Antioxidant Research:
Making Sense Out of the Contradictions

Antioxidant research is an inexact and extremely complicated subject, like all nutritional research. We are all unique individuals; our bodies all have different metabolisms and our emotional makeups are as different as you can imagine. Our bodies react to different foods in different ways. Nutrients in our food and food supplements all work together in many ways that we don't even understand yet.

Antioxidant research is full of contradictions. If you investigate any particular piece of nutritional information thoroughly enough, you will discover an opposing viewpoint, often just as convincing. Antioxidant studies may provide us with theories and possibilities about the benefits of diet and nutrition, but cannot provide absolute judgements on any particular diet, individual nutrient, or supplementation program.

It's difficult to evaluate the health effects of specific antioxidants, since such a large number of individual compounds may occur even in a single food. For example, over sixty different chemically distinct flavonoids are known to occur in a given red wine.

Furthermore, antioxidants don't work their magic in isolation — they work together as a team. The principal benefits of antioxidants seems to come from the consumption of a wide array of them; so, if you are supplementing your diet with antioxidants, it's best to eat antioxidant-rich foods with the supplements.

See my page on How do antioxidants work? to learn more about this.

Things About Nutrition That are Definitely True

1. There's No Magic Bullet. If someone tells you that a certain diet or a single nutrient is the answer to all your health problems, I wouldn't believe it. Any particular regimen may work for some people, but never for everyone. I've found that using the information from antioxidant research studies can be a very good place to start. Continually experimenting and monitoring your diet and supplement routine is the best guideline for your health. Pay attention to what you eat and how your body responds!

2. Nutrition Does Work! While it may take research, experimentation and dedication on your part, giving your body all of the nutrients it needs is the only way to enable it to heal itself of any problems and thrive. Finding a knowledgeable natural-healthcare practitioner is a great idea for anyone who wants to get healthier and stay healthier.

Ironically, the FDA has mandated that only drugs can claim to cure diseases. Nutritional companies are not allowed to make medical claims for any nutritional products. The only thing you need to know about the FDA is that its primary goal is to protect the profits of the food and pharmaceutical industries — not the health of the consumer!

What Do the Media and Medical Community
Say About Nutritional Supplements?

The idea that you can have better health by adding nutritional supplements to your daily diet is generally downplayed by the food and healthcare industries.

We are told that our food supply contains everything we need for good nutrition, and any studies that contradict this are dismissed as inconclusive and further research is declared to be needed before we try those alternatives.

USDA Recommended Daily Allowances are Set Artificially Low. The nutritional RDA for nutrients have been calculated using short-term studies and were designed to be a minimum requirement for average health for the average person. These recommendations are insufficient for anyone to achieve optimal health, including a strong immune system, prevention of degenerative disease and a longer lifespan.

Put another way, if you consume just the recommended allowance of nutrients and no more, you increase your risk for heart disease, cancer, arthritis and a host of other "normal" diseases associated with aging.

Major media outlets give you biased and filtered information. If you monitor the reporting of nutritional information that you find in the mainstream media, you will discover an inherent bias against the effectiveness of nutritional supplementation. This is not an accident.

Major media outlets are owned and supported by large corporate interests, who primarily want to protect their profits, which mostly come from selling you processed food and more pharmaceuticals and other medical treatments.

Does the Pharmaceutical Industry Influence
How Medical Journals Report on Antioxidant Research?

One of the ways to evaluate the objectivity of an antioxidant research study is to track down who provided the funding. It’s well known that studies paid for by the pharmaceutical industry or conducted by researchers with industry ties tend to favor corporate interests. This is not always easy to determine, as the funding is often disguised through official-sounding organizations with front names.

Statistical analysis provides a clear picture. Statistical researchers investigated the relationship between pharmaceutical advertising and articles regarding dietary supplements in medical journals. Their analysis revealed the following:

1. Journals with the most pharmaceutical ads published significantly fewer articles about dietary supplements than other journals.

2. The percentage of major articles concluding that dietary supplements were unsafe was 4% in journals with the fewest pharmaceutical ads and 67% among those with the most pharmaceutical ads.

3. The percentage of articles that found that dietary supplements were ineffective was almost twice as high (50%) among journals with more pharmaceutical ads.

Dietary supplements compete directly against prescription drugs in many disease categories. It's simply in the financial interest of pharmaceutical companies to encourage negative dietary supplement studies to be published in influential medical journals to the exclusion of positive studies.

Scientific Claims Have Only a 50/50 Chance of Being True

Back in 2005, Dr. John Ioannidis, an epidemiologist at Ioannina School of Medicine, Greece, showed that there is less than a 50 percent chance that the results of any randomly chosen scientific paper will be true. See his published report here: Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.

Prestigious journals boast that they are very selective, and turn down the vast majority of papers that are submitted to them. The assumption is that they therefore publish only the best scientific work.

But Dr. Ioannidis' study of 49 papers in leading journals, which had been cited by more than 1,000 other scientists — in other words, well-regarded research — showed that within only a few years, almost a third of the papers had been refuted by other studies.

Making matters worse, the "hotter" the field, the greater the competition, and the more likely that published research in top journals will be proven wrong.

Another factor to consider is that many of the antioxidant research studies are flawed, and sometimes (sad to say) even rigged to produce a desired outcome. Researchers often use inferior, synthetic vitamins, and frequently use doses that are insufficient to produce the desired benefits. You are never really given enough facts about any study to determine if the findings are valid or not.

With all that being said, it's clear that, while antioxidant research studies can certainly be of value, you shouldn't take any of their conclusions too seriously.

My Own Experience with Nutritional Science

Personally, I've been taking nutritional supplements, and lots of them, for over 30 years. I've continually changed my regimen as I learned more, but have taken them continuously over that time. I don't need scientific studies to "prove" that they work — I have the results.

What's interesting to me is that I can't point to any one supplement or dietary change that made an instant and significant impact on my health (I started this journey in excellent health back in my late 20's). However, I'm certainly glad now that I choose a path of good nutrition and the judicious use of supplements when I did!

When my dad was the same age as I am today, he was permanently bedridden with circulatory problems. That was my original motivation to educate myself on nutritional health and disease prevention, so that I would not end up the same way.

Everything I learned and put into practice has produced some great results, and made me into a staunch proponent of the benefits of nutrition and nutritional supplements. That's what eventually led to the creation of this website.

I invite you to use the information on this website to improve your health and protect yourself from chronic diseases. With the resources now available on the internet, it's easier than ever to find the type of products that will allow you to get better nutrition — I offer many of them right here.

Back to Antioxidants Home Page from Antioxidant Research

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