I don't know about that, it looks more like a free radical terminator to me, the radicals being terminated being peroxy and superoxy, which are essential for normal cell function. Destroy too many of those and you end up with unoxidized species normally oxidized in a healthy person, inhibit many essential processes in soft tissue. Free radicals are your friend, but only if maintained in their beneficial range of activity. A lot of "health" problems come from too few or too many, at the extremes. This is how people accomplish a metabolic shift, by enabling free radical activity to go too much, one way or the other. Nobody on earth knows all the details yet but we do know that shifting free radical activity too much one way or the other is "bad". Given retinol is never found alone in any natural food, and given its importance in electron transfer and ability to terminate free radical propagation, it makes sense that avoiding an excess of that stuff is probably smart. I generally try to keep excessive amounts of free radical terminators out of my diet. Based on normal levels, I sense the retinoids work together with mk4 mk7 and the tocopherols which are obviously semi-quinones. In the final analysis, I don't really know anything.