Just to put the whole "antioxidants from plants" thing in perspective, this is a snippet from the NIH:



So antioxidants are not exclusive to plants, and even on a carnivore diet, you're still getting antioxidants from animal products.

The fact they mentioned that plants have carotenoids makes me think of the study that had to be discontinued because beta-carotene actually increased the risk of lung cancer.

Good point, Calianna. But there's still, officially, only evidence to suggest antioxidants do "jolt" the body. But we don't know if that's good, or not.

Health giving properties are theory at this point, like leaky gut. Which is also theoretical.

But one theory I followed, and got good results. Eating all those "toxic superfoods" like spinach, raspberries, and cocoa, --packed with healthy antioxidants!-- made me sicker.

So my own personal tests are what I have to rely upon. While parents always urge children to eat their vegetables, they don't.

Giving up most plants was not that difficult. I never liked them anyway :) Heck, I gave up fast food, and I used to love that.

To me, the whole article from Popular Science (previous page of this thread) on antioxidants and free radicals made it sound like the more you have of one, the more you need of the other in order to balance things out.

And it also said you can have too many antioxidants.

And that the free radicals that the antioxidants neutralize are actually helpful in some instances (such as fighting disease and infection, and building muscle).

And that there's so many different antioxidants that taking them in pill form (vitamins) only gives you excessive amounts of that one electron (they used Vit E as the example), so then there's too much of that antioxidant, not enough free radicals... so the antioxidant has the ability to become damaging in and of itself.

So going by that, it's theoretically possible that you personally just don't have enough harmful free radicals to need more than the small amounts of antioxidants you get from very small amounts of herbs and such along with the antioxidants you get from animal products, and are doing well on those, so theoretically (just like with the whole antioxidant/free radical theories to begin with), maybe your body only NEEDS those very small amounts of antioxidants from herbs and seasonings to complement the antioxidants from animal sources.

Or maybe it's all a self-balancing act that no one needs to be overly concerned about, since both plant and animal foods have antioxidants, while free radicals can be both harmful and helpful.

They can keep studying it and trying to figure out ideal amounts of each and how they lead to disease or health, but in the end it's going to come down to the individual, and how their body handles each.

If one diet worked for everyone, we would only need one diet plan. We are all different.

Sadly, most of what we hear about what we need in our body from the so-called experts are simply covert advertisements.

We each have to find out what works for us.