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In a message dated 97-05-22 02:04:30 EDT, Ken Becker writes: << Anti-oxidents sound like rust removers to me! Do I look like a tin man? I think NOT! I am afraid to try more than one unperscribed item at a time. I always remember what happened when I mixed all the chemicals in my chemistry set together, ................ >> Antioxidants work to neutralize the free radical scavanging (or oxidation -- you know, "rusting") in your cells. So taking them is actually an attempt to rust-proof yourself. I don't know what you look like, but antioxidants tend to keep people from siezing up like the Tin Man in the rain. No, you are not afraid to try more than one unprescribed item at a time. A case in point would be an apple, which is an item consisting of dozens of chemicals (some antioxidant in character) and rarely prescribed. Put a walnut with it and you're on the roller coaster ride of unprescribed items. Think what a Waldorf Salad does to your theory! Food is simply tasty (or not!) packages of chemicals. When you put the wrong things together, they can have internal and external effects much like the ones produced by your chemistry set escapades. Controlled studies are showing, more and more, and more often than not*, that the ingestion of antioxidant nutrients, whether from food sources or in supplemental form, helps the human body decrease the myriad effects of the aging process. IMO, there is hardly a more worthy laboratory than my body. This is not to say that I eat perfectly always, or take all the supplements on my shelf every day. (I leave that to my husband, who is obnoxiously younger and healthier than other people his age.) I can, however, tell when I''ve been more faithful to the healthier practices. That's when I feel more energy, more strength, and a more positive outlook. You do as you will, Ken. I enjoy your posts so much that I hope what you do brings you health and longevity and keeps your input fingers supple. I'm not meaning to be so dull and serious about your funny antioxidant message, but it does read like that, doesn't it? Maybe I need to go take more vitamins . . . . Deanne Charlton [log in to unmask] * When a piece of research shows negative effects of antioxidant studies, I try to find the original paper to see how the study was designed. Choosing an inappropriate population, trying to test too many things at once, the length of a study, influence by the funding agency, population dropout, uncontrollable lifestyle factors -- these and many more pitfalls can skew the results, and the old dictum is true that you can massage statistics to make them "prove" anything you want them to. BTW, I also try to find the original papers on positive reports. I love to torture myself with looking up five words of twelve syllables each per paragraph. The trouble with that is that then I start reading the dictionary and then I'm not good for anything else for hours.