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Recursion

(56,582 posts)
Mon Apr 22, 2013, 01:56 PM Apr 2013

Apparently antioxidants actually kill you

http://bigthink.com/devil-in-the-data/who-needs-antioxidants-no-one-actually

It's hard to walk down a grocery aisle these days and not notice the many food labels that shout out "Rich in Antioxidants!" or "Good source of Antioxidants!" or "Fights free radicals!" The labels don't just beckon; they taunt you. They dare you to be stupid enough to turn your back on a good source of antioxidants. "You don't really want to go around unprotected against oxidants, do you?" they seem to ask. Meanwhile you slink out of the supermarket with a bad case of pomegranate remorse, unsure if heart disease will strike you dead in the parking lot because you failed to start the day with a pint of blueberries.

Here's the thing, though. The story you've been fed about antioxidants being good for you because they stave off the buildup of toxic free radicals (which supposedly are a major cause of aging and disease)? That's all rubbish, basically. The food industry uses the antioxidant rap, along with the "low trans fat" come-on (and several other well-known gimmicks), to guilt-trip gullible consumers into preferring, paying more for, and consuming more of the very foods and beverages that many of us are trying to cut back on. This is the well-studied health halo effect, whereby extraordinary nutritional claims have the effect of tricking people into making irrational food decisions. (For more, see this study in The Journal of Consumer Research and this one in The Journal of Consumer Psychology showing that dieters are more likely than non-dieters to be tricked.) Food labels that promise "Rich source of antioxidants" are crass marketing ploys. They have nothing to do with health.

Why all the fuss, then, about antioxidants?

The Free Radical Theory of Aging, proposed in the 1950s by Denham Harman, says that oxygen-containing free radicals play a key role in the aging process because of their tendency to increase oxidative damage to macromolecules. The theory gained credence when it was found that oxidative damage to lipids, DNA, and proteins does tend to accumulate with age in a wide variety of tissues, across a wide variety of animal models. In studies of the life-extending effect of severe caloric restriction (discussed here), animals who lived the longest showed the most resistance to oxidative stress. Likewise, overexpression of antioxidative genes extends the life of fruit flies, and variations in longevity among different species inversely correlate with the rates of mitochondrial generation of superoxide radical and hydrogen peroxide. (See this paper.) From these and other highly suggestive lines of inquiry, we know that oxidative damage and aging go hand-in-wrinkly-hand.


Once again, the stuff we've been told to eat turns out to kill us faster. I am convinced that in 200 years people will look back at our "nutritional science" like we look back at medicine from 200 years ago.

Also, I'm posting this here because there's some interesting bits about food labeling enforcement towards the end.
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octothorpe

(962 posts)
1. EATING FOOD KILLS YOU!!!!
Mon Apr 22, 2013, 02:00 PM
Apr 2013

Just existing kills us.

I don't think I'll stop eating blueberries any time soon because of this study. I also won't stop eating the occasional hamburger and deep fried stick of bacon wrapped butter either.

 

green for victory

(591 posts)
2. why do some people look like the following at 70+ and others look like they're
Mon Apr 22, 2013, 02:10 PM
Apr 2013

a half a foot in the grave?

72




72


Genetics? Only genetics?

NickB79

(19,114 posts)
10. No way they had comparable lifestyles
Mon Apr 22, 2013, 02:45 PM
Apr 2013

The Russian woman in your video likely survived some very, very hard times; she would have been a child during WWII and a young woman during the hard times that befell Eastern Europe in the following decades. She likely engaged in extensive physical labor throughout her life.

The blonde woman in the first video? Let's just say I don't see her working on a farm, in a factory, or raising 6 kids over her lifetime.

On edit: after watching both videos, I'd say that the younger-looking woman is the one with one foot already in the grave. Blondy may look better on the outside, but Russian Granny is in shape! Holy crap, she can do harder crunches than I can!

RebelOne

(30,947 posts)
13. She is actually 75 now since she was born in 1938.
Mon Apr 22, 2013, 02:58 PM
Apr 2013

I was born in 1939 and do not look much older than her. And I am a vegetarian and a blonde also.

