Are We Wasting Our Money on Antioxidant Supplements?

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There is a book entitled Forbidden Health by biophysicist Andreas Kalcker that is primarily about the health benefits of chlorine dioxide, which the mainstream lies about, and in some cases, persecutes practitioners who provide it.

In the book Kalcker also talks about "oxidative stress" and "free radicals." He challenges mainstream orthodoxy. He says that oxidative stress is an old hypothesis by Denham Harmon in 1956.

He refers us to work by Professor Dr. Michael Ristow on "mitohormesis" that debunks "oxidative stress"—and states that short-term oxidative stress is good for us. He says that athletes have lots of oxygen, which is the most abundant "free radical" in our body, concluding that the past 50 years of antioxidant supplements sales worth thousands of millions has been a mistake for we the people.

Here is an interview of Professor Ristow:

 

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He refers us to work by Professor Dr. Michael Ristow on "mitohormesis" that debunks "oxidative stress"—and states that short-term oxidative stress is good for us.

From an interview of Dr. Michael Ristow on the website Geroscience:
. . . The message I want to get across here is that the best case for antioxidant supplements is that they’re harmless, like vitamin C. If you have too much vitamin C, you’ll just excrete it through the kidneys and no damage is done. But other antioxidants like vitamin E, vitamin A, beta-carotene, these can become a problem, and they’ve been repeatedly shown to increase cancer, to cause cardiac problems like heart attack, and to reduce lifespan.

But we should drink green tea.

Oh, green tea is just perfect. Green tea extracts I’m not so sure about, because they have too much, which leads us to the concept of hormesis, or nonlinear dose response. Green tea extracts have huge amounts of polyphenols, like a thousand fold what you get from drinking green tea, and since polyphenols eventually get toxic, these can kill people. . . .

 

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From an interview of Dr. Michael Ristow on the website Geroscience . . .

There is a part 2 of the interview: "Glucosamine: The new metformin? | Interview with Dr. Michael Ristow (part ii)."

The first three paragraphs:



Last week when we heard from Dr. Ristow, he turned the outdated notion of the “free radical theory of aging” on its head, and demonstrated that antioxidants like vitamin A and vitamin C aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. But if those supplements can’t help us, what can? Perhaps, says Ristow, the answer can be found in the mitohormetic effects of an inexpensive over-the-counter compound, one with enough promise that it may someday rival metformin as the darling of the anti-aging set.


So we’ve discussed this effect called hormesis, where substances that are toxic at high doses can actually be helpful in low doses. There’s a related word that pops up a lot in your research, “mitohormesis”–what is that?


It’s an abbreviation of mitochondrial hormesis, and it essentially translates this hormesis principle, which normally applies to compounds and drugs, to whatever comes out the mitochondria. So mitochondria send out signals that promote health and lifespan at low doses, and at higher doses these signals do the opposite.

 
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