All About Free Radicals | Dr. Sherri Thomas | EP 111

First of all, I want no one to feel condemned. We're here to try to just see like, what is a better way? God didn't take stripes on his back just for physical healing. That's for emotional healing. Maybe the answers could be found just in being heard and being seen and finding someone else that understands. I was seeing God's hand in the prayers that I was praying for other people. When you are not focused on yourself, it frees you to actually be part of a miracle in somebody else's life. Welcome to iRefresh, where we talk about the power of prayer and God's Word. Welcome to another episode of I Refresh. And I have with me my friend, Dr. Sherry Thomas. Welcome. Thank you, Cheryl. It's been a while since we've been together doing this. We did. We had a great episode. We had Christy Waters also join us and talk about health. So that's a great one for you to check out as well. But today, it's all things about our health and nutrition. I'll let you give the title of it, because it's really clever. OK, my title is, It's All About the Radicals. Wanted to get an attention getter, so hopefully that works. Plus, we brought this lovely spread of a bunch of nutritious food, so hopefully that will keep your attention as well. There's so much information out there, and yet, like, okay, what is valid? What's truth? What... And things do change over more research. Even within the church, there's a lot of books on the Daniel fast, and we see it in the Old Testament, a lot of all the different things about... Like even Daniel, what he ate or chose not to eat, didn't feel like he was supposed to eat. So I would love for us to maybe for you to kind of open it up to how you see what God's viewpoint is on our eating habits and our health. Exactly. And so many things in life change all the time. You know, should you drink coffee? Should you not drink coffee? Should you do this? Should you not? I think we do need to seek the Lord, first of all, just to see what does his word say and listen to our bodies to see. what foods and things assimilate better in our body, because what's good for you may not always be good for me. But we can hone it down to a few principles that I think we can all agree on. And I think that's what I'd like to discuss mostly today, is just like what basic things can we agree on that are healthy? and the little nuances that each and every person chooses for their own self might look different for you as looks different for me or looks different for our children, but there are some basics we should agree on. One of the main things is, You know, like a child, if they're running out in the street and there's a car, you're going to yell, stop, don't run out in the road. And you don't have time at that minute to explain to the child, there could be a car coming, but we can train them. And we can say, when we get to a road, mommy's going to look to the right and the left. We're going to look for cars. If it's safe, we're going to cross the road. And then the child can understand the why behind. When you frantically say, stop, they know. There might be a car. There might be something there. So I want to look at the why behind nutrition, because I feel like if you have a choice, I have a donut in one hand and an apple in another. I want you to think. why would this choice be better than that? This one might taste better. It might smell better. It might look better. But which one's going to feed my body and be more nutritious? And our bodies are the temple of the Holy Spirit. So we want to fuel them with good things. I think if we can look at the why first, that's going to help with just the whole basis of nutrition. So two Bible verses I'd like to look at. The first one, Joshua 1.8. Verse 8 says, keep this book of the law always on your lips, meditate on it day and night so that you may be careful to do everything written in it. Then you'll be prosperous and successful. So I believe in that God is telling us why. He wants us to meditate on his word. He And the reason why, so we know his word. And when we're in situations, if we don't know his word and we haven't meditated and we haven't put it in our soul, then we're not going to be able to draw upon that wealth. And when he says, then he will make your way prosperous and then you'll have good success. So there's a lot of whys and a lot of instructions in the Bible. Also, one of the big ones, Deuteronomy 28. which we don't need to read the whole thing. But as we recall, the first part of that is the blessings, my favorite part. We love the blessings. So the first, what, first 1 to 14 is if you heed the voice of the Lord and if you follow his commands, then these blessings will come upon you. And then what happens after that? We don't follow the instructions. It's the curses. Exactly. So if you don't heed his voice, then the curses. The thing I found interesting when I was reading the other day, in my Bible, there's two columns. One column is the blessings. The whole next page and a half are the curses. So the Lord just really ministered to me when I was reading that, that I want the blessings. And there's three times as many curses. I don't really want those in my life. So if we heed the voice of the Lord, then the