Dietary Antioxidants vs Dietary Supplements: Which Are Better For Your Heart?

If you are what you eat, do you look more like Ronald McDonald or the Pillsbury Doughboy?  Or do you look more like some of the Olympic athletes?  Isn't it unfortunate that we can't bottle up their efforts, pop a pill, and look just as good as they do?  Unfortunately, it doesn't quite work that way, at least not yet.  Worse, modern day snake oil salesmen have preyed on our need for a quick fix by marketing any number of pills designed to make us look, feel & perform 20-30 years younger than our current chronologic age.

An 11yr prospective population-based cohort study of 49-83yo Swedish women was published early online last week in the American Journal of Medicine in which the authors concluded that total dietary antioxidant as estimated by Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity (ORAC) was inversely associated with heart failure risk.  In other words, eating healthy just might help lower one's risk for heart failure by up to 42%..  Now isn't that a nice incentive to do the right thing?  Try combining these results with an earlier one in which the Mediterranean diet plus either olive oil or nuts was associated w/lower risk of heart disease.  

Unfortunately, you can't yet bottle these findings into a handful of pills, although that's probably not going to stop any manufacturer from making unsubstantiated claims generalized from this study.  Recall that this study is one of dietary antioxidants, not dietary supplements.  We just don't have the evidence to demonstrate much benefit from popping pills.  So go out there & eat healthy.

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