Health Benefits of Antioxidants and Antioxidant Studies

By Bonnie Jenkins, Advanced Natural Medicine

You’ve probably heard by now about the new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association which claims that taking antioxidant vitamin supplements won’t +do your health a darned bit of good. In fact, according to the study, they might even cause you to die sooner!

Excuse me???? Can increasing your antioxidant levels really shorten your lifespan? Before you start tossing your vitamin bottles, let’s put this study under the microscope and see what we find.

Conventional "Wisdom"

The study by Danish researchers analyzed 68 antioxidant studies involving almost a quarter of a million people. About half took supplemental beta carotene, vitamins A, E and C, and selenium. The supplement-takers were then compared to groups of people who did not take the vitamins.

The Danish investigators report that, on average, those taking vitamin A increased their risk of death by 16 percent; beta-carotene supplements taken regularly increased the risk of premature death by seven percent and vitamin E supplements increased the risk by four percent. What they don’t tell you is that the actual causes of death in most of these studies were unknown.

What about vitamin C and selenium? Even though the researchers found that these nutrients didn’t appear to have any effect on the risk of dying, they aren’t giving them free pass. According to the lead author of the meta-analysis, "the verdict is still out on those two."

Devil in the Details

So what’s going on here? Should you stop taking these vitamins? Absolutely not! Here’s the real scoop on this study:

When researchers set about to do a meta-analysis, they normally include studies that are very similar in the way they are designed and people involved in the study. But this meta-analysis combined studies that were very different from each other in a number of important ways. As a result, the findings were skewed from the start.

For instance, this study included clinical trials with radically different doses. It also looked at studies that varied widely in length. In other words, they looked at data from a study of 200,000 IU vitamin A that lasted just one-day study and compared it to one for 25,000 IU (the normal dose) lasting several years. If that wasn’t irresponsible enough, the researchers also included studies that tested nutrients other than vitamins A, C, and E, beta-carotene and selenium, including lutein and zinc. That’s like comparing apples to oranges.

Wait, there’s more. The overwhelming majority of the clinical trials included in this meta-analysis tested people who were already sick. And many of these trials had the expectation that taking a simple antioxidant vitamin could overturn a serious illness like cancer or heart disease. It’s hard to see how a vitamin boosts prevention if you aren’t looking at how it affects healthy people!

How could supposedly intelligent scientists make such huge mistakes? According to a number of scientists, there’s only one answer: This meta-analysis build the study to support a predetermined conclusion that vitamins are unhealthy. This is just another attempt by mainstream medicine to discredit the well-documented benefits of supplements. Why are they trying to undermine nutritional supplements? As my father-in-law used to say, “Follow the money.” JAMA accepts millions of dollars in advertising from drug companies each year. The American Medical Association, for its part, has long worked to discredit alternative medicine and has even been found guilty by U.S. federal courts of engaging in a conspiracy to destroy chiropractic medicine. Then there is the government. While the National Institutes of Health applauds this new study, keep in mind that the NIH and the FDA

One Last Thing ...

If there was a real risk to people taking antioxidant vitamins, it would have become apparent in the clinical studies analyzed in this meta-analysis. And if antioxidants really did increase the odds of dying, the studies would have been halted. But none of them were. Nearly 160 million people in AmericaEurope use these supplements to improve their health. If antioxidants were a public health risk, as this study tries to claim, we would all know by now. and

This certainly isn’t the last word on antioxidant vitamins. In fact, another study came out at about the same time as the JAMA study showing that vitamin A may help reduce the risk of stomach cancer. And ironically, JAMA has, in the past, published a stream of studies suggesting the health benefits of antioxidants – from a reduced risk of Alzheimer’s disease and macular degeneration to helping improve immune functioning in patients with HIV.

The lesson here is that you can’t take things you see on TV, the internet or even in a medical journal as the gospel truth – especially if it goes against common sense. Look deeper and you’ll likely discover that your common sense was right all along.

This Just In ...

Here’s some good news for those of us who spent much of our youth listening to Rock & Roll at full volume: Taking 800 mcg. folic acid daily may help slow the hearing loss that typically accompanies aging. Those were the findings of Dutch researchers who studied 728 men and women in their 50s and 60s with elevated blood levels of homocysteine, an amino acid.

During the three-year study, about half of the participants received a folic acid supplement; the other half got a placebo. (Homocysteine can be kept in line with an adequate intake of B vitamins, including folic acid. But in the Netherlands, enriched grains do not contain added folic acid as they do in the U.S., hence the supplements.)

People getting the supplemental folic acid experienced less hearing loss over time than those getting the placebo. The difference in hearing loss in the study was slight, but scientists suggest that the benefit could be significant by age 70, since hearing loss generally accelerates with age.

Rock on . . .

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References:

Bjelakovic G, Nikolova D, Gluud LL, et al. “Mortality in Randomized Trials of Antioxidant Supplements for Primary and Secondary Prevention.” Journal of the American Medical Association. 2007; 297:842-857.

Durga J, Verhoef P, Anteunis LJC, et al. “Effects of Folic Acid Supplementation on Hearing in Older Adults: A Randomized, Controlled Trial.” Annals of Internal Medicine. 2007; 146: 1-9.

Larsson SC, Bergkvist L, Näslund I, et al. “Vitamin A, retinol, and carotenoids and the risk of gastric cancer: a prospective cohort study.” American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. 2007; 85: 497-503.