Recursion

(56,582 posts)
12. Big Think is an aggregator. This is a blogger who points out when popular "science" ignores data
Mon Apr 22, 2013, 02:49 PM
Apr 2013

That's as anti-right-wing a hobby as there is.

On the Road

(20,783 posts)
8. I Would be Open to the Idea That Antioxidants are Not Helpful
Mon Apr 22, 2013, 02:39 PM
Apr 2013

except for the fact that the author casually admits not believing that transfat is bad.

denverbill

(11,489 posts)
9. This is hardly an indictment of 'nutritional science'. It's an indictment of the food industry.
Mon Apr 22, 2013, 02:44 PM
Apr 2013

The fact that the food industry uses bad science and misleading advertising to sell their shit should come as no surprise to anybody.

It's a shame that government doesn't do it's duty and actually regulate the misleading statements made by food companies. For example, the 'No trans-fat' promotion on the front of Coffee-Mate creamer, when in fact, Coffee-Mate is primarily made from trans-fat. But because of sloppy regulation and misleading portion size, Coffee-Mate can claim it has No trans-fat because it contains less than 1gr of trans-fat per serving.

The fact that science is continually proposing and rejecting hypotheses isn't a rejection of science either. It's pretty much the definition of how real scientific investigation is supposed to work. Unlike the pseudo-science of the right-wing, who propose a theory and simply rejects any contradictory evidence.

 

FarCenter

(19,429 posts)
11. The Myth of Antioxidants
Mon Apr 22, 2013, 02:45 PM
Apr 2013
David Gems’s life was turned upside down in 2006 by a group of worms that kept on living when they were supposed to die. As assistant director of the Institute of Healthy Aging at University College London, Gems regularly runs experiments on Caenorhabditis elegans, a roundworm that is often used to study the biology of aging. In this case, he was testing the idea that a buildup of cellular damage caused by oxidation—technically, the chemical removal of electrons from a molecule by highly reactive compounds, such as free radicals—is the main mechanism behind aging. According to this theory, rampant oxidation mangles more and more lipids, proteins, snippets of DNA and other key components of cells over time, eventually compromising tissues and organs and thus the functioning of the body as a whole.

....

If free radicals are not always bad, then their antidotes, antioxidants, may not always be good—a worrisome possibility given that 52 percent of Americans take considerable doses of antioxidants daily, such as vitamin E and beta-carotene, in the form of multivitamin supplements. In 2007 the Journal of the American Medical Association published a systematic review of 68 clinical trials, which concluded that antioxidant supplements do not reduce risk of death. When the authors limited their review to the trials that were least likely to be affected by bias—those in which assignment of participants to their research arms was clearly random and neither investigators nor participants knew who was getting what pill, for instance—they found that certain antioxidants were linked to an increased risk of death, in some cases by up to 16 percent.

Several U.S. organizations, including the American Heart Association and the American Diabetes Association, now advise that people should not take antioxidant supplements except to treat a diagnosed vitamin deficiency. “The literature is providing growing evidence that these supplements—in particular, at high doses—do not necessarily have the beneficial effects that they have been thought to,” says Demetrius Albanes, a senior investigator at the Nutritional Epidemiology Branch of the National Cancer Institute. Instead, he says, “we’ve become acutely aware of potential downsides.”


http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~ucbtdag/Wenner_2013.pdf

KT2000

(20,544 posts)
16. A silly article
Mon Apr 22, 2013, 04:05 PM
Apr 2013

He seems to have targeted many here - marketers, retailers, gullible customers and volumes of research.
I wonder why he does not address the effects of DNA damage on the very mechanisms the body has to neutralize free radicals. He does not advance our understanding but rather disregards consideration of oxidative stress. The purpose of this is likely to hinder testing for and regulation.
He has built a very weak straw man.

It is true that people can live many years with macular degeneration, Parkinson's, Alzheimers and all the other diseases that have a correlation to oxidative stress. Life expectancy and quality of life are two different topics.

from the article
"In sum, mice do not live longer when they over-express antioxidant enzymes (singly or in combinations), even though they show heightened protection against DNA damage, lipid damage, and other typical signatures of oxidative stress."

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