Stop Wasting Money On Antioxidants
Antioxidant supplements don’t work like you hope, and may even be damaging.
Years ago, my university lecturers asked me to write an essay about antioxidants in supplements. The assignment tested to see whether we students could change our opinions when faced with evidence, or a lack of it, that ran counter to our preconceptions. I’ve never forgotten the lesson.
My existing notions about antioxidants (AOs) went something like this: Free radicals are bad and need AOs to ‘quench’ them lest we face the consequences of dysfunction and disease. Therefore, eating foods or taking supplements high in these compounds reduces oxidative stress — the pathological condition caused by an excess of the damaging reactive particles — and the chances of disease.
This simple idea reflects our desire to see good versus evil everywhere, but the human body is more nuanced. Endogenous AOs (made in the body) do work something like that, but exogenous AOs (introduced to the body) don’t always. This article is about those we introduce.
Observational research has linked eating foods high in AOs, typically fruits and vegetables, with healthy outcomes. One theory is that these nutrient-dense plants are healthy because of their ability to balance disease-causing free radicals using their…
