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.