blessings will come upon us. That's what nutrition is like. And I think if we know the why behind it, then we can make some better choices. So now I'm going to go into a little chemistry lesson for you all. This is really helpful. And so you've really got to stick with it because on the other side of it, you really get a clear understanding of, like you're saying, making choices. Even as we age or depending on different sicknesses and diseases we're seeing on people, I think we're becoming more motivated to find ways to be proactive towards health. So this is where the radicals come in. So I'm also, you know, some people think as a doctor, I'm so serious, but I really like to have fun and I like to laugh and I like to enjoy things. Plus, I also like to simplify things. I don't want my patients to walk out of the office and think, oh, wow, she's really smart. She went to school for 11 extra years after high school. I want them to think I learned something today and that I could put some information in their little bag to take out with them to have better health. Just like when I'm talking to a car mechanic or an accountant, I want them to speak my language that I can understand so I can try to live a better life and understand these things better. So we're gonna try to make it as simple as possible, but yet there's still a lot of biochemistry in all this. So first of all, we have a healthy molecule. So for those who may just be listening, a healthy molecule has an even number of electrons. So my example is water, which is H2O. So in the water, we have 10 electrons, five nice stable pairs. And I'm going to ask Cheryl to be my healthy molecule. Then we have the bad free radical, which I will be the radical. I'm the crazy. Well, I don't know. Cheryl's a little crazy, too. We both have options. We're both a little radical at times. So this radical has an odd number of electrons. So you can see there's eight in the middle. There's two. Here's a pair. Here's a pair. But there's one single electron that is unpaired. Well, what happens, Cheryl's molecule is very stable. It is healthy, it is happy, it's living a good life, it is well. This radical feels very unstable when it only has one, and it's gonna do everything possible to try to become a pair. So what will I do? I'm gonna go over to Cheryl and I'm gonna steal one of her electrons. Well, that makes me happy, that makes me stable now, but what happens to Cheryl? Cheryl becomes unstable. So she goes to seek another cell and steals one from them. And that cell steals one from another. And there goes the cascade. So that is just a very simple way to explain where disease, where aging, where degenerative changes come from. It's these free radicals. Free radicals are everywhere. Like our body makes them just even internally from stress. So if we're stressed, stressed, stressed, stressed, stressed, we don't get enough sleep, we're just too worried, we have so much going on, our body will make free radicals. But then we can also put things into our body. The things that cause free radicals and promote them in our body are things like alcohol, tobacco, even external things like pesticides, and even the sun. So a little bit of sun is good. But a lot of sun, what does it do to your body? Burn, burn, burn. For me, yeah, burn, Bill. Burn, burn, burn. And it even can promote sunspots and wrinkles. Oh, I have that. It's from the car. Driving the car, I'm like, oh, my goodness, I had those spots on my cheek. But that's where the sun coming in. Exactly. Yeah, you're right. And we see, especially people who are the drivers, we see more sun damage usually on the left side of their face. That's where they're getting, if you're more the passenger, we see more damage on the right side of the face. All these things, it's a lot of unhealthy molecules in our body. that become free radicals and free radicals and free radicals. Well, where does this lead to? It leads to cancer, it leads to neurocognitive diseases like even Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease. It can lead to heart disease, all various different heart problems, arthritis, especially thinking about like rheumatoid arthritis, a whole host of autoimmune diseases, which can be anything from thyroid problems to, even celiac and various different autoimmune problems that we can have. Cataracts, those are even from often too much sun and just the damage that we get. I'm hearing some of those diseases are more typically have been when you're later in your life that they come on, but yet you're still seeing cancer in younger kids or now there's been, it seems like the onset of different, even Alzheimer's has been coming on. People are getting younger and younger that are having osteo. It seems like it's younger and younger ages. Why would that be? I mean, is it all about free radicals or maybe it's other things? Some is our hereditary. I think of just the genetic makeup that we have in our body is almost like a light switch. You know, the light switch is turned off, and there's various different things that can flip them on to make them occur sooner in your life. And that's part of the whole goal of getting nutrition under control, as well as... exercise, sleep. We could talk for days and days and days on. Well, I'm