This is scientific Americans 60 second science. I'm Steve Mursky. Got a minute?

Are you gobbling up antioxidants as part of your diet and nutrition regimen, the benefits may be, well,

It seems surprising, but even after several decades we don't have a clear answer.

There's not, if they were really across the board powerful benefits, we would have seen seen it and that's not the situation.

Walter Willett he chairs the Department of Nutrition at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public

Health. He spoke at a January 15th forum on cancer and diet that wound up touching on diet and health in general.

The studies so far, randomized trials that have been done don't show much benefit.

There was actually a surprising increase

in lung cancer with beta carotene, one of the antioxidants.

And people who smoked and were heavy drinkers,

although there was no increase in risk in people who were

were generally pretty healthy to start with.

So even the randomized trials give different answers.

I think that antacents are not a magic solution to cancer or other diseases but there probably

are some benefits.

One example is that in the physician's health study randomized trial over 12 years at the end of that period of time

those taking betacoratin had better cognitive function than people on

placebo I think a really interesting and potentially important finding.

So antioxidants may provide some benefits to some people.

But even if there are, that's only a small part of the changes that we need to make in diet and lifestyle to reduce our risk

of cancer. There's so many other things that are really quite well documented.

The entire hour-long forum featuring Willitt and other researchers discussing diet and health is archived online just Google

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