Science Vs - Antioxidants

Episode Date: May 4, 2017

Are chocolate, coffee and red wine actually good for us? Reading the news it seems that one day they are helping us live longer, and the next day they are giving us heart attacks. So what’s going on here? Host Wendy Zukerman and DJ/senior producer Kaitlyn Sawrey explore the science live on stage, with interview clips from Prof. Bruce Ames, Prof. David Sinclair and author Aidan Goggins. This show was recorded live at The Bell House on Thursday, March 23rd, 2017. If you want to listen to the Q&A after the show, sign up to become a Gimlet member for $5 a month. If you sign up for a year, you can receive a Science Vs t-shirt! Our Sponsors:Cloudflare - To learn more visit cloudflare.com/sciencevsWordpress - go to wordpress.com/science to get 15% off a new websiteHello Fresh - For $30 off your first week of meals go to hellofresh.com and enter the promo code SCIENCEVS30 Credits: This episode has been produced by Wendy Zukerman, Heather Rogers, Diane Wu, and Shruti Ravindran. Our senior producer is Kaitlyn Sawrey. Edited by Annie-Rose Strasser. Fact checking by Diane Wu and Ben Kuebrich. Sound design and music production by Matthew Boll, and mixed by Austin Thompson. Music written by Bobby Lord. Extra thanks to Martin Peralta, Rachel Ward, Eric Mennel and the Bell House, and live show art by Alice Lay (which you can see at facebook.com/sciencevspodcast) Further Reading:JAMA Review - Are antioxidant supplements associated with higher or lower all-cause mortality? David Sinclair’s Study: Resveratrol improves health and survival of mice on a high-calorie dietAlcohol and coronary heart disease: a meta-analysisCoffee Meta-analysis: Coffee consumption and mortality from all causes…Habitual chocolate consumption and risk of cardiovascular disease among healthy men and women Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I just wanted to say at the beginning of the show that if you like what we're doing here at Science Versus, we would love if you could give us a review on iTunes. We cover some pretty controversial topics. Some people don't like them. So if you do, we would absolutely love it if you could give us a nice review. So we're the show that pits facts against everything else out there. Fads, fears, feelings. And now we're diving into red wine, coffee and chocolate. And we are asking, are these foods good for you or bad for you?

But we're taking this show out of the studio and onto the road. Well, onto the stage. The Bell House in Brooklyn, New York, where we recently performed Science Versus to a very wonderful and very packed crowd. And on stage with me was senior producer Caitlin Sori. Hello. So we're now going to play you that performance.

Without further ado, Science Versus, red wine, coffee and chocolate. And today, our very first show in New York, we are tackling some of our favourite foods. Red wine, coffee and chocolate. And we pick these foods because they're the best and also because we keep hearing how amazing they are for our health. This is news that I just love to keep reporting on. Wine is good for our health. This is news that I just love to keep reporting on.

Wine is good for your health. And chocolate. So is a cup of Joe now considered health food? Well, I think the fact is that coffee is good for you. Drinking a glass of red wine is just as good as spending an hour at the gym.

All right, Doc. Drink up, then. Good. The happy drink. Trust these guys. And it seems that science says that consuming all the red wine, coffee, and chocolate that you want can help your heart, make you lose weight, and even make you live longer. But then it seems like the next day there are these other reports coming out screaming that science says that if you eat chocolate, drink coffee and wine, it'll increase your risk of heart disease, of getting a heart attack and make you more likely to die younger.

So what's going on here? Are these delicious treats helping us or are they harming us? Are they going to kill us all or save us all? When it comes to our diet, there are lots of opinions. But then, there's science. Two of the theories out there as to why these foods that you might naturally think are bad for you might actually be good for you are... One, antioxidants and

two, sirtuins. So first up, antioxidants. Now one thing that coffee, wine and chocolate all have in common and one reason that they might be making us live longer is that they are packed with antioxidants. Fabulous, wonderful, antioxidant, bioflavonoid, Phil. Really good for you. Chocolate. Wine.

All of them are good. Try that one. That's my signature bar. But what exactly are antioxidants and why are they so good for you? Dr. Oz, he always asks those tough questions. So the story that you might have heard about why antioxidants are good for you is because they protect you from free radicals. So let's start here.

What are free radicals? Free radicals are molecules that have a loner electron it's what's called unpaired and this makes them incredibly reactive so these free radicals can be in your cells for all kinds of reasons your body naturally pumps them out when it's producing energy so if you go for a run and you do exercise your body's actually ramping up its production of free radicals. Cigarette smoke also has free radicals inside of it, so you breathe them in along with that nicotine. Don't be judgy. No, smoking is bad. However these free radicals get in your body, once they are there, they are desperate to get an electron. And

sometimes they go on a rampage and they steal that electron from things like our DNA or maybe the lining of cells. And this can mutate our DNA and can potentially lead to cancer. It's also thought to lead to the faster progression of aging. Now, this is a bit complicated, so here's a video of what it looks like in the human body. So that was the new radicals rather than the free radicals. And they're, like, messing up the mall instead of messing up your cell. It's really good. The Canadians loved it.

