There are thousands, of different phytochemicals and other substances that can act as antioxidants. The most biologically important one for all life on the planet is vitamin C and vitamin E. Most species and most of the omnivore and all carnivore species produce their own vitamin C in the liver. These pigments act as protection against oxidation and UV radiation in plants and all have biological action in a similar protective way in animals. The most important pigment is beta-carotene which our body uses to produce vitamin A but there are also other related carotenoids, along with the minerals that have antioxidative properties like selenium and manganese. They’re joined by glutathione, coenzyme Q10, lipoic acid, flavonoids, phenols, polyphenols, phytoestrogens, and many more. 

As a herbivore species with more than 50 million years of plant-eating background, our physiology adapted to a high consumption rate of these naturally occurring antioxidants because in nature, food is a package deal. To get to the energy we had to consume all of the chemicals that exist in that food source. Our modern diet has completely shifted from our natural diet and the diet of all living primates today. The problem is that there are no phytochemicals in animal food sources and as such antioxidant capacity of animal food is more than 60 times less powerful than plant-based food and this is at the average level. This does not incorporate all of the other inflammation-promoting effects of meat consumption that you can read more about in correlated articles. There are no antioxidants in refined products as well. The situation is so bad that in the standard American diet number one source of antioxidants today is coffee.

Although not all antioxidants are essential like vitamins like vitamin C or vitamin E they are also important and lacking adequate intake of ORAC value in combination with other dietary factors leads to the formation of chronic diseases.

The reductionist mentality of profit-driven allopathic medicine with patenting and most of the population that do not want to change their addiction patterns to supernormal stimulation from food had created a market demand for supplemental extracted antioxidant formulations as prevention not just from cancer but for most of the diseases of affluence.

These strategies are effective in some cases especially if we accepted the fact that most of the population will essentially never change their dietary patterns of addiction.

The first problem scientifically arises because “antioxidant” is in reality just a chemical property, namely, the ability to act as an electron donor.

Most of the antioxidants that lose their electron to more aggressive substances still want their electron back. Some antioxidants in one situation may be pro-oxidants in a different situation. This is proven to be damaging in some situations even more than if we just did nothing because supplementing in this manner disrupts our body’s defensive mechanisms.

Another big problem is that antioxidants are not interchangeable.  For example, water and oil don’t mix. Vitamin C is water soluble while vitamin E is oil soluble. Some natural antioxidants are also water while other will be oil soluble and every single one has unique chemical behaviors and biological properties. One will go to one tissue other will go to other tissues and some will have low bioavailability. They almost certainly evolved as parts of elaborate networks, with each different substance (or family of substances) playing slightly different roles. This means that no single substance can do the work of the whole crowd.

In almost all cases, complete food is a better choice than extracted single phytochemicals and antioxidant supplements because of the phenomenon known as food synergy. Synergy means that we have two compounds that will work together much better than individual compounds combined. Two plus two equals five if you like that analogy. This is also the reason why many of the pigments like beta carotene and lycopene in the extracted form are useless.

Carrots lower the risk of cancer but beta-carotene in a pill actually increases the risk.

Tomatoes lower the risk of prostate cancer dramatically but lycopene increases the risk.

This is very important because some supplements are more than just a waste of money and can do us harm. People might get the idea that if they don’t eat enough vegetables they can get antioxidants from a pill after a nice meal of barbequed bacon. And this is not the case in all situations.

There are some that can be taken as an antioxidant supplements but not all of them. Curcumin from turmeric is excellent even as a supplement but for example, beta-carotene and lycopene are not.

If they are not packed as a whole food with thousands of other phytochemicals that work synergistically to neutralize some of the other bad effects, some of these extracted phytochemicals can do us a lot of damage. That is a reason why we always need to choose healthy food in a whole food package instead of pills until there is extensive research done on specific phytochemicals in real clinical double-blind studies. Curcumin is well studied now and so is lycopene and so are many other phytochemicals today we have a basic scientific knowledge of many of them.

Food companies actually petitioned the FDA back in 2004 to allow them to print labels on ketchup bottles regarding lycopene and cancer risk reduction. They were denied. At that time there were a lot of mixed results for tomato consumption and cancer risk because there were no real double-blind studies and people that consumed most lycopene usually got it from a pizza.

