Basically, most DNA damage is caused by free radicals. Free radical are things that have an affinity for electrons. The redox potential is basically the amount of energy given off during the reaction (or how badly the ion wants an electron) when they steal an electron. The higher the redox potential, the more dangerous the free radical.
When you breathe oxygen, you produce hydrogen sulfide. The redox potential of the 1/2 reaction of hydrogen sulfide gaining an electron is 1.78. Basically, hydrogen sulfide wants an electron really, really badly. Bad enough to take one from your cells. When a free radical steals an electron from your cells it does damage. Often, DNA damage. If the DNA damage isn’t repaired, this is basically how cancer starts. The free radicals can come from other sources, but this is the basic process.
It gets a little more complicated, because often the damage isn’t to the DNA, but to the level of gene expression. But, it’s the same concept. Oncogenes get overexpressed, and tumor suppression genes get under expressed. I’ll talk about gene expression in more detail later.
Your body has a built is defence system against free radicals. It’s mostly glutathione, but there are a few others. We’ll focus on glutathione to keep things simple. The job of glutathione is to give an electron to the free radicals. This neutralizes the free radical, and prevents the free radical from doing further damage.
Decoupling Damage Response Signaling Network from DNA Damage
But now, the body needs to figure out a way to determine how much damage occurred, and then fix it. It does this primarily via the NRf2 signaling network and downstream genes (SOD-1, NQ01, etc). This is because it’s pretty much impossible to directly measure the amount of DNA damage. So, you need to use a proxy measurement. Again, it’s more complicated then this, but let’s go with this explanation for now.
Here’s one of the interesting points… Your body largely uses the Redox state of the glutathione to determine the extent of the damage*.
Basically, if there’s a whole bunch of glutathione in your system that has lost it’s electrons, then your body knows/thinks it was under attack, and repairs itself. So, your body doesn’t directly measure the damage when it figures out how much to repair itself. So, there’s a slight disconnect here, and in theory, you should be able to trigger the DNA repair without actually generating the DNA damage. The result is significant amounts of NRF2 and increased cellular repair.
A central thesis of this discussion is that vegetables are healthy because they decouple the damage response from the actual damage. It becomes possible to elicit DNA repair (and repair in general) without having to endure damage.
OK, now let’s go back to vegetables… Specifically, let’s talk about ginger because it’s close to my heart in light of past incidents. Lol.
Note: ** In reality, this is how free radicals stimulate an increase in NRF2: KEAP1 causes NRF2 to degrade. Free radicals deactivate KEAP1. When KEAP1 is deactivated, NRF2 doesn’t degrade and builds up. NRF2 normally has a half life of one hour. With KEAP1 out of the picture it lasts much longer.