If you’re alive in 2024, have an internet connection, and check social media often, it can often feel like the world is a horrible place, and we’re all screwed. You’ve got to protect your home, buy insurance for everything you own, be careful of everything you eat, drink, or touch, and perhaps most importantly, protect that ever-so-fragile body of yours. Skin, hair, eyes, hands, whatever it may be, there’s always something else you can do to keep your body healthy, right?
But here’s what those ads in your Instagram feed don’t tell you because, surprise, surprise, it doesn’t sell their product. Our body is pretty darn good at keeping itself healthy on its own. After all, we haven’t had these fancy creams, pills, supplements, and oils for the vast majority of human history, and our ancestors must’ve gotten by well enough to bring us into the world! In fact, the human body is so incredibly complex that even the top experts who’ve dedicated their whole lives to understanding it don’t even come close to fully grasping everything. Despite all the advancements in medicine and physiology that our world has been blessed by, there remain dozens, perhaps hundreds, of unanswered questions about how our body works.
All this is to say that our body, in its natural form, is pretty impressive in what it does. Millions of years of evolution have given us a machine that’s many times more powerful than even the most powerful AI or supercomputer out there. What’s more, it’s also far better protected than any machine you might be used to. That antivirus program you might’ve had to buy for your old Windows machine a few years ago? Yeah, any nerd with a brain could easily whip up something that could get around it. But the body’s natural antivirus program (which we call the immune system) is basically rock solid. You might not think that when you’ve caught a cold or have the flu, but your body is attacked by millions of unwanted bacteria and viruses every second, and the end result is that you maybe get sick once or twice a year. What’s the save percentage on that? Pretty good, we think!
And remember that time your friend thought it was hilarious to push you into the pool while fully clothed and with your phone in your pocket? Very likely, you panicked that your phone would be okay, and your clothes were likely a total mess. But your body? After rubbing it with a towel for a few seconds, nobody probably noticed you’d just taken an unplanned dip. And that’s because your skin, like the immune system, forms an incredibly powerful protective barrier to bits of the outside world that don’t belong in the body. And for what does manage to seep through, your body doesn’t just short-circuit and go dead like a laptop might after getting a drop of water spilled on it.
For germs that manage to sneak in, you’ve got the immune system, and for everything else that doesn’t belong in the body, we have what’s called antioxidants. They might not get as much praise as the immune system, likely because unwanted chemicals and minerals that seep through the skin aren’t quite as scary as deadly viruses, but their role is nonetheless heroic. All the time, millions of times per second, the body encounters chemical compounds it doesn’t want in the air you breathe, things you touch, food you eat, and water you drink (or fall into). Many of these sneak through the skin and become what physiologists call free radicals.
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