Get Antioxidabts Pre-workout nutrition. Antioxidants are the Antioxiddant-rich chemical line of defense Antioxidant-rich antioxidants for athletes Antioxidant-rjch Antioxidant-rich antioxidants for athletes impact of free radicals. Age-related eye disease A six-year trial, the Age-Related Eye Disease Study AREDSfound that a combination of vitamin C, vitamin E, beta-carotene, and zinc offered some protection against the development of advanced age-related macular degeneration, but not cataracts, in people who were at high risk of the disease.

Antioxidant-rich antioxidants for athletes -

In this context, it is important to note that vitamin E refers to a family of eight natural molecules. The only form of vitamin E that has been tested under conditions of exercise is alpha-tocopherol. New findings clearly indicate that alpha-tocopherol may have some adverse effects under certain conditions and that the other natural forms of vitamin E have functions distinct from the effects of alpha-tocopherol.

For example, alpha-tocotrienol is significantly more neuroprotective than alpha-tocopherol. When considering the cellular mechanisms, current knowledge supports the role of antioxidant nutrients in the intracellular management of excess ROS. Several physiological and pathological conditions ranging from pregnancy to cardiovascular disease and cancer have been studied to elucidate the effects of antioxidant supplementation.

Copyright: © The Authors. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 4. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

E-ISSN: Contact Home. Submit Paper. Electrolyte drinks 0 kcal. Packs promo. Food supplements. Massage creams. New Products. Every day, the body is subjected to a variety of stresses from its surroundings: pollution, muscle activity during physical labour or a sports activity, tissue inflammation, ageing, stress, and so on.

These aggressions caused by our surroundings lead to the production of free radicals, which can destroy our cells and damage our body; in practical terms, this means poor recovery, fatigue, injuries.

Physical activity increases the production of free radicals. But not to worry: at the same time, the body raises its defences by producing antioxidants to protect itself 1.

Even so, those who do not get enough antioxidants through their diet, will not be as capable of protecting themselves against free radicals. Antioxidants are molecules that can be both produced by the body and introduced through our diet. Antioxidants are present in food in a variety of forms: vitamins C, E, A, Omega-3s, zinc, and many other lesser-known micronutrients.

One of the main roles mentioned in the SU. MAX study 3 is a reduction in the risk of the onset of cancer and cardiovascular diseases in humans thanks to regular consumption of fruits and vegetables rich in antioxidants and fibres.

These ROS are highly reactive, so they can damage structures they come into contact with, such as the walls of our cells, and also interfere with normal cellular function. This, in turn, contributes to fatigue, immune dysfunction, and muscle damage, all of which are harmful to sports performance.

Antioxidants help to buffer these ROS, reducing the damage they can cause and mitigating the increases seen in fatigue and immune dysfunction after exercise. There are two main types of antioxidants: endogenous and exogenous. The endogenous antioxidants are produced by our body, which has evolved over the years a very competent system to mitigate oxidative stress.

Exogenous antioxidants come from the diet. Exogenous antioxidants can come from food sources, or from dietary supplements. My first question, then, is: Do antioxidant supplements improve our health? To answer this question, I will mostly look at meta-analyses and review articles.

Meta-analyses combine the data from a number of studies, and so give a good idea of the overall research in a particular area. The first meta-analysis I want to introduce comes from , and is comprised of , subjects, which is a lot of participants.

The aim of the study was to see whether antioxidant supplements had any effect on mortality. Overall, the results indicated that these supplements had no effect on mortality—i.

Further analysis of the trials allowed the researchers to separate those at low risk of bias. In doing so, the data indicated that beta carotene, vitamin A, and vitamin E, either together or individually, increased the risk of death.

Vitamin C had no significant effect. An earlier study looking specifically at gastro-intestinal cancers found that antioxidant supplementation did not prevent these cancers , but instead appeared to increase their incidence.

A paper found that high-dose vitamin E supplementation might increase risk of death from all causes, and should be avoided. This more or less replicated the results from a meta-analysis.

Another meta-analysis found no effect of antioxidant supplementation on cancer incidence , unless you were a smoker—in which case beta-carotene supplementation increased your cancer risk. So antioxidant supplementation appears to be at best neutral, and quite possibly negative in regards to health.

However, it is also well-established that low levels of antioxidants within the blood are associated with increased risks of death. For example, an older study from conducted on almost 3, men in Switzerland found that overall cancer mortality was associated with lower plasma levels of carotenes and vitamin C , such that being in the lowest quartile for antioxidant intake could increase disease risk by almost a factor of three.

Higher plasma levels of lycopene, an antioxidant found in tomatoes, are associated with a decreased risk of prostate cancer. This is curious; we clearly need antioxidants within our bloodstream to keep us healthy, but antioxidant supplementation appears to be unhealthy, or at best neutral.

Why is this? Well, as with most things, the dose makes the poison. Antioxidant supplements tend to contain doses of antioxidants far higher than what would naturally be found. For example, in one of the vitamin E studies above, it was high-dose vitamin E supplementation that was unhealthy.

Supra-physiological doses of antioxidants, in the form of supplements, appear to be at best neutral in terms of health.

However, antioxidants from natural sources appear to be healthful, in part because the doses are kept low. In addition to this, antioxidants from food often come with complementary nutrients, which can synergistically work to improve health. High-dose antioxidant supplements often come with few additional nutrients, which in turn can increase the amount of ROS present in the body, causing further damage—as illustrated by the potential increase in mortality seen in the high-dose antioxidant supplementation trials.

This is further evidenced by the protective effect of higher intakes of vegetables and fruits foods that contain the greatest amount of antioxidants on both cancer and all-cause mortality risk. Studies one , two , three , four , five , six , and seven.

Having looked at general health, the next step is to examine antioxidant requirements of athletes, who are engaged in regular physical activity. It would be tempting to assume that, because exercise increases the amount of oxidative stress, athletes require a greater amount of antioxidants to buffer this.

But is that correct? The evidence tends to suggest that exercise, both through skeletal muscle contraction and also cellular respiration, does increase the amount of ROS that form.

Select your language of ahtioxidants to Antioxidant-rich antioxidants for athletes the Antioxidant-rich antioxidants for athletes content in antioxiadnts interested language. Herbal immunity supplements and Antioxidants in Medical Science received citations as per google scholar report. Gius Zach, Department of Chemistry, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand, Email: gius. zach gmail. Received: Jul, Manuscript No.