Okay, so one of the places that free radicals can get an electron without causing harm, like damaging the cell or the mole, is from an antioxidant. And that is a molecule that is ready to give away one of its electrons to a rampaging free radical. So antioxidants are naturally found in our cells, and some of them are also found in different foods, like, you guessed it, red wine, coffee and chocolate. Now, the thing you need to know is that this kind of process, this electron exchange, isn't just happening in our body. It happens all over the place.

It turns fatty foods rancid and it turns fences to rust. So it's a by-product of living, is getting mutated. It's your sort of rusting to death. This is Bruce Ames, a professor emeritus at the University of California in Berkeley. And he's getting pretty rusty. I'll be 88 in December next month. My hearing isn't so good. But anyway, hit that again.

So back when Bruce was a little less rusty in the 1980s, he started getting interested in free radicals, but he was particularly curious about how they might damage our DNA and how that could potentially lead to ageing. He ended up studying them for decades. Once he fed old rats antioxidants along with a protein supplement and found that together they could actually reverse some of the damage that free radicals had caused in the elderly rats.

In a media release, Bruce said that he got the old rats up and dancing the Macarena. Bruce thought it was funny and so did we, but some people didn't. Oh, it was funny, and so did we. But some people didn't. Oh, it was just a joke. I like to make up jokes, but it's sort of absurd, of course. But I got about a six-page single-spaced letter from some Scottish pharmacologist who trued me out for doing that. He said it was very unscientific.

But it was in a press release release and I was just having fun. Meanwhile, the vitamin and food industry also started having a bit of fun. They picked up this antioxidant theory and they ran with it. And now the vitamin supplement industry, thick with its sales pitch for antioxidants, is worth billions. Since then, the food industry has also come along for the ride

and they're selling us antioxidant-packed coffee, wine and chocolate. But just because people are buying it doesn't mean it's actually working. So let's break this down. Starting with foods. When you eat antioxidants like coffee, chocolate and wine, they go into your gut and they can be absorbed, eventually landing in your bloodstream. But the thing is, once they get there, what do they do?

Are they actually helping you to live longer or reducing your risk of cancer? Well, this is actually very hard to study. One of the most popular tools that scientists have are epidemiological studies, and this is where you look for patterns in very, very big populations. But interpreting these kinds of studies can be so problematic that Bruce has a joke about it.

My epidemiologist joke is, study shows Miami a weird place. Everybody's born Hispanic and dies Jewish. LAUGHTER shows Miami a weird place. Everybody's born Hispanic and dies Jewish. The point is that these kinds of studies can only give you a correlation. They don't show causation. So even if you find that people who drink wine tend to live longer,

you don't know that it was the wine that caused them to live longer, just like you can't say that moving to Miami turns you into an old Jewish baby. Which is all to say that we don't have good data to show that antioxidants in food are extending life. And making this even more difficult is that these kinds of studies often tend to rely on food questionnaires. So they'll ask people, how much chocolate did you eat yesterday or last week? And let's see how reliable that is. You sir, how much chocolate

did you eat last week? More than I would like. Really difficult to quantify. So sometimes people are forgetful, sometimes people lie, but still. So even if you kind of try and do these studies and you do find a link between eating chocolate and living longer, then you have another problem. You still don't know what it is in the chocolate that gave you that benefit. Was it the antioxidants or was it something else? Now, this is one situation that at least you can control for. At least you can deal with this problem. So instead of asking people about their diet,

you ask them whether they take antioxidant supplements or not. Or even in some studies, you can give one group antioxidant supplements and then you can compare them to another group that doesn't take the pills. And there is loads of research like this. But since we're not here all night, I'm going to give myself 90 seconds on the clock and I'm going to give you the best evidence that we could find on whether antioxidant supplements are good for you. That is, do they lower your risk of heart disease, cancer, and can they make you live longer? Okay, so 90 seconds on the clock. Let's go.

