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Antioxidants and Cancer: Have we got it Backwards?

pipeline.corante.com

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Re: Antioxidants and Cancer: Have we got it Backwards?

#11

Post by biohacker42 »

I'm not sure if we have it backwards, but the article definitely oversimplifies it. It also makes some embarrassing points for ephasis, plants using antioxidants as defenses, green tea might be, but I doubt many fruits are NOT meant to be eaten by animals.

The health benefits of a diet high in fruits and vegetables are supported by very strong science.

We've also had some very good recent research into vitamins and other antioxidants in pill form. The news there is not so good, it seems vitamin pills may be worse then useless.

With cancer it's more complicated. Some vitamins like C and D have proven anti-cancer properties but in doses that would kill you. In low doses C might actually be helping some cancers, as they can use it as well as healthy cells.

In summary:

Backward? No.

Oversimplified? Yes, it is complicated.

Re: Antioxidants and Cancer: Have we got it Backwards?

#13

Post by tokenadult »

randallsquared wrote: post #10
noodle wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

indeed he does. but, at the end of a large "eating a lot of plants is bad for you" essay, to tack on the short note "oh wait, fruits? maybe those aren't bad for you" type of statement undercuts the credibility of the entire argument for me.

It does? I think the vast majority of plants that most people (at least, where I live) eat are non-fruit. Potatoes, beans, rice and other grains...

The vast majority of plants that most people eat have been so altered by selective breeding that they are quite unlike wild plants. When Richard Dawkins spoke in my town in March 2009, he made a special point of ridiculing a video purporting to show that the banana was intelligently designed by a divine creator, and finished his comments on that issue by showing a picture of a wild banana, which looks very different from the cultivated bananas that are universal in world commerce. The same is true of potatoes, rice, maize (especially), and most common foodstuffs.

The evolutionary history of cooking

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/wrangham/wrangham_index.html

goes back as far as the origin of genus Homo, and modern human beings would look--and eat food--a lot differently if they hadn't already undergone a lot of evolutionary selection for eating cooked food.

Re: Antioxidants and Cancer: Have we got it Backwards?

#14

Post by latortuga »

biohacker42 wrote: post #11

I'm not sure if we have it backwards, but the article definitely oversimplifies it. It also makes some embarrassing points for ephasis, plants using antioxidants as defenses, green tea might be, but I doubt many fruits are NOT meant to be eaten by animals. The health benefits of a diet high in fruits and vegetables are supported by very strong science. We've also had some very good recent research into vitamins and o…

>> The health benefits of a diet high in fruits and vegetables are supported by very strong science.

Maybe check out http://high-fat-nutrition.blogspot.com/2007/12/fruit-and-veg... It is a blog post but it seems to have reasonable sourcing. However, I do agree with your conclusion: it's complicated!

Re: Antioxidants and Cancer: Have we got it Backwards?

#15

Post by bedris »

pyre wrote: post #9
jcl wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's entirely possible that antioxidants make it less likely for you to get cancer but more likely to make cancer worse once you have it. Depending on how the two effects interact, the correlation could go either way. Interesting random blog page describing research that shows a fruit- and vegetable-rich diet may actually be bad for you: http://donmatesz.blogspot.com/2009/08/phytochemical-fallacie...

What I got from that blog post was 'there are lots of bad things in fruits and vegetables along with the good things'. Isn't that the truth for anything? Unless we start making foods that are homogeneous mixtures, every natural food that we eat will have good and bad things in it. I somehow don't think that the solution is to have a diet that's heavy in meats and carbohydrates. I think that it would be interesting to…

The sheer number of environmental, dietary, and lifestyle factors that would have to be adjusted for in a comparison of present-day cancer rates and those that took place ~160 years ago in Ireland would likely make any conclusions that you could draw conjectural, at best.

Re: Antioxidants and Cancer: Have we got it Backwards?

#16

Post by noodle »

randallsquared wrote: post #10
noodle wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

indeed he does. but, at the end of a large "eating a lot of plants is bad for you" essay, to tack on the short note "oh wait, fruits? maybe those aren't bad for you" type of statement undercuts the credibility of the entire argument for me.

It does? I think the vast majority of plants that most people (at least, where I live) eat are non-fruit. Potatoes, beans, rice and other grains...

i would consider fruits to be a nontrivial group. not saying they're a major part of everyone's diet necessarily, but they're not quite something to be brushed aside as not significant.

Re: Antioxidants and Cancer: Have we got it Backwards?

#17

Post by andrewvc »

Trying to game the system as far as nutrition goes is a losing battle if history has shown us anything. Every time someone half-way understands some new aspect of nutrition we flood or deprive our bodies of something we've eaten successfullly for generations upon generations.

I like Michael Pollan's simple advice: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

One other thing, from a behavioral perspective, if you come out with a new health food, people don't stop eating bad food and start eating more health food, they just add the health food on top of the crap.

Re: Antioxidants and Cancer: Have we got it Backwards?

#18

Post by joe_the_user »

biohacker42 wrote: post #11

I'm not sure if we have it backwards, but the article definitely oversimplifies it. It also makes some embarrassing points for ephasis, plants using antioxidants as defenses, green tea might be, but I doubt many fruits are NOT meant to be eaten by animals. The health benefits of a diet high in fruits and vegetables are supported by very strong science. We've also had some very good recent research into vitamins and o…

Complicated, indeed...

I don't see why one should necessarily assume that the diets might prevent cancer before it happens will cure cancer once it happens, yet it seems like the article is making something like an argument for this...

Re: Antioxidants and Cancer: Have we got it Backwards?

#19

Post by Mz »

My experience has been that most things are a two-edged sword. Saying some things are "bad" and other things "good" is usually a huge oversimplification that is tantamount to lying. I have my own pet theory on cancer. But that's probably not relevant to the discussion.

Re: Antioxidants and Cancer: Have we got it Backwards?

#20

Post by blasdel »

jcl wrote: post #7
noodle wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

two notes from that blog posting: > Plants have no claws or teeth, nor can they run from predators, so they have chemical defenses instead. some do, sure. but plenty of plants rely on animals to disperse their seeds, and making it dangerous to eat them is an evolutionary mistake. fruits taste good because they want you to eat them, process their seeds, and 'deposit' them elsewhere in the world. >After 7.3 years of fo…

some do, sure. but plenty of plants rely on animals to disperse their seeds... Yes, and that's noted in the article, a few paragraphs later: Some hunter-gatherer tribes do eat substantial amounts of fruits and vegetables (wild types, which have even higher concentrations of poisons), yet remain free of cancer and heart disease. Significantly, hunter-gatherers tend to consume more fruits than vegetables. Fruits have l…

Hunter-gatherers don't live long enough to get the kinds of cancer that post-industrial westerners do.
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