Hi there, it's Matt here and welcome back to a new episode on what I think may be one of the most exciting fields in sleep science that have just exploded on the map and it

focuses on a topic called antioxidant. Now I say it's a new field but if you actually go back into the literature what you'll find is that there is a theory proposing a link between sleep and antioxidants that dates back all the way to the 1990s.

You probably were thinking I was going to say something like the 1700s or something like that, but it's the 1990s.

That was a little bit before my time in terms of being a scientist.

I think I was what, I was only around 10 years old at the time but I'm dating myself. But focus Matthew this is not about you this is about the listeners and the episode. Now to understand the relationship between sleep and antioxidants,

and even before we discuss that theory,

we should probably understand what antioxidants are and what they're trying to target.

Because antioxidants are there to combat their nemesis

and specifically to deal with molecules that are called free radicals. So we're first going to focus on why free radicals are relevant to the topic of sleep and therefore why antioxidants are relevant.

And specifically we'll understand what role that free radicals play in the deadly consequences of a lack of sleep in the extreme.

And I do quite literally mean deathly, as in life extinguishing, life ending in terms of a consequence of sleep loss.

Although I should say that, I don't mean to sound too

scaremongering in this regard.

I want to firstly recognize that of course all of us have had periods in our lives

where we don't sleep enough or we're sleeping too little for whatever reason and whether that's

studying for an exam or racing towards a big work

project deadline or just that we've had a bad night of sleep, obviously that lack of sleep feels

miserable and terrible and there are consequences to

that that we've discussed on this podcast. That's not what I mean when I speak

about the deathly consequences of sleep. Here we're talking about sleep deprivation in the extreme

leading to the mortal consequence, the deathly outcome. What we know from studies by scientists that were conducted, gosh some of them 50 years ago, 40 years ago, is that a lack of sleep in a number of different species will lead to death and scientists have conducted

experiments in things such as cockroaches in flies in rats. They've even done those studies in dogs. I know I know I

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