Free Radicals? Getting the Right Kind of Attention for Your Antioxidant Products (Part 1)

New research is coming out all the time on antioxidants. Log onto the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed database, and type in terms like “benefits of antioxidant supplements,” “beneficial effects of antioxidants” or “benefits of antioxidants,” and (as of this writing) you get the following number of hits for published studies, respectively: 428; 2,009; and 8,395.

Now while there are many ways to slice, dice, and mesh search arguments, and not all studies are positive, despite the search parameters, suffice it to say that there is a tremendous volume of research on dietary antioxidants that reputable manufacturers can tap into.

Yet, there are challenges to the successful communication of information on antioxidants that primarily stem from the following factors: misinformation on antioxidants by researcher-skeptics and critics; confusion regarding, and bias against, dietary supplements by the negative-headline-loving mainstream media; and a general public that is either understandably confused or bored, since the consumer “knows” that antioxidants are fine and gets everything needed in the pharmacy store-brand multi.

Researcher- and Critic-perpetuated Misinformation

One example of researchers with an apparent ax to grind regarding supplements was in 2008, when Goran Bjelakovic and others published a supposed meta-analysis in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews that was an update of an earlier review which originally appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) that had been roundly criticized by scientists.

While 67 clinical trials were included in this new review, most people are not aware that 748 trials were excluded for a number of reasons, including 405 studies that failed to show anybody died. One could persuasively argue that the authors of this review only included studies that could be molded to support the viewpoint that antioxidant vitamins are dangerous.

At the time, Dr. Bjelakovic made no bones about his skeptical attitude toward dietary supplements. In 2007, he co-authored an article in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute entitled, “Surviving Antioxidant Supplements” and posted an article on a newspaper syndicate entitled, “Do antioxidant supplements work?”

A second example, also in 2008, was when Howard Sesso and his Harvard colleagues came out with their study in JAMA: “Vitamins E and C in the Prevention of Cardiovascular Disease in Men: The Physicians’ Health Study II Randomized Controlled Trial.”

While they stated on other occasions that the findings of their report were not consistent with earlier primary and secondary prevention studies using vitamin E, which were very positive, only the flukey non-positive findings of their study were what made it into headlines.

In 2009, the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) suggested that results from the SELECT (The Selenium and Vitamin E Cancer Prevention Trial) study indicated increased health risks due to selenium supplementation, when there were no statistically significant risks reported.

In 2011, another SELECT paper suggested that vitamin E could increase health risks, but again the results were not significant and were anomalous.

What does the research on vitamins C and E show? A wide body of scientific evidence has established that taking antioxidant supplements — including vitamins C and E, beta carotene, selenium and zinc — can help reduce the risk of chronic disease.

A number of landmark epidemiological studies have, in fact, established that vitamin E supplementation reduces cardiovascular disease progression and reduces mortality.

Part 2 will appear Wednesday.