not doing so good on that with the sleep factor. So, yeah. So all the things with health and nutrition. Okay. But just... Like you said, yes, we are starting to see things younger and younger. We're seeing more obesity, more diabetes, more diseases at a younger age. And if we look back at how things were, you know, for our great-grandparents, they didn't have all the different radiation that we're exposed to. They didn't have cell phones, all the electronics, exactly. They ate healthy food. We mentioned like pesticides and things in our food. So they had gardens and they had healthy soil and they didn't have processed food. We have so much processed food now. And I believe all of these things just... you know, trigger the effect of free rattle tools. It's kind of like the glass is half full. It just keeps on flowing over with all the different things. We are, with electronics, processed, all kinds of foods. We don't know where it's coming from. I mean, or even fruits and vegetables, if we don't wash them correctly, we don't know what preservers are on there to keep like the apple from, you know, turning colors quickly. I'm assuming that we have to even clean certain things so that we bring it to our body. We're not, Taking in those, you know, contaminants or toxins. Exactly. I mean, it's nice to have organic foods, but I realize, wow, the costs of things have gone up tremendously. Right. So if you can buy organic foods or get some things in their healthier state, that's great. But if not, definitely washing fruits. I even, you know, bought some strawberries the other day and I thought, you know, they seem like they can get moldy within just two or three days. Oh, my God, so fast, yes. So, you know, I soak and soak and soak them in a little bit of vinegar and baking soda and, rinse them off really well. My kids will say, are they gonna taste like vinegar? Yes. So, but once I did that and got them all cleaned and dried them off and put them back in a container, they lasted the whole week, which they never would. So yes. I do vinegar, but you're saying add the baking soda. I did a mixture of both some vinegar and baking soda. And more vinegar, obviously, than baking soda. You don't need much, but just in a little bit of water and soaking them and rinsing them. So as much as we can get rid of our pesticides and things, you know, we want to try to eliminate them. So that's kind of a key with free radicals. What can we eliminate? Because we want to eliminate, obviously, smoking and tobacco sources, limit our sun exposure, although we get a lot of vitamin D from the sun. So a little bit's okay, but we don't want to get burned. Okay. And we want to use healthy things, healthy products on our skin as well. To say, because if you do sunscreens, there could be some that are harmful maybe? Exactly. Okay. And that's, you know, that's where knowledge changes and knowledge increases. So I've learned a lot more just over my life just looking into nutrition and looking into nutrition. things then when I was a child. I wasn't brought up that way. In my family, we had a little bit of a garden, but we lived on macaroni and cheese and- Oh my goodness. Spaghetti and things that- Bologna. Right, bologna. White bread. Spam. Oh, spam, you got that. How many ways can you make spam? And for a treat, we might go have like a root beer float. So we weren't necessarily brought up with the healthiest of beginnings, but my parents did the best they could with the knowledge they had. So I think as much as we can try to increase our knowledge, that's going to help. And it's going to help our children and our grandchildren. If we can start young, you know, so that people don't have some of the, you know, background that we have to try to relearn, it can be very helpful too. No, I think our kids have a better advantage because we've learned the healthier routes. So you're right. Yeah, they're not eating spam. At least not on my watch. So hopefully they are. These are the things we want to try to avoid. You know, try to stay away from the UV light, the pesticides, the smoking, alcohol. But then what else can we do? We're going to eventually run into free radicals. So that's where God is so good. I love him so much because he always provides a way out. He always has a solution for if we're exposed to these things, what do we do? So in walks Mr. Antioxidant. This is what the Lord provides us so much. So the antioxidant, for those listening, also has an odd number of electrons. So we're having to think of all this... All the cells, our cells have like billions of molecules in them. So we're looking at the smallest little, little, little, little tiny molecules made of atoms with these electrons like buzzing around almost like satellites around a planet. Our antioxidants, they also have an unpaired electron. But instead of stealing from someone else, the antioxidants donate. So they're the good guys. So they're going to go to the free radicals and donate this little electron, which is now going to give it a pair and make it stable. Isn't God so good? So that's where we bring the free radicals, and it's actually the antioxidants coming against the free radical? Exactly. So the free radicals, the bad things that are out to destroy us and lead to