will kill you.

We now know that in most of the major diseases that kill people prematurely or ruin the quality of their lives, the actual bodily damage is caused by free radicals.

These short-lived but enormously damaging chemical groups are constantly attacking body proteins, carbohydrates, fats and DNA, causing potentially serious damage unless checked. In this sense, the body really is a battlefield. Scientists believe that, on average, every cell in your body suffers around 10,000 free radical hits each day. And each of these hits can set up a chain reaction that can kill a cell.

There is no way you can avoid free radicals, but there is a lot you can do cut down the numbers produced in your body and to ensure that the maximum number of those that are produced are neutralized before they can do you harm.