antioxidants under the microscope
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Arnold Schwarzenegger <[email protected]>
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Arnold's Pump Club welcomes subscribers and explores the effectiveness of antioxidant supplements in preventing cancer. The company discusses the results of 78 trials involving nearly 300,000 people, which found no benefit to taking vitamin C, E, or beta-carotene pills. They aim to provide a healthier and happier life through their daily emails.
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Do Antioxidant Supplements Prevent Cancer?
Vitamin C, E, and beta-carotene pills were tested in 78 trials with nearly 300,000 people. The results didn't match the promise. Here's what to do instead.
Welcome to the positive corner of the internet. We’re here to make your life healthier, happier, and less stressful. At the bottom of each email, we explain our editorial process, stance on AI, and partnership standards.
If you were forwarded this message, you can get the free daily email here.
Today’s Health Upgrade
The truth about supplementing with antioxidants
Is intense exercise bad for your heart?
Adam’s Corner: The permit year
Fact Or Fiction
Will Antioxidants Help You Prevent Cancer And Live Longer?
Studies suggest that people who eat a lot of produce get less cancer and live longer. And fruits and vegetables are loaded with antioxidants. So the theory went, if you bottle the antioxidants, then you bottle the benefit. It’s why many people take vitamin C or E and assume it will offer similar protection.
Researchers tested that idea, and the findings aren’t what many people expected.
If you take vitamin C, vitamin E, or beta-carotene pills to live longer or prevent cancer, a review of randomized controlled trials found no benefit, and some supplements slightly increased risk.
A Cochrane review went through 78 randomized trials involving nearly 300,000 people, most of whom were healthy. The trials lasted anywhere from one month to 12 years and tested vitamin C, vitamin E, beta-carotene, vitamin A, and selenium.
None of the supplements helped people live longer. When researchers narrowed the analysis to the 56 highest-quality trials, beta-carotene and vitamin E performed slightly worse than placebo.
To be clear, the difference was small (about a 3 to 5 percent increase in relative risk). Still, the result pointed in the wrong direction.
And it wasn’t just that one analysis. The SELECT trial looked at 35,000 men, and those taking 400 IU of vitamin E per day developed 76 prostate cancers per 1,000 men, compared with 65 per 1,000 in the placebo group.
That works out to 11 additional cases per 1,000 men over seven years. That also does not mean Vitamin E causes cancer. But it does suggest that taking antioxidants is not inherently protective.
Some researchers believe that free radicals aren’t simply waste products to eliminate. In normal amounts, they help cells communicate, repair damage, and adapt to stress, including exercise.
Large doses of isolated antioxidants may interfere with those signals. That mechanism remains a theory, however. The trials showed what happened, but they didn’t test or prove why.
And none of this makes fruits and vegetables any less valuable. Food contains fiber, vitamins, minerals, and thousands of compounds that interact in ways a single nutrient in a capsule can’t reproduce.
This evidence applies to antioxidant supplements, especially high-dose versions. It doesn’t apply to the vitamins naturally found in food, and it doesn’t settle the separate question of whether multivitamins are useful.
So if you megadose antioxidants, a better bet is to get them naturally through your diet.
Fitness
Don’t Let AFib Headlines Scare You Away From Hard Exercise
It’s easy to understand why someone might hesitate to push harder during exercise. Stories about endurance athletes developing abnormal heart rhythms make caution sound sensible.
But unless your doctor has given you specific limits, treating intensity as dangerous is likely to steer you away from something that overwhelmingly protects your heart.
The most recent fear was triggered when a new study suggested that higher fitness was associated with a small increase in atrial fibrillation.
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