wrinkles and cataracts and disease and cancer and autoimmune problems. And when there's the cascade where it's stealing, stealing, stealing, it nips it in the bud. It stabilizes out that molecule. And so it can become healthy. And then in. In turn, this one also comes into a paired state where it's stable too. So that stabilizes our cells. So this is just a real practical way to try to explain all the science behind what's happening actually in our body. If you wanted to be healthy, are you wanting to have cancer and autoimmune diseases and, oh, dementia and Parkinson's disease? Or if there was a way not to have those, do you think it would make it easier to make your choices as to if you could prevent those things? What are your ways that we can begin to stop the damage we've already started? Because some of you might, depending on what your age is, where you're at, how can we begin to redefine where we're at in our health? Right. And this is in no way to bring condemnation to anyone or guilt of feeling like, oh, wow, I've had one of these diseases, so I must have done something wrong. I mean, I myself have had a couple of joint replacements and have dealt with arthritis, so I'm speaking to myself. So things happen. We have our genetic makeup. We have how we were brought up. Some sometimes not as healthy as we should have been. And so, first of all, I want no one to feel condemned. What is a better way or what are some wise choices that we can just slowly work into our lifestyle? We can't overhaul everything at one time, for sure. And it's not to be like... It's free radicals, but it's not to make such a radical change where it's not obtainable. Exactly. Right. We want you to enjoy life. We want you to be happy. I want you to be healthy. Nothing I like better than to see a patient and say, wow, you're doing so much better. We can eliminate this medicine. We can eliminate this medicine. I love it if there's things that we can change with health style and nutrition and exercise and drinking more water and all the different things that we can do to benefit our health. We're going to talk about now, like if we had a way, if you had a way that you could not only minimize your free radicals, but if you knew they were buzzing around in your body, how could you nip them in the bud and stop that cascade? Wouldn't you want to do that? This is hope. Right. Which is so good. Yeah, this is medicine right here. This is the medicine I want people to take. I don't want them to have their bottles lined up everywhere, but I'm thankful to the Lord that we have surgery. We have medicines to work, but it's working in conjunction. And that's why I loved my training at Oral Roberts University because it was the, you know, prayer and medicine and health and nutrition and, I had to study a lot of it on my own just because there's only so much you can learn in medical school and it's things that we can all learn. But food is medicine. And even just aside, like the number one, the best medicine you can possibly take for diabetes is exercise. We have a whole bunch of pills you could take and shots, but the best thing to get diabetes under control is regular exercise. Let's look at the food and nutrition. Essentially... Our antioxidants come in kind of two categories. One is vitamins. And the big vitamins, vitamin C, vitamin E, and beta carotene, which is kind of a subsidiary of vitamin A. So those three vitamins are just incredible antioxidants. They zoom right in there, stabilize the free radicals, and keep you healthy and well. We'll just go over vitamin C to begin with. Vitamin C, we pretty much always think about the citrus, you know, the oranges and things, but also tomatoes, strawberries, antioxidants, broccoli, one of my favorite, Brussels sprouts. cauliflower, cantaloupe, grapefruit, leafy greens, sweet potatoes, those are all great sources of vitamin C and obviously there's several more. And we wanna try to get those in as much of the natural source as well. You know, we could eat tomatoes or we could drink tomato juice or we could eat oranges and we can get orange juice. But really, when we're eating the fruit and the whole food that God gave us naturally, we're getting a lot more than the vitamin C. We're getting the fiber. Oh, yeah, that's true. Fiber, the pulp, the skin. We're getting so much more nutrition than just if we have just the juice of those. Try to eat those things in as much the whole thing. way that they come. We look at vitamin E. Vitamin E comes from squash and eggs and asparagus and these green leafy vegetables. Also from nuts, we get it from almonds, sunflower seeds, avocado, even things like oatmeal. So oatmeal is a good source of vitamin E if you wanna have that for breakfast. And then the categories of legumes, which of course includes beans and peas and lentils, peanuts. They're also a very good source of vitamin E. Next we'll move on to beta carotene or vitamin A. Here we have some of the dried fruit, which could be apricots and mangoes, carrots, and all the lovely colors of carrots you see nowadays, purple ones, orange ones. I never knew they were so many different colors. When you have a plate of food and you have all the various colors, it makes me happy just to see all the different colors on a plate