Why such a question, you will say ... Because it is at the heart of a nutritional debate. When one refers to the term oxidative stress, one often thinks of its deleterious effects. The idea of using antioxidant supplementation, as an athlete with intense metabolic activity, therefore appears logically. Yes, but.
Oxidative stress - or oxidative stress - is a physiological process indispensable to life. When you breathe in your lungs, the inspired air will feed each of your cells oxygen to reach your energetic factories as far as the mitochondria. Particularly abundant in muscle, they will make the energy you need from sugars (glucose), fats (fatty acids) and oxygen through a series of particularly complex chain reactions. However, a small part of the oxygen consumed, about 2%, will form particularly unstable molecules, free radicals. They are chemical species with an unpaired electron, called celibate, giving them a very unstable character with respect to the surrounding molecules.