Antioxidants Blamed Over Poor Health You haven’t been feeling yourself lately. Maybe a bit tired, can’t sleep your joints ache. Or you’ve been putting on some pounds, even though your lifestyle hasn’t changed. Someone told you about antioxidant supplements, that they’re good for you, how they helped them when they were in your situation. You know you can’t just trust everything people say these days. But there are experts out there doing studies and writing books. They should know better. So you open a browser window and type “antioxidants” in your favorite search engine. What you most likely find are a few online shops that sell antioxidants and many “newspaper” articles telling you that antioxidants cause cancer and what-not. Why are there such articles on the Internet and why are they so popular? As humans, we’ve known for a long time that we need fresh fruits and vegetables to keep our health. We can see this illustrated in the histories of northern peoples, who have been suffering during the long winter seasons due to lack of fresh food. In more recent times, scientists have discovered substances that prevent rancidity and oxidation of lipids and they have termed them antioxidants. Then they’ve looked into the actual chemical reactions and realized that what these substances do is intrinsically connected to our lives. They studied the mechanisms through which antioxidants function and discovered that they restrain free radicals (bits of very reactive molecules) from doing damage in live cells.
Fresh fruits - the best source of tasty antioxidants. (image source: http://www.fun54.com/wpcontent/uploads/2011/09/Food-Fruits-and-Berryes-The-ripe-fruit-orange-with-white-backgroundwidescreen-hd-pictures-1600-x-1200.jpg) In the meantime, they also studied the sources of antioxidants in daily life and found that there are vegetal, as well as animal sources for antioxidants. We can also produce our own antioxidants. The scientists also correlated the ingestion of enough antioxidants in a balanced diet to health and wellbeing. So someone came with the brilliant idea of concentrating antioxidants from food into small supplements. This way, people can add the missing antioxidants to their diet. This way, a whole industry emerged in order to grow the sources of these antioxidants, extract and concentrate them and then market them to the people who need them. But where there are ideas, there are also people who are against those ideas. Just like vaccines, antioxidants have become the subject of controversy due to their value on the market. If they are accessible where they are needed, some other industries suffer, such as the ones transporting fresh, exotic or off season fruits rich in antioxidants to different parts of the planet. Thus, someone had to do something. They funded studies to show that antioxidants didn’t have effects on full-blown diseases, such as the flu, or on cancer and published them as ‘breakthrough’ news all over the internet in order to slow down the blooming market. What do these articles say and why are they wrong? When you see such a “scientific” article based on a study, you are inclined to think its results are correct and applicable in real life. But, as Ben Goldacre demonstrated in his famous book, Bad Science, there are proper studies and there are really bad ones. Why is that? Their hypothesis is flawed to begin with. In this case, the scientists ask whether antioxidants can cure cancer or be used as remedies for colds and other common ailments. Antioxidant supplements are not medicine and shouldn’t be used as such.
Are you sure you should trust your source of information? (screenshot from http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2147771/Ignore-hype-antioxidant-supplements-Why-dailyvitamin-pills-INCREASE-risk-disease.html; retrieved May 23rd 2013) There’s also the correlation error, in which one factor that is correlated with an effect is said to be the cause of that effect based on the correlation alone. Some studies have found correlations between excess antioxidant intake through supplements and an increase in the risk of lung cancer. Where are all the other factors that are usually taken into account? Things such as diet, lifestyle, daily stress, smoking and drinking, heredity - they are all much more important in dealing with cancer, but they are nowhere to be found in the conclusions of these articles. So the next time you read an article about antioxidants and why they might not be so good for your health, read through the lines and understand the actual message. Is it real information or is it just dust in the wind?
Further reading:
http://www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au/bhcv2/bhcarticles.nsf/pages/Antioxidants