rather than just a boring, You know, grilled cheese sandwich and whatever, you know, just brown. I'm curious, too, when you're talking about vegetables, too, when you're saying it, is there a healthier way, even when you're putting vegetables on a plate to make it, like you said, especially for young parents or young kids? how do you make it enticing if like, okay, they don't like cauliflower. Although I've, I've seen, it's amazing how much you can make with cauliflower these days. Like for me, I'm gluten free. So I was somewhere and they had a cauliflower pizza crust. And I'm like, I'm like, Oh, it's not bad. I'm like, I'm like, okay, I felt like I'm getting my vegetables at least. Right. We, we, we had that for dinner last night. It was, it was interesting. We had a few people over for dinner and, um, had some swimming and dinner afterwards, and it was pizza. Sunday at our house is often pizza night. So half the family ate traditional pizza, but half of us had cauliflower pizza. And even on the box it says, you know, eat your vegetables for pizza. But it was a cauliflower crust, and we added tons of extra vegetables on it, and half of us had that along with a big salad and some fruit. Well, then we sat around and played some games and laughed and laughed and laughed. And so don't you know that that brings health to your body? We got our vegetables. We got our fruit. We laughed until we almost rolled at times. And we didn't need to have dessert. You know, everyone enjoyed their meal. And by and large, it was fairly healthy. And for those who want to eat traditional pizza, you know, that's fine with me. I mean, I have a piece once in a while, but I actually prefer the cauliflower better. And so I think that's one way we can work that in with our kids. And sometimes I've made a spaghetti sauce and made some plain spaghetti for my kids and spiralized zucchini for me. And I found they liked the spiralized zucchini better than they liked the pasta. So I'd like, no, that's mom. So I'm going to eat the spiralized zucchini. It feels like it's easier on your digestion too. For the, when you're doing more of a vegetable as a pasta. Exactly. And it doesn't spike your sugar as much. Okay. And you actually feel better too. So you don't have that just like drop off after dinner, like I need to go take a nap. Well, there's ways to introduce that into your family. So that's a point though. You said- Pay attention to your body because your body is actually telling you something. So part of it is for someone who's never experienced that is maybe do a test of maybe switching out one time. And maybe not telling their family, but maybe switching the type of pasta you're making for them and see if they... how they feel afterwards. Like everybody like do an inventory of how do you feel after you had it, a different form of a pasta. Exactly. Yeah. And I think most people notice pretty well. And as we talked about earlier, there's a lot of, you can do a lot more damage to your body when you're younger. Like your first 30 years, you might go without sleep. You might not eat as healthy and not necessarily feel it in your body as much. But certainly as you get older, you do tend to sense it more where you feel like, oh, I feel sleepier. I feel draggy or that didn't agree with my stomach as well. It didn't mesh with my digestion. If you start younger with your children, then... you can add in those healthier foods. With my grandson now, it's amazing. He's 20 months old, and one of his first foods, once he switched from pureed food, was salmon. And he loves salmon to this day. When we go out to eat, I love salmon. I love salmon. I barely get half of my salmon because he eats the rest and usually wants more. Or he'll sit and just eat, you know, pepper slices. And so that's not anything that I had as a child. So I think the younger we can start to try to work these things in, You know, children are developing their tastes as well and have them experiment. Ken, I was told, too, of doing sweet potatoes in lieu of potatoes. What's wrong with, for people who may not know, what's wrong with a potato versus other vegetables? Potatoes are starchier, and so they do have some nutritional value, but definitely, like you mentioned, choosing a sweet potato over a white potato is more nutritious for you. The more starch, like the white potato, will spike your blood sugar, and we often see blood sugar spike up and crash, which can make you feel not well. The sweet potato also has a little more fiber in it, so fiber is always good for your body. But like the sweet potato we have on here, I don't know if you can see it, they're huge. So usually you can easily have a small sweet potato or easily share and just have a half or even a third of a sweet potato to... to get some of the nutrition but not to have too much of any one food. Unless you do it like I do. Like I've had it at a steakhouse and they put marshmallows over it. And you're like, oh, my goodness. They just probably destroyed the goodness of it, I have to admit. Like, oh, that's tough. We'll talk about moderation too. So some of the other things, asparagus, beets, kale, sweet potatoes, as you mentioned, collard greens, oranges, pumpkin, peaches, cantaloupe, squash, broccoli, peppers, and