Every Person's Guide to Antioxidants - Hardcover

A clearly-written guide to antioxidants - what they are, what they do and information to decide if, when, why and how they should be a part of your diet. Millions of people take vitamins to supplement their diet, believing these pills and powders will help maintain good health and ward off illness. This belief drives an enormous industry for manufacturing, packaging and distributing vitamins. In addition to the thousands of drug store and supermarket shelves stocked with vitamin bottles, there are more than 11,000 health food stores and nutrition centres in the United States that sell only vitamins and their related products. One type of vitamin, antioxidants -including familiar vitamins as C, E, beta-carotene and melatonin, as well as dozens of lesser known antioxidants - has become especially popular and equally controversial. However, reliable information about this important subject has been scanty. Oxidants are naturally occurring chemicals in our bodies that are derived from oxygen to facilitate essential biochemical operations. For example, white blood cells of the body's immune system attack and kill invading pathogenic bacteria and viruses. The weapons they use to do this include highly poisonous oxidants. It is the role of antioxidants to counteract oxidative stress, which consists of the overproduction of these otherwise useful chemicals or failure of normal antioxidant mechanisms. Oxidative stress has been linked to the development of a wide range of chronic diseases, including coronary heart disease, cancer, diabetes, asthma, Alzheimer's disease, schizophrenia and AIDS. Smythies surveys and evaluates the current scientific work on this subject in detail and suggests that a high proportion of many of these diseases can be prevented, or their onset delayed, by attention to the proper intake of antioxidants in the diet. He examines the debate over whether this necessary intake can be achieved by increasing the amount of fruits and vegetables in the diet or whether supplements are needed. Smythies surveys the toxicity of antioxidants and under what circumstances they should be given with caution, or at all. He also discusses whether medical supervision is necessary for someone planning to take supplements, and lists good sources of antioxidants in fruits and vegetables.

John R. Smythies, M.D., heads the Neurochemistry Division of the Brain and Perception Laboratory, University of California, San Diego. He is also a senior research fellow at the Institute of Neurology in London and emeritus professor at the University of Alabama Medical Center, Birmingham. A former president of the International Society for Psychoneuroendocrinology and consultant to the World Health Organization, Smythies is the author of 13 books and more than 200 scientific papers.