The continuing debate on antioxidants

The claim:

Most long-term prospective trials have shown that using antioxidant vitamin supplements does not prevent heart disease or cancer, with the possible exception of prostate cancer.

In a study published last month in The Journal of the American Medical Association, researchers in Europe analyzed data from 68 large trials in which more than 232,000 adults were given antioxidant supplements.

In a subset of those studies, the scientists concluded, subjects taking vitamins A and E and beta carotene saw a slightly increased risk of death compared with those who did not take supplements. (Vitamin C had no effect on mortality, the team found.)

And the Opposition:

Dr. Stampfer and others say [the study's] analysis is methodologically flawed, because it includes data from widely heterogeneous studies, excludes data from hundreds of others for unclear reasons and does not try to detail the causes of increased mortality among supplement users.

“It just seems implausible that antioxidants should be killing you by several different means,” said Dr. Jeffrey Blumberg, a nutrition professor at Tufts. “I don’t buy it.”

Dr. Andrew Shao, vice president of the Council for Responsible Nutrition, a trade group for the supplement industry, said, “Most of these patients already had disease, so the conclusions simply aren’t relevant to a healthy population.”

I think one of the problems is that when studies first started to uncover the correlation between antioxidants and health, researchers made the mistake of assuming there was a causal relationship. When really the healthy people were not healthy because they took vitamins. They took vitamins cause they were healthy. And probably did a lot of other healthy things too. But once the cat was out of the bag - well, we all know how much we love a quick fix.

In hindsight, it was naïve of scientists and consumers to hope that the relatively short-term addition of one or two antioxidants would be enough to counteract decades of poor diet and inadequate exercise, not to mention the genome.

This article follows a 12 pg essay by a nutritionist published in the times a few months ago touting the benefits of eating whole foods. The gist was that when we eat processed foods, we're eating food that has essentially already been digested and our system gets flooded with sugar and doesn't know what to do with it all. Hence, love handles. Whereas eating whole foods enables us to digest antioxidants, etc. the way nature intended.

Despite the proliferance of fad diets and endless reams of conflicting information, the bottom line always seems to be the same:

The good news is that a diet rich in fruits and vegetables contains literally thousands of antioxidant nutrients. Prevention begins in the kitchen.

Would that we all had the kind of lifestyle that allowed us to go into the kitchen to do more than microwave a frozen pizza. And would that vegetables tasted like baileys and ice cream. And that Splenda was really made from sugar and made the whole world look like a scene from Big Fish.