 The USDA recently removed their online antioxidant database of foods concerned that ORAC values were routinely misused by food and dietary supplement manufacturing companies to promote their products. Supplement manufacturers were getting into my ORAC is bigger than your ORAC pissing contest, comparing their pills to the antioxidant superfood du jour like blueberries. And we know there's lots of bioactive compounds in whole plant foods that may help prevent and ameliorate chronic diseases in ways that have nothing to do with their antioxidant power. So I understand their decision. So should we just eat lots of whole healthy plant foods and not worry about which ones necessarily have more antioxidants? Or does one's dietary antioxidant intake matter? We have some new data to help answer that question. Dietary total antioxidant capacity and the risk of stomach cancer, the world's second leading cancer killer. A half million people studied, and dietary antioxidant capacity intake from different sources of plant foods was associated with a reduction in risk. Note they say dietary intake, they're not talking about supplements. Not only do antioxidant pills not seem to help, they seem to increase overall mortality. That's like paying to live a shorter life. Just giving high doses of isolated vitamins may cause disturbances in our body's own natural antioxidant network. There's hundreds of different antioxidants in plant foods. They don't act in isolation, they work synergistically. Mother nature cannot be trapped in a bottle. Similar results were recently reported with non-Hochkins lymphoma. The more orac units and food we eat per day, the lower our cancer risk may drop. So antioxidants are not greens, we're particularly protective. Look at that. Going from eating like one serving of green leafy vegetables per week to more like a serving per day may cut our odds of lymphoma in half. Should we be worried about antioxidant intake during cancer treatment? Since that's how most chemo drugs work, by creating free radicals. According to some of the latest reviews there's no evidence of antioxidant interference with chemotherapy. And in fact, they may actually improve treatment response and patient survival.