Apparently antioxidants actually kill you

[Recursion]

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.