The next time you pop a vitamin pill in the hope of improving your health, just give a second thought as a new study has debunked anti-oxidants' ability to prolong life. Worse, it claims that some supplements could increase the risk of a premature death.
Researchers at the Copenhagen University have carried out the study, which is actually a review of 67 researches on 2,30,000 healthy people, and found 'no convincing evidence' that antioxidants helped them to prolong life expectancy; but some indeed 'increased mortality'.
In fact, the review found that vitamin A supplements raised the risk of death in healthy people by 16 per cent, while beta-carotene pills by 7 per cent and vitamin E supplements by nearly 4 per cent, British newspaper The Daily Telegraph reported on Wednesday.
Although the study showed no significant detrimental effect caused by vitamin C, it also found no evidence that it helped ward off disease.
"We could find no evidence to support taking antioxidant supplements to reduce the risk of dying earlier in healthy people or patients with various diseases. If anything, people in trial groups given the antioxidants beta-carotene, vitamin A, and vitamin E showed increased rates of mortality," Goran Bjelakovic, who led the review, was quoted as saying.
Co-researcher Christian Gluud added, "The harmful effects of antioxidant supplements are not confined to vitamin A. Our analyses also demonstrate rather convincingly that beta carotene and vitamin E lead to increased mortality compared to placebo".
