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Comment by spingsprong | Hacker News Reader

Just to pick on a tiny part of that post, consuming anti-oxidants hasn't been reliably shown to have any health benefits.

If consuming anti-oxidants has any effect, it's not necessarily a positive one, since the body uses oxidation for various processes, for example the immune system.

You might be consuming anti-oxidants aiming to benefit your health, yet be negatively impacting your immune system's ability to fight infection and prevent cancer.

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Anti-oxidant supplements are now generally believed to provide no real benefit, and might even have detrimental effects. See http://annals.org/article.aspx?articleid=709255 This research is about _supplements_, though. It doesn't say that it's a bad idea to consume vegetables and fruits where the anti-oxidants occur naturally, which is what OP was referring to.

That said, the real gain of eating vegetables is probably not that they happen to contain anti-oxidants. Rather, they contain any number of things that are good to us which are hard to quantify individually but has been observed to do us good as a whole. To attribute the positive health effects of something as complex as an apple to a single class of components - such as anti-oxidants - is most likely cargo-cult science in its purest form.

I hope you're being ironic, because this attitude is exactly what the article is declaiming.

Nope, not ironic.

But if your aim is to increase people's health, you're going to do a better job using accurate information.

The initial studies showing anti-oxidants have health benefits have struggled to be replicated, and new studies have shown anti-oxidants may be having negative health impact.

Edit: since a couple of people have asked, here's one fairly good source, there are others if you search. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22419320

Why would he be ironic? Consuming too many antioxidants have been tested and turn out to have some pretty ugly negative effects, just like too much of anything else at all.

Care to show us such a test or study?

http://www.badscience.net/2008/04/cliff-richard-gloria-hunni...

That links to a 2008 Cochrane review.

Here's the updated review: http://summaries.cochrane.org/CD007176/antioxidant-supplemen...

Isn't the study (not the blog, because...honestly, who cares about a blog reference) about supplements, though?

My smoothie is made from whole foods, only.

Supplements are a very complicated thing. I can't even venture to say whether they're good or not, based on all the conflicting information.

I'd suggest you to review the current science literature on this subject as it so far it's starting to look bad for proponents of the "You need more vitamins"-campaign.

Antioxidants Could Spur Tumors by Acting on Cancer Gene http://www.sciencemag.org/content/343/6170/477.summary

Supplement Alert: Antioxidants May Protect Cancer Cells Instead Of Protecting Us From Them http://www.forbes.com/sites/daviddisalvo/2014/02/08/suppleme...

I see this as the perfect example why the article is mostly wrong. It supposes a personal motivation for "ignoring" allegedly good advice, whereas I'd bet that a lot more readers are looking at things from a objective, scientific angle where just anecdotes don't really count ("every person I tried this on" ain't that much better than "it works for me!").

Probably some variation/inversion of Hanlon's Razor.

Not everyone who wants to see more evidence for every claim and trick is doing that out of sheer denial. There might be some room for the Nirvana fallacy here ("SuperMegaFoodStuff didn't make me into an Adonis in a week, so it's crap"), but in general I'm pro-skepticism.

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