Hey Tom,
The NY Times article is pretty concerning as it goes against everything one has heard about these supplements. I do know you can take too many vitamins and it can be detrimental to the liver as everything passes through it. Too many vitamins/supplements can make the liver look like it belongs to a heavy drinker.
There is always so much contradictory information about health, what foods we should eat - and then the next year these same "experts" say it will kill you. Who the heck knows what to believe!?!
As the wife of a patient at The National Institutes of Health - which I hold in very high regard - I did a search on "anti-oxident paradox" and found the article below that NIH has published about this...
Thanks for totally confusing me on this
Take care,
Sally
The antioxidant paradox: less paradoxical now?
Halliwell B.
Source
Department of Biochemistry, National University of Singapore, Singapore 119077, Singapore.
bchbh@nus.edu.sg
Abstract
The term 'antioxidant paradox' is often used to refer to the observation that oxygen radicals and other reactive oxygen species are involved in several human diseases, but giving large doses of dietary antioxidant supplements to human subjects has, in most studies, demonstrated little or no preventative or therapeutic effect. Why should this be? First, the role of reactive oxygen species in the origin and/or progression of most human diseases is unclear, although they are probably important in cancer, neurodegenerative diseases and perhaps some others. Second, the endogenous antioxidant defences in the human body are complex, interlocking and carefully regulated. The body's 'total antioxidant capacity' seems unresponsive to high doses of dietary antioxidants, so that the amount of oxidative damage to key biomolecules is rarely changed. Indeed, manipulation of endogenous antioxidant levels (e.g. by supplying weak pro-oxidants) may be a more useful approach to treatment and prevention of diseases in which reactive oxygen species are important than is consumption of large doses of dietary antioxidants.
© 2012 The Author. British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology © 2012 The British Pharmacological Society.