A study recently published in the journal Cancer indicates that antioxidant supplements may reduce the effectiveness of chemotherapy and radiation therapy by protecting the cancerous cells that the treatments are used to destroy. Heather Greenlee, assistant professor of epidemiology and medical oncology at Columbia University s Mailman School of Public Health and lead author of the study, claims that the data is inconclusive.
I m still waiting for some evidence that antioxidant supplements are beneficial at all, says ACSH's Dr. Gilbert Ross. This just seems like another reason to doubt all the hype surrounding these products. Antioxidant is starting to seem like more of a marketing term than a medical term.
ACSH s Dr. Ruth Kava agrees: People like the idea of antioxidants because they are marketed to appeal to their intuition about healthy eating. Healthy foods like fruit aren t necessarily beneficial just because they have antioxidants, and some of the supplements have been proven to have no effect at all.