tomatoes. Those are all great sources of the beta carotene that helps to get into our body. So that kind of is the vitamins. The vitamin C and E, and then the beta carotene. But then there's also minerals that are helpful too. And that's like selenium and zinc. Eggs, tuna, salmon. which I love, brown rice, kind of funny thing. I was, you know, doctors are not known for handwriting. And so I was looking at my notes where I had brown rice and I thought it said brownies. Yeah. Yay! I was like, all right, brownies have selenium in it. You can throw it in there. I guess you can make healthier forms of brownies, but no, it was brown rice. Sorry, guys. Oh, disappointing. Anyway, fish, pork, seeds. So we have flaxseed here, chia seeds. quinoa. So all the different seeds are good. Onions, red onions are great. Various forms of poultry, so chicken and turkey, beets. Brazil nuts are one of the hugest amounts of selenium. So, you know, a Brazil nut's pretty big. I'm not really fond of those. So if you just eat one a day, that's a good amount of selenium. But I think I'll choose some of these other things to get my selenium. I'm not a big fan of it. But if you love Brazil nuts, have one every day. And sometimes once you start eating things, I notice that. Like once I start eating them, I... As a child, I was very stubborn, and I sat at the table for hours after dinner because I would not eat my Brussels sprouts. I was like, I'm not going to have them. I just can't do it. Now I love Brussels sprouts and cabbage. So your taste can change. Yes, I've done that with melon before because I didn't like melon before. I just kept trying it until I liked it. All right. So that's the hopes, and that's what we can encourage our kids. You know, taste a little bit of everything. We realize they might not love it all, but at least try it. And that can open up their palate to enjoy some more nutritious things. That's great. And then mushrooms. So zinc, besides the beef for our zinc, also various forms of poultry and seafood, citrus again, peas, and cashews are helpful. Okay. And now I think this is going to be your favorite category and maybe mine too. Other, besides the vitamins and the minerals, what's called the phenolic compounds. And that is our coffee and tea and cocoa. We can have tea and coffee and cocoa, and that helps to stop our free radicals. Okay, so for those who are listening, I see you have dark chocolate here, and this is Godiva chocolate. That's part of that? Dark chocolate is a wiser choice than milk chocolate. Okay. Dark chocolate definitely has a higher... phenolic compound in it and is healthier to stop the free radicals for sure. And so you may have to gradually increase the amount of cocoa that you like in your dark chocolate. I do. So 2% for me. Sometimes it's starting at a lower amount and gradually get your taste buds used to a little higher amount and you can do that. We see that small amounts of wine, especially red wine from the grapes, It has some good compounds in it. Apples is a huge one. So the saying, an apple a day keeps the doctor away, is really true. Apples have great phenolic compounds. Spices, and I have a few on here. Right. Turmeric is great. I think I brought some cloves and rosemary, oregano. Spices are just great. And if we can add more spices to our food and less salt, for sure. We talked about salt. We need a little bit in our diet, but too much salt definitely raises blood pressure, makes you retain fluid. So if we can add a little more spices to our foods, that's definitely helpful. Sea salt and Himalayan salt. Himalayan, okay. Himalayan, which is more the pink one, and sea salt have a little better nutrition for you than just plain old iodized salt that you can get in a shaker. But we do need a little bit of salt in our body. Right. And in medicine, we look at... four grams, which you're not going to necessarily measure out your salt, but it's amazing just how much salt is in food and different, you know, if you look at the labels, it's snuck into about everything in a lot of our condiments and definitely in canned foods. So I do have a can of black beans here. And for convenience, we want to, you know, use some canned foods and use some frozen foods, but as much as we can have fresh is great. But, you know, we need to make life livable for ourselves. So, hey, I buy organic black beans. If I had time to buy the bag of beans and soak them all night long and cook them down, I would love to do that. But my life is busy. So I get some organic black beans and we will probably have those for dinner tonight, along with maybe some. rice and potentially some form of tacos. So black beans are great. And, you know, get the canned foods, shop wherever you can to get foods at a reasonable price. We have to really consider all those things these days now with the world that we live in. These are some of the just great foods that we want to introduce into our bodies. to try to keep our health as good as possible. Overall, as we look at it, we can enhance the flavors through seasoning because you pointed those out. And I actually started an herbal garden. And so actually, they just keep growing because it comes back and it just grows and expands. And I think that helps. You mentioned that to me earlier is, adding