Abstract
The idea that antioxidant supplements can prevent or cure many diseases is extremely popular. To study the public understanding of antioxidants on the Web, we searched the term “antioxidants” in http://Google.com and analyzed 200 websites in terms of typology (news, commercial, professional, health portal, no-profit or government organization, scientific journals), disease or biological process mentioned (aging, immunity, neurological disease, diabetes, arthritis, etc.), and stance toward antioxidants, whether neutral, positive, or negative. Commercial and news websites were prevalent (over half of the total) but not in the top 10 returned by Google, where the most frequent were health portals, government, and professional websites. Among the diseases mentioned, cancer was the first, followed by vascular and eye diseases. A negative stance toward supplements was prevalent in the whole search, and this was even more evident for cancer. Information on aging or immunity had the largest proportion of pro-supplement and commercial websites. This study shows that some diseases are highly associated with antioxidants on the Internet and that information on antioxidants in aging and immunity is more likely to describe the positive effects of antioxidant supplements.
Highlights
As early as 1956, Harman proposed the free radical theory of aging and suggested that chemical antioxidants could slow down the aging process [1]
While the classifications for disease or antioxidant were identified by a string of text or a word, we noted that the classification by typology of websites was more subjective
This may raise concern on the quality of information on antioxidants as that most websites are commercial websites and news websites [presumably containing information largely based press releases, often of poor quality [24, 25] or themselves written by companies selling supplements [26]]
Summary
As early as 1956, Harman proposed the free radical theory of aging and suggested that chemical antioxidants could slow down the aging process [1]. The purpose of this study is to analyze the information on antioxidants available on the Internet to gather a picture on the public understanding on this topic For this purpose, we used Google, the search engine used by over 65% of Internet users [8], to collect a significant sample of websites, and Antioxidants on the Internet we downloaded the first 200 URLs in the search engine result page (SERP). We used Google, the search engine used by over 65% of Internet users [8], to collect a significant sample of websites, and Antioxidants on the Internet we downloaded the first 200 URLs in the search engine result page (SERP) These were analyzed in terms of the disease process they mention, whether they described antioxidants as contained in fruit or vegetables or as supplements. We classified the websites as per their typology (e.g., governmental, commercial, no-profit, news, and professional websites)
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