It’s tough to sort out what of the endless yammering abut nutrition is accurate and relevant. Sorting out what’s relevant in the context of prepping is tougher still. One of the big nutrition topics these days antioxidants. What, if anything, does a prepper need to know about them? Salty and I talk about in this podcast:
Phytic Acid is an antioxidant that is found in many grains and cereals.
What antioxidants are
Skipping most of the chemistry (it often causes eyes to glaze over), oxidation reactions are a kind of chemical reaction. Antioxidants stop these reactions by ‘distracting’ one of the reactants, the oxidizing agent. There are fewer oxidation reactions when antioxidants are about.
The most reactive of the oxidizing agents are things called ‘free radicals’. It is not a political statement when I tell you, free radicals can be dangerous. They are what chemists call ‘promiscuous’. They will react with anything — proteins, DNA, whatever. Letting free radicals run around unsupervised in a body is about as good an idea as letting a five year old run around unsupervised in a china shop. With his puppy.
Free radicals can do great damage in live bodies, when uncontrolled. On the other hand, they also play intentional and important roles in jobs such as getting rid of unwanted cells and in immune responses.
So are antioxidants actually good for you?
Good question, but it has to be met with another: How much antioxidants, and which ones?
Getting at least a certain level of the most important antioxidants is absolutely good for you: as in, If you don’t get enough of them, you die in unpleasant ways. Vitamin C, for example, is a potent antioxidant. If you don’t get enough of it, you get scurvy. Scurvy has killed lots of people, and maimed many more.
During the Napoleonic era, scurvy killed far more sailors than cannon. *
Vitamins D and E and the mineral Selenium, are also potent antioxidants you can’t do without. Without Vit D, one develops rickets and/or osteomalacia, and the immune system doesn’t work as well. Vit E deficiencies leave you with anemia and neurological problems. (2) Selenium deficiencies are rare.
Getting enough antioxidants also has some more general good effects. There’s evidence for upsides such as slowing the development of heart disease and aging, reducing the risk of some cancers, and reducing the damage that comes with diabetes mellitus. (1)
What happens if you get more than enough antioxidants?
This question is a lot murkier. Learning that excess oxidation was so important in heart disease and cancer sparked a whole host of trials to see if higher doses of antioxidants were protective. I happened to work on one of these trials many years ago. The experiment with which I assisted, like many others (3), did not not demonstrate any benefit from the megadoses.
Some trials have even indicated that the megadoses of antioxidants increase risk for cancer. (3,4) While the question isn’t considered settled…my own oncologist did recommend I not take supplements of antioxidants during treatment, as they’d degrade the effectiveness. Dietary levels of vitamins were encouraged.
Why are antioxidants a prepper issue?
Many stored prepper foods are low on natural antioxidant sources. Some preppers know this and plan to remedy the situation with vitamin supplements. I am not a physcian so won’t presume to offer medical recommendations … but now you have more information with which to consider what you might like in a supplement. I personally wouldn’t buy a supplement with more than 100% RDA of vitamins without an exceptionally good reason.
Some supplements have hundreds of times the needed amount of antioxidants. Studies don’t support their use.
On the other side of the coin, there are good reasons to eat the kinds of foods that provide antioxidants in their natural settings and quantities. Plenty of storable fruits and vegetables are for sale, and they are also excellent targets for home production. For starters, here’s a post on dehydrating vegetables. Coupled with gardening, there’s no cheaper source of in-food nutrition that I know of.
1) Antioxidants in health and disease.
2) Merck Manual Professional Version. 2018. Merck Sharp & Dohme Corp. https://www.merckmanuals.com/professional/nutritional-disorders/vitamin-deficiency,-dependency,-and-toxicity/vitamin-e
3) Gluud, C. and Bjelakovic, G. JNCI: Journal of the National Cancer Institute, Volume 99, Issue 10, 16 May 2007, Pages 742–743, https://doi.org/10.1093/jnci/djk211
4) Lawson KA, Wright ME, Subar, A Mouw T, Schatzkin A, and Leitzmann MF. Multivitamin use and risk of prostate cancer in the National Institutes of Health–AARP Diet and Health Study, J Natl Cancer Inst, 2007, vol. 99 (pg. 754-64).
* Pierre-Julien Gilbert [CeCILL (http://www.cecill.info/licences/Licence_CeCILL_V2-en.html) or CC BY-SA 2.0 fr (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/fr/deed.en)], via Wikimedia Commons