Are antioxidant supplements just a big fat lie?

Filed in archive Diet & Fitness , Health on January 5, 2007

We read it in every glossy magazine, we hear about it on television, we even buy our cosmetics for it: antioxidants are just the thing you need to stop aging, to keep your skin beautiful and hazardous pollution agents not harming your body. Free radicals have been the no 1 beauty enemy for years now, and antioxidants just the perfect way to fight it.

Well, this might not be true, according to Lisa Melton from New Scientist:

"You name it, if it's an antioxidant, we'll swallow it by the bucket-load. According to some estimates around half the adults in the US take antioxidant pills daily in the belief they promote good health and stave off disease. We have become antioxidant devotees. But are they doing us any good? Evidence gathered over the past few years shows that at best, antioxidant supplements do little or nothing to benefit our health. At worst, they may even have the opposite effect, promoting the very problems they are supposed to stamp out."

As it turns out, new research has proven that antioxidants, extracted mainly from green vegetables and put into pills, tonics, creams and do nothing what so ever to reduce our chances of getting wrinkles, cancer and body deterioration.

I am really disappointed in vitamin E and vitamin C pills right now, and I hate the cosmetic industry for not researching things thoroughly. Read the whole article and find out why only green vegetables taken as is, in their vegetable form, can help protect us.