Consuming Antioxidants Not So Useful
A metastudy weighs in to demonstrate that antioxidant supplementation has no effect on human life span. Statistics is a dangerous beast, meaning one should never consider this sort of study in isolation, but its far from the only research to show that the standard array of antioxidant supplements don't do much. "The findings of our review show that if anything, people in trial groups given the antioxidants beta-carotene, vitamin A, and vitamin E showed increased rates of mortality. There was no indication that vitamin C and selenium may have positive or negative effects. So regarding these antioxidants we need more data from randomised trials. The bottom line is that current evidence does not support the use of antioxidant supplements in the general healthy population or in patients with certain diseases." If you engineer your antioxidants (or your genes) to target the mitochondria inside your cells on the other hand - the heart and starting point of the mitochondrial free radical theory of aging - then a slowing of aging results. But that doesn't happen when you swallow those supplement pills.
Link: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-04/w-net041108.php
antioxidents are not useful