Why vitamins may be bad

Many people take vitamins as part of their daily fitness regimens, having heard that antioxidants aid physical recovery and amplify the impact of workouts. But in another example of science undercutting deeply held assumptions, several new experiments find that antioxidant supplements may actually reduce the benefits of training.

Antioxidants became popular dietary supplements largely because they were said to sop up free radicals, the highly reactive oxygen molecules that are generated during daily activities. Physical exertion, through its breakdown of oxygen, results in the creation of large numbers of these molecules, which, in excess, can lead to cell death and tissue damage. So it seems logical that reducing the number of free radicals produced by exercise would be desirable.

Enter antioxidants, which absorb and deactivate free radicals. While the body creates its own antioxidants, until recently many researchers believed that we produce too few natural antioxidants to counteract the depredations from free radicals created during exercise. So many people who exercise began downing large doses of antioxidants such as vitamins C and E, even though few experiments in people had actually examined the precise physiological impacts of antioxidant supplements in people who work out.

For a study published in The Journal of Physiology, researchers with the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences in Oslo and other institutions gathered 54 healthy adult men and women, most of them recreational runners or cyclists, and conducted a series of tests, including muscle biopsies, blood draws and treadmill runs, to establish their baseline endurance capacity and the cellular health of their muscles.

Then they divided the volunteers into two groups. Those in one group took four pills a day, delivering a total dose of 1,000 milligrams of vitamin C and 235 milligrams of vitamin E. Members of the second group got identical placebo pills.

Culled from Punch