Will taking antioxidants save you from heart disease? A 2013 analysis of 22 studies involving thousands of people found that, quote, there is no evidence to support the use of vitamin and antioxidant supplements for the prevention of cardiovascular disease, end quote. In fact, over the past dozen or so years, there have been scores of studies and reviews looking at the effects of antioxidant supplements

in hundreds of thousands of people, and they've all found the same thing. Antioxidants are not associated with a lower risk of heart disease. On to cancer. Can antioxidants protect you from cancer? A recent review of 11 of the largest studies into this very question, trials involving more than 7,000 people and even up to almost 40,000 people, found that none showed convincing evidence to, quote, justify the use of traditional antioxidant vitamins or minerals for cancer

prevention. In fact, some of these studies, but not all, are finding consistent results that actually taking antioxidant supplements is associated with an increased risk of having some types of cancers, including lung cancer and yikes. And what about living longer? Can antioxidants reverse ageing and get old people up and doing the Macarena? Well, a 2013 review paper of 56 trials involving more than 240,000 people found that taking antioxidants was not linked to living longer and in fact some supplements like vitamin A, E and C there was a teensy but statistically significant increased risk of dying earlier when taking the stuff. I'm done. So, when you add all of these studies up, there's no evidence that taking antioxidant supplements will make you live longer

or reduce your risk of heart disease or cancer. So, what's going on? Well, it turns out that our early ideas about antioxidants, that more equals good, and our early ideas about free radicals, that more equals bad, were just too simplistic. For one, bodies actually need free radicals for a bunch of things, like free radicals can help cells die, which can be a good thing if you have a mutated cell that might turn into a cancer, and your immune system uses free radicals to kill bacteria. Plus, your genetics are believed to play an important role here

in how you respond to antioxidants and free radicals. It's horribly complicated in all our metabolism and everybody's different. Some people need more of this and less of that. Evidence is now suggesting that the body has its own natural mechanisms to balance out the damage from free radicals. And it might not need any help or any boost from supplements. Conclusion.

Antioxidant supplements don't work and because it's really hard to study an entire diet, we don't have evidence that it's the antioxidants in chocolate, coffee and wine that are doing anything for you. You know, it might be, but we just don't know. But that's not the end of the story when it comes to our favourite treats. Because there's a new research field in town. And it might mean that you can eat as much chocolate, coffee and wine as you want. We're having a quick intermission and then we're going to tell you all about it. Alright, we'll be back.

Welcome back. So, when it comes to the benefits of eating our favourite treats, it looks like antioxidants aren't all they've cracked up to be. But luckily, there's a new star in town. Hello. Hello. How are you? Oh, I'm good.

I'm just in the middle of something. It's so typical of me to talk about myself, I'm sorry. I like to push jokes to the limit. So, anyway. Okay, so there are new claims in town that you can and should eat all the chocolate, wine and coffee that you want and not because of antioxidants, but because of something very very different

sirtuins sirtuins that is the biggest reaction for sirtuins ever um sirtuins are proteins that are found in your body and they play an important role in ageing and metabolism and so our ability to burn fat. Now, research is now being done into how you can activate these proteins. Professor David Sinclair at Harvard Medical School has discovered his own way of doing just that. It's a white powder. I have it in a bag and I sprinkle it on the yogurt

so that it dissolves and I eat that. And sometimes I put a little bit of Splenda on there so that it doesn't taste so bitter. Do you ever get stopped in the airport for having a plastic bag full of white powder? I do worry about getting stopped in the airport, but I haven't been stopped yet. David is putting a compound on his breakfast that he discovered could activate his sirtuins. Cocaine. Definitely not. It's a compound that's found in red wine

and it's called resveratrol. And remarkably, this magical ingredient actually can ramp up those fat-burning proteins, sirtuins. And guess what other foods also have these sirtuin ramp-rupperers in them? Coffee and chocolate. In coffee, one of these ramp-rupperers is called caffeic acid. In chocolate, an activator is called epicatechin. So the idea here is that by eating chocolate and drinking wine and coffee, you can activate your sirtuins and speed up your metabolism and maybe burn more fat.

And this whole idea comes from David's early research. So he discovered that resveratrol, what's found in red wine, could activate sirtuins. And when his research came out in 2003, it got some pretty exciting headlines. And then a few years later, it was another pretty exciting moment when we fed resveratrol to old mice, both lean and fat, and they became much healthier.

And David says that since sirtuins can make your body burn more fat to get more energy, resveratrol can have some pretty impressive results. So we find that mice, when we treat them with molecules like resveratrol, can run sometimes twice as far as untreated mice. So resveratrol activates sirtuins. But how are sirtuins actually working? Well, David says that these proteins send out messages to orchestrate a bunch of processes throughout our body.

