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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Dietary Antioxidants vs Stroke Risk

"Le bon Dieu est dans le détail" (the good God is in the detail) - Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880).  

I thought this quote a propos given how loosely trial results are translated into headlines & sound bites.  In the EPICOR  study to be published next year (doesn't that sound so far off in the distance?), researchers of the Italian cohort of the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer & Nutrition followed 41,620 participants for an average of 7.9 years and concluded that those who consumed the most dietary antioxidants had the lowest risk of ischemic stroke but not hemorrhagic stroke.  That's the difference between the water pipes in your house clogging vs bursting.  

In fact, there was a 47% relative risk reduction by comparing those who ate the most to those who had the lowest total antioxidant capacity.  Please note, however, taking a handful of pills hasn't been proven to be equivalent to the daily & regular consumption of larger amounts of coffee, wine, fruit, chocolate, vegetables & soups, tea, and fruit juices as dietary sources of antioxidants. When broken down further, vitamin C was found to be especially helpful in preventing ischemic strokes while vitamin E was associated with increase risk of hemorrhagic strokes.

The take-home message hasn't changed over these past 12 months.  Make better, healthier, food choices, eg eat your fruits & veggies every day.  A little bit of wine & some high cocoa-content dark chocolate appears to be good for you, too.  So make a resolution to lower your stroke risk in 2011.  A votre sante!