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5 Amazing Antioxidant Studies
If your regular physician doesn't think much of antioxidants, he/she will probably not keeping up with the nutrition research that is now being published regularly in medical journals. Read about these five studies and you might know more than your doctor.
Blood Pressure
In a 1999 Lancet study, 39 subjects with mild to moderate hypertension took 500 mg of vitamin C or a placebo daily. After one month, people taking vitamin C had a 9 percent decline in blood pressure.
Heart Attack
This year, an analysis in Current Opinion in Lipidology found that supplemental vitamin E reduced the risk of heart attacks in four out of five studies (the authors contended that the fifth had design flaws). The most dramatic study to date appeared in Lancet in 1996. In it, 2,000 people with advanced heart disease took natural vitamin E (d-alpha tocopherol; 400 to 800 IU), and it lowered their risk of nonfatal heart attacks by 77 percent.
Hepatitis C
Burton M. Berkson, M.D., Ph.D., a physician and researcher in Las Cruces, N.M., reported in a German journal in 1999 that a high-potency antioxidant cocktail can improve liver function, reduce virus concentrations, and normalize liver enzymes in patients with this chronic liver infection. His daily protocol consist of alpha-lipoic acid (600 mg), selenium (400 mcg), and silymarin (900 mg), the active ingredient in milk thistle (silybum marianum).
Influenza
A 1997 trial published in the European Respiratory Journal studied 262 older adults who took either 600 mg of N-acetylcysteine (NAC) or a placebo twice daily for the six-month winder cold and flu season. Only 25 percent of those taking NAC developed flu symptoms, whereas 79 percent of those taking placebos developed clear-cut flu symptoms.
Precancerous Stomach Lesions
In a study published last year in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, 631 subjects with precancerous changes to stomach tissue took beta carotene (30 mg) or vitamin C (2,000 mg) daily for six years, antibiotics for 14 days, various combinations, or placebos. People taking either beta carotene or vitamin C were five times more likely to have a reversal of their precancerous condition than those taking placebos.
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