Like if you're starving, sirtuin urges our body to burn more fat to make more energy. Or if your insulin levels are low, then sirtuins tell your body to ramp up its insulin production. Now, how exactly these proteins work gets a little bit complicated, but I wanted David to be technically and scientifically accurate as he explained it to us. If you were, say, to dress up as a sirtuin for, like, a kids' puppet show, what would you get that character to do

in order to explain how these work? I would dress up as an army general, so with uniform, and there would be the troops around me. There'd be tank commanders, there'd be people with guns, people with medical supplies, and I'd be the Sirtuan general that would receive a call from higher up, an emergency call, say from the Pentagon, saying, we're under threat, we have to build more muscle,

or we have to protect the brain, or we don't have enough food around. And it would be my job to round up the troops, get them mobilized and send them off to protect, not the country, but in this case, the body. And maybe we should have, like, a little moment for David here, because he had no practice, and that is in real time. So, good work, David, for playing along. So, when David eats that white powder, that resveratrol, he's hoping that

he will activate his sirtuins, kind of like the Pentagon is calling his sirtuin general inside him and triggering a bunch of processes to keep him healthy. The general now has someone screaming in his or her ear that we're under attack and then the general will mobilise the forces. So this all sounds pretty amazing, right? A compound you just sprinkle on your breakfast and it'll send your internal generals running around to make you skinny? And it sounds so great, in fact, that someone has written a diet pretty much based on David's research.

Hello. No, it's research. Hello. No, it's not Adele. It's this guy. My name is Aidan Goggins. I am a pharmacist and a nutritional medicine consultant. And my favourite animal is a pug. A pug? A pug, yeah.

That's not an animal. Well, I think it's in a class of its own, isn't it? So, meet Aidan Goggins, Irish pug lover and co-author of the Sirt Food Diet. Get it? Sirt for Sirtuins, food for food, and Sirt foods for foods that activate your Sirtuins. Now, the Sirt food diet made headlines when it was published in the UK last year, pretty much because it proclaimed that you could eat chocolate, wine, and coffee, and it would help you lose weight and be healthier. Others have since come along with a

very similar diet and the cert food craze may very well be the new paleo diet. Aidan's book was a bestseller and it's since been translated into 14 languages and if you're feeling left out because you haven't heard of it, the book has just been published in North America. But here's what you really need to know. According to the gossip mags, Adele is on the Sirt Food Diet. How from the other side? Totally worth the payoff, could I just say. So Aidan's list of cert... Aidan...

Sorry, I just went really Australian then. Aidan's list of cert foods also includes kale, buckwheat, strawberries and green tea. And he goes so far as to say that if people change their diets and stop eating any old fruits and veggies but focus on cert foods, then they'll be healthier for it. Somebody could be forcing down like four bowls of broccoli a day. And actually, now with this new understanding of how food works for us,

we realise that we could be doing much better by just eating foods that we really enjoy. You can understand why we were a little bit sceptical. Can you see why it looks like this is just another fad? How would changing how we understand the landscape of nutrition be a fad? But is this really changing the landscape of nutrition? Are cert foods really going to make us live longer, healthier lives? Well, as we said with antioxidants, it's actually very difficult to answer these kinds of questions when you just look at someone's diet. Because we don't know if it's the SIRT activating powers in chocolate or the antioxidant in chocolate or something else that might be doing good. Still, despite these problems with the research,

we actually asked David, based on his work, on his research, could the SIRT food diet really help people lose weight and make them healthier? Well, I'm not ruling it out for sure. I don't see any evidence against it. But, yeah, my approach has always been to keep my head down, work on our research and not make wild claims myself. Are you calling it a wild claim?

Is this a deposition? So, without diet studies, we again have to look at supplements. As of 2013, scores of studies of resveratrol, that white powder that David puts on his brekkie, have been done. And they're often small studies in different groups of people, some who are obese, some who are pre-diabetic and others who aren't. And overall, the studies are actually pretty inconsistent.

Some show subtle benefits, some show nothing at all. And in healthy people with no heart or diabetes troubles, resveratrol has shown no real benefits of eating it at all. But unlike the antioxidant supplement story, because the research on sirtuin activation is pretty new, we really can't bow-bow it just yet. No, I said we can't bow-bow it. So, for example, there are no long-term studies on resveratrol with people taking the powder every day like what David is doing. And so that means there are kind of two ways

that we can look at this research. We can say that it's just going to be like antioxidants and ultimately a dud. Or we can say that maybe there's still some hope here, still some work to do. And David is staking his career and his breakfast on that second option. He's hoping that consuming those powders

that activate our sirtuins can make him and us live healthier, longer lives. But he's well aware that people have come before him and failed. The Wright brothers, you know, could have been criticised because nobody succeeded before them as well. Plenty of people promised they could fly and they fell off cliffs. You know, maybe I'll fall off a cliff, but so far we've made it far further than I thought I would in my lifetime. Conclusion. For now we don't know if chowing down wine and coffee and chocolate can ramp up the

activity of our sirtuins or even if putting extracted resveratrol powder on your breakfast will help you lose weight or extend your life or make you healthier and how you take this research just depends on whether your glass of wine is half empty or half full so oh come on that was great it's about wine so So, chocolate, coffee and wine. The reports keep coming out. One day they're good for you, one