There was one man who read a bunch of unproven “quackery” about vegan diet and nutrition on the internet because he got untreatable prostate cancer. This was back in 1999. The prostate cancer metastases were spread through his body and treatment was stopped and he was sent to die. He started to eat a tablespoon of tomato paste every day because he found that in experimental research lycopene killed prostate cancer cells. At that time there were no real studies done like we have today. His PSA was 365 with metastases all over the body. He started his spoon of tomato paste in march and in may his PSA was down to 8.1 and stayed between 3 and 8 for the next 18 months. His metastases disappeared and at his last follow-up, he was completely asymptomatic and cleared of cancer (1). That is one of those “quackery“ cases that the medical industry doesn’t like that is almost too weird to be the truth. All of the billions of dollars “invested“ in the War on Cancer and some dude heals himself from terminal metastatic cancer with one tablespoon of tomato paste a day. He lived happily ever after. This case was well documented and could not be suppressed or ignored so in later years there were some experiments that used just lycopene in extracted form for cancer treatment. And the results were disappointing and actually, the researchers were happy that lycopene didn’t cause more cancer like beta carotene in extracted form did. In some studies, it did worsen cancer.

Today it is accepted that vitamin E (they always use a synthetic form of vitamin E in the testing) and selenium (supplements) cause an increased risk for prostate cancer (2). Also does the lycopene (3).

Why this is the case, again I can only speculate and some studies prove my point. If an antioxidant is able to turn itself into a pro-oxidant and if we take them in large quantities that we were not been exposed to in our evolution, if we supplement or overdose, these antioxidants will overrun our natural detoxification mechanisms. This would not be a problem if antioxidants just give an extra electron and did nothing else but usually what they do is they want that electron back and become pro-oxidants again. And this is exactly what research shows.

In low dietary doses that we would be able to get from food, the lycopene and beta carotene showed protection against cellular damage. But in higher supplemental dosages they actually caused more damage (4).

If you want to supplement with antioxidants you would need an antioxidant that does not have the capacity to turn itself into a pro-oxidant after giving its electron or if it does our body needs to have a strong detoxifying mechanism to rapidly remove it before it does damage. For example, vitamin C never becomes a free radical but a weaker version of an antioxidant that our kidneys just urinate out with no need for enzymatic detoxification.

In the whole food manner eating too many antioxidants could never pose any risk. Antioxidant supplements could. Why there is such a push for the extraction of these chemicals is because they can be used in medicine and charge and because the food industry will like to use them as a food additive so that they can claim health-promoting properties to unhealthy food items.

We would probably have phytochemically fortified meat and bacon and ice creams in the future. They already tried to do this with meat but they failed because again these phytochemicals are just pigments so when they try to use some of them they always stain the meat and other products giving them unnatural color or a nasty taste. This is a problem that the food industry is trying to solve. And if they solve it, and we get health-promoting bacon still there is one thing that cannot be replicated and that is food synergy. In this study, they researched exactly that, a combined synergy of carotenoids (5).

“Epidemiological studies have consistently shown that regular consumption of fruits and vegetables is strongly associated with reduced risk of developing chronic diseases, such as cancer. It is now accepted that the actions of any specific phytonutrient alone do not explain the observed health benefits of diets rich in fruits and vegetables as nutrients that were taken alone in clinical trials did not show consistent preventive effects. Indeed, synergistic inhibition of prostate and mammary cancer cell growth was evident when using combinations of low concentrations of various carotenoids or carotenoids with retinoic acid and the active metabolite of vitamin D. We found that combinations of several carotenoids (e.g., lycopene, phytoene, and phytofluene), or carotenoids and polyphenols (e.g., carnosic acid and curcumin) and/or other compounds (e.g., vitamin E) synergistically inhibit the androgen receptor activity and activate the EpRE/ARE system. The activation of EpRE/ARE was up to four-fold higher than the sum of the activities of the single ingredients, a robust hallmark of synergy.“

It is only when they combined low doses of lycopene, phytoene, and phytofluene three phytochemicals that were found in tomatoes that they get a measurable result. Both three were tested in the low non-effective dose and as expected they did not show any clinical effect on their own. But when combined they did show measurable effects although the same low non-effective doses were used. Then when they combined curcumin with tomato extract and with vitamin E the result was suppressed tumor growth by 70 percent. That is significant suppression. Individually it was around 5 percent each, with vitamin E showing no result at all. The result of studies like this is crucial for nutrition. What studies like this show is that we need to eat health-promoting antioxidant-rich whole food and not just that. We need to have a variety of foods on our plates.

