The advice I’ve heard is to eat a variety of fruits and vegetables of different colors to get a variety of antioxidants in your diet.
Until recently, the thinking had been that the more antioxidants, the less oxidative stress, because all of those lonely electrons would quickly get paired up before they had the chance to start mucking things up in our cells. But that thinking has changed.
Drs. Cleva Villanueva and Robert Kross published a 2012 review titled “Antioxidant-Induced Stress” in the International Journal of Molecular Sciences. We spoke via Skype about the shifting understanding of antioxidants.
“Free radicals are not really the bad ones or antioxidants the good ones.” Villanueva told me. Their paper explains the process by which antioxidants themselves become reactive, after donating an electron to a free radical. But, in cases when a variety of antioxidants are present, like the way they come naturally in our food, they can act as a cascading buffer for each other as they in turn give up electrons to newly reactive molecules.
On a meta level, I don’t think we understand nutrition well enough to reason about it from first principles, so if the lore among dietitians is that people who eat a variety of foods are healthier, I think we should put stock in that.
Similarly: “Institutional sources consistently overstate the importance of a varied diet, because this prevents failures of dietary advice from being too legible; if you tell someone to eat a varied diet, they can’t blame you if they’re diagnosed with a deficiency.” But there’s a real point here, e.g. suppose that you have just a few standard meals, but all of the high-magnesium food items are being paired with phytates, and you end up magnesium deficient.
The advice I’ve heard is to eat a variety of fruits and vegetables of different colors to get a variety of antioxidants in your diet.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/food-matters/antioxidant-supplements-too-much-of-a-kinda-good-thing/
On a meta level, I don’t think we understand nutrition well enough to reason about it from first principles, so if the lore among dietitians is that people who eat a variety of foods are healthier, I think we should put stock in that.
Similarly: “Institutional sources consistently overstate the importance of a varied diet, because this prevents failures of dietary advice from being too legible; if you tell someone to eat a varied diet, they can’t blame you if they’re diagnosed with a deficiency.” But there’s a real point here, e.g. suppose that you have just a few standard meals, but all of the high-magnesium food items are being paired with phytates, and you end up magnesium deficient.