The problem with these articles is there are SO MANY variables which affect outcome. Because they don't control for relevant variables it's hard to identify the true cause of problems.

Here are just a few very important variables which weren't even mentioned in the study:

What sort of lifestyle did these people lead? Was it low in stress, low in toxins (smoking, drinking, pesticides, drugs, etc), low in energy usage (strenuous exercise, over-eating)?
What was the diet like? Were they eating lots of sugars? What composition of fat was consumed (was it too low in saturates and too high in PUFA)? Did they eat a lot of "damaged fats" (fried foods, trans-fat)?
Most important of all, did they make sure to examine people from a wide variety of lifestyles & diets and then observe the effects of anti-oxidants?

Not controlling for these variables makes any conclusions drawn from anything else near worthless, because all of the above activities increase free radical activity. Oxidative stress results in free radicals which contributes to everything that can be considered a result of aging. If the environments and diets were all the same or similar, who's to say it's not the diet or lifestyle which is causing the problems, and the anti-oxidants are just increasing the rate at which the body "mops up the mess" so to speak? Let me explain...

I'm convinced the way the medical establishment views cholesterol is all wrong. Cholesterol is itself not some foreign disease-causing substance that needs to be targeted and eliminated. When your body elevates production of cholesterol it is a sign that really bad things are going on inside of you. Cholesterol is what your body produces in response to some deterioration caused by some other process. High cholesterol is reactionary to damage that is done, it doesn't cause damage. Think of cholesterol as a tourniquette... you use a tourniquet to deal with an immediate threat, but if nothing is done about that threat the tourniquet might cause gangrene. But the tourniquet wouldn't be needed if not for the life-threatening wound, would it? Deal with whatever is causing cholesterol to rise. Refusing to deal with the real problem and then blaming cholesterol for whatever happens is kind of like sitting there, limbs rotting and bleeding to death, and blaming the existence of your tourniquet for your plight.

If you view cholesterol in this light, as a "necessary evil" produced by your body in response to high frequency of cellular & tissue stress/damage, the fact that cholesterol would rise with high anti-oxidant intake coupled with an oxidative-stress inducing diet & lifestyle makes sense.

Cholesterol is a line of defense in cellular damage, its a repair material. If anti-oxidants are believed to protect from free-radical damage, it makes sense that anti-oxidants would cause cholesterol to rise if the body were in an environment where it is exposed to an unnecessarily high level of oxidative damage. The cholesterol rising is your body's attempt to "heal" itself from the damage done. Anti-oxidants promote such activity. The anti-oxidants aren't responsible for the "unfavorable" blood lipids, the cause of the oxidative stress is.

Of course I am just theorizing. We actually don't know if the people in the study all ate very different diets and lived very different lifestyles and still everyone saw a similarly sharp rise in cholesterol. That's because the study was flawed, or the way it was reported by press was flawed. Either way, linking "the evil cholesterol" and its associated diseases with anti-oxidants based on the above evidence is a little premature, IMO.