Nature as the Optimal Organizer

Abstract

In their article, the authors (1) say that antioxidants don’t work—but that is not true. The specialist literature contains many descriptions of different enzymatic and non-enzymatic antioxidants that work synergistically in a network very effectively and are available exactly where they are required—optimally organized by nature (2). Interestingly, Wingler et Schmidt confirm elsewhere in the article the effectiveness of antioxidant enzymes and non-enzymatic antioxidants from among the secondary plant substances in tea, dark chocolate, and red grapes. With regard to vitamins C and E, the authors cite a negative selection of studies whose quality is very much doubted by experts: neither study design nor the results are consistent with today’s requirements (for example, Bjelakovic [reference e16 in the article] and Ristow [reference 10 in the article]). It is not the case that most studies into antioxidants have yielded mostly negative results. The authors did not mention many studies with positive outcomes that were conducted according to the criteria of evidence based medicine and that confirmed significant and physiologically based benefits of antioxidants for a wide range of disorders (3, 4). Further, we wish to draw attention to the fact that there are indeed different markers for oxidative stress—for example, hydroperoxide, malondialdehyde, and desoxyguanosine—and that these can be easily measured in clinical practice or in the laboratory.