different herbs and spices or whatever to help to maybe help family to maybe appreciate some of the vegetables they have or just changing it up making there's so many fun things that we can do i think pinterest is really great for coming up with creative ways to make food a hundred thousand ways and something that that some families might be pickier Some people that like they can acquire a taste, like you said, it's worth trying and always putting in front of them. We are blessed with so many things available at our fingertips now where we can just Google anything. What can we do to make our food healthier? And definitely as much as you can eat at home is helpful because at least we know what we're putting in our food. It's amazing sometimes if you go now restaurants are more cognizant about like putting calorie counts you know, some more information on their foods. And it's just astounding to see even some meals that you might think are more healthy of how many calories and how much fad and, you know, how much extra things might be in the food. Salads is a big example. Because I've grown up eating salads all day long, and I really do enjoy them. And there are some salads, there are more calories on a salad with all of the other fun little things that are in it, but the dressings alone, I always try to get them on the side. It can be more calories than like a double cheeseburger or whatever fries. I'm like, that is overwhelming. So it's really, you have to pay attention and... And learn those things when you go in, when you're traveling or whatever, when you go into a restaurant is trying to find things that probably more simplified food. Where there's not all the dressings and all kinds of things that probably kind of fatten it up, I would think. Don't be afraid to ask. I mean, you can ask them. You know, you might order. broccoli and think, oh, well, that's going to just be steamed broccoli, but they might be having a bunch of oils and fats and butter on it, too. So a little bit is fine. We do have a little pot of butter there, so some dairy, and some people need to do some dairy alternatives. Their stomach may not handle cow's milk as well, but... Wow, we can go into the grocery store and find just about everything now. You can get oat milk and soy milk and rice milk and one of my favorites, almond milk to use as a substitute for plain dairy. We are very blessed with just a lot of alternatives and choices now to try to make things at home and prepare them better for ourselves and for our family. And then ask in a restaurant or see could they prepare it. Most places are I've been to Italian restaurants and just said, instead of pasta, could you put, you know, my chicken on a bed of spinach? And they'll gladly substitute that. So there's ways that you can make your meals a little healthier and to suit your digestion better. That's good. Those are great points. Well, you know, Sherry, you've given us a lot of different helpful ideas of knowing from the radicals how they're not good on us, but great alternatives to helping us to counteract those things. And having it not only just in our environment, but things that we can do for ourselves. And again, you know, it's, it's a process. You can't change it overnight, but it's beginning, you know, like she said, it's not a judgment. It is how can we start taking step by step over the years? I've done that slowly, but surely I've reduced my sugar. I've tried to come up with options. Like I'll put honey in an alternative to different sugars, learning to be informed and, and trying to create a a pathway of changing over time. Exactly. Small steps. I mean, like Cheryl said, if we do a radical change in our diet, you know, that can upset your stomach too, uh, in your whole system. Just like when, you know, people decide I'm going to cut out all caffeine. I'm going to cut all that. Your body will make some changes and notice that for a while. You can do that. It's not going to kill you, but sometimes just making some small gradual changes, um, makes you feel better. And then you can see the changes in your body. But this is the basis. And I hope that you have the understanding now as far as like what the free radicals are, and just where they come from, and how they can be dangerous to your body. And we have all of this in front of us just to try to control them the best we can. Realizing that we do age, and we do get wrinkles, and we do get some changes to our body for sure. And we have to accept Some of that, but we can try to slow it down. That's the whole purpose. We want to slow down the process and just try to be healthy along the way. We want to feel our best. We want to have energy. We want to have clarity of mind. And we want to do all that to serve God and fulfill his purpose in our lives and to give out to the world. That's so great. Well, you will hear in an upcoming episode, we will actually, she's going to dive into it and really break it down into bite size where you will hear more details. So stay tuned. And thank you so much for sharing with us. You're welcome. Thanks for having me today. And that's mine. Oh, that's yours. Okay, so I will never really be looking at it. We don't have to worry about that. You can look at it, but it won't do you anything.