Cells make up your
body organs. When your cells die, your body organs fail and health
deteriorates; as a result, you age and die.
To maintain and
sustain life, some of your cells replicate themselves continually, such as
epithelial cells in your intestine, while others do not divide, such as your
heart cells and neurons in your brain.
All human cells
require energy and oxygen to function normally, and in this oxidative
process free radicals are created. For example, when you
breathe in life-giving oxygen, you also breathe out harmful carbon dioxide.
This oxidative process is how your Creator has ingeniously built normal cell
death into your body system to ensure your mortality. Slowly and
accumulatively, these free radicals build up in your cells, leading to
premature cell death.
The human body is
composed of negatively and positively charged molecules, which must be balanced
in order to enable these cells to function normally. When any imbalance occurs,
a free radical is formed in these molecules. A free radical may damage other
nearby molecules, causing them to produce more free radicals, and thus
producing a free radical chain reaction.
Free
radicals can also be caused by external factors: alcohol and tobacco; chemicals
and pesticides from foods and pharmaceutical drugs; heavy metals, such as
cadmium and lead, from the environment; radiation from the sun and other
sources, such as cell phones.
Oxygen
free radicals and other free radicals in the human body may cause damages to
cells and neurons, such as the neurons in the brain, the cumulative damage to
the DNA, resulting in human cancers, heart damage in the form of plague
formation on the walls of heart arteries.
Most
importantly, the presence of free radicals weakens the human immune system, which
is essentially a network of cells and organs that communicate with one another
in order to identify the invaders and attack them so as to protect the body
from diseases and infections.
A
malfunctioning immune system is the major cause of autoimmune diseases, which
come in many different forms with many different symptoms; there are as many as
over 100 autoimmune diseases. An autoimmune disease occurs when the immune
cells "attack" the body's own organs and tissues, instead of
protecting them from foreign invaders. As an illustration, in allergies, the
body perceives something harmless, such as pollen, as potentially dangerous,
and begins to produce large amounts of pollen antibody. In the next pollen
encounter, the immune system "remembers" the first exposure, and
consequently releases powerful chemicals causing sneezing, wheezing, and other
allergic symptoms. In an autoimmune disease, the "attack" will repeat
itself, and thus causing long-term damage.
For more information on how I struggled with my autoimmune disease and how I
successfully overcame many of the disease symptoms, read my book My Myasthenia Gravis.
Stephen Lau
Copyright © by Stephen
Lau
This book is about
the art of living well, which is being in
the material world we are all living in, but without being of this mundane world. This daunting and challenging task requires profound
human wisdom, which comes from TAO wisdom, the ancient wisdom from Lao Tzu, the
ancient sage from 
