Antioxidant

When Denham Harman proposed his free radical theory of aging in 1956, he sparked a nutritional gold rush that peaked in the 1990s, convincing millions to megadose on vitamins C and E. The logic seemed bulletproof: reactive oxygen species damage cells, antioxidants neutralize them, therefore supplements should extend life. Instead, landmark trials like SELECT (35,000 men) found vitamin E increased prostate cancer risk by 17%, while beta-carotene raised lung cancer rates in smokers—turning the antioxidant hypothesis on its head.

Exercise produces massive amounts of free radicals, yet athletes live longer—a paradox explained by hormesis, where moderate stress triggers adaptive defenses stronger than the initial damage. When you take high-dose antioxidant supplements during workouts, you may actually block the signaling that tells mitochondria to multiply and cells to activate their own sophisticated antioxidant machinery like glutathione and superoxide dismutase. Evolution spent billions of years perfecting these systems; a pill can't replicate that wisdom.

Remember when everyone obsessed over ORAC values (Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity), ranking foods by their test-tube antioxidant power? The USDA quietly withdrew its database in 2012 after realizing these in vitro measurements had "no relevance to the effects of specific bioactive compounds on human health"—the polyphenols that score high often aren't absorbed, or they work through mechanisms unrelated to direct radical scavenging. Blueberries are still healthy, just not because they're antioxidant superheroes in a reductionist sense.

Two-time Nobel laureate Linus Pauling bet his reputation on megadose vitamin C, claiming it could cure cancer and extend life by decades—he personally took 18,000 mg daily. His charisma and credentials convinced millions, but rigorous trials at the Mayo Clinic found no benefit for cancer patients, and some evidence suggested harm at high doses. Pauling's tragic miscalculation illustrates how even brilliant minds fall prey to confirmation bias when they become emotionally invested in a hypothesis.

Plants can't run from drought or UV radiation, so they synthesize colorful compounds like resveratrol and quercetin as chemical defenses—and when we eat these molecules, our bodies interpret them as mild stress signals that activate protective pathways. This "xenohormesis" theory, proposed by David Sinclair, suggests the benefit isn't the antioxidant activity itself but the hormetic response to these foreign defense compounds. You're essentially borrowing the plant's stress response to upgrade your own cellular resilience.

Isolate lycopene from tomatoes and it becomes just another carotenoid, but eat it with the tomato's vitamin C, fiber, potassium, and fat-soluble structures and you get cardiovascular benefits no supplement replicates. The PREDIMED trial showed Mediterranean diets (rich in "antioxidant" foods) reduced heart disease by 30%, while isolated antioxidant supplements flopped—suggesting that food's power emerges from thousands of compounds working synergistically in ways reductionist science can't yet decode. Evolution assembled these packages over millennia; we can't improve them by extraction.