Also, it has been shown that different phytochemicals bind to different receptors and different proteins in our bodies (6). Every single phytochemical has a different receptor. There are a number of these receptors identified. EGCg, for example, is a main phytochemical in green tea and it has its own receptor. There are different binding proteins for phytochemicals in onions, grapes, broccoli, apples, and oranges and as time goes science will identify more and more receptors for thousands of different phytochemicals. An antioxidant is an antioxidant in a molecular sense but in our bodies, they will exert a different mode of action by binding to different receptors. We need to have a variety of foods on our plates. If we eat just meat, eggs, dairy, and refined sugar and fat in 100 different varieties our health will deteriorate.

There are no phytochemical requirements for labeling food items. There is no phytochemical RDA. Phytochemicals are not vitamins. If we look at Fanta and orange juice the orange juice will be even worse in the amount of sugar that is in it. But because there is no labeling the whole list of phytochemicals is missing. So far the medical industry has done little to educate people on the importance of phytochemicals and research like this was only meant for a small group of scientists that are trying to develop different drugs based on them. Then phytochemicals will be prescribed as a medicine. Medical doctors like to talk a lot about prevention but that all comes down to weight management and maybe some exercise and maybe some refined food avoidance. Real education is hard to find and even MDs themselves are deprived of nutritional education in college. What science is saying is basically what most people know already instinctively or by folk traditions.

Plants are good for health and we should eat our fruits and veggies and avoid greasy sausages. The problem is that we don’t want to do it. We want greasy sausage with a beer. And even if we do eat vegetables, not all vegetables are made equal. If we have to compare kale with cucumbers, kale is a clear win. Some plants have more phytochemicals and are much more nutritious than others. The problem is that usually even when people chose fruits and vegetables, they chose the less nutritious ones.

Potatoes, cucumbers, Iceberg lettuce, bananas instead of sweet potatoes, kale, spinach, berries, and spices.

Conclusion:

• Never take supplemental antioxidants that will turn into pro-oxidants inside the body
• Never take supplemental antioxidants that need enzymatic pathways to be removed from the body, they might overrun the body’s natural defense mechanism, do your research before taking them
• Never take supplemental vitamin E, selenium, beta carotene, and lycopene- showed an increased risk of cancer in supplemental form
• Always take whole food sources of antioxidants before supplemental extracted forms because of the phytochemical synergies
• There is no wonder cure or substitute for a bad diet, there are only more potent supplemental antioxidant food sources like amla, turmeric, cacao, hibiscus, astaxanthin, or berries…
• Supplemental antioxidants are not a substitute for a bad diet with a nonexisting ORAC score even if it is whole food plant-based diet, learn your ORAC values
• There are only a few supplemental antioxidants that are proven to be effective and safe like liposomal vitamin C, curcumin or astaxanthin

Sources:

Passages selected from a book: “Go Vegan? Review of Science: Part 3” [Milos Pokimica]

1. Response of hormone refractory prostate cancer to lycopene. J Urol. 2001 Aug;166(2):613
2. Baseline selenium status and effects of selenium and vitamin e supplementation on prostate cancer risk. doi: 10.1093/jnci/djt456
3. A randomized double-blind placebo controlled phase I-II study on clinical and molecular effects of dietary supplements in men with precancerous prostatic lesions. Chemoprevention or “chemopromotion”? doi: 10.1002/pros.22999
4. Lycopene and beta-carotene protect against oxidative damage in HT29 cells at low concentrations but rapidly lose this capacity at higher doses. Free Radic Res. 1999 Feb;30(2):141-51
5. The anti-cancer effects of carotenoids and other phytonutrients resides in their combined activity. doi: 10.1016/j.abb.2015.02.018
6. Target molecules of food phytochemicals: food science bound for the next dimension doi: 10.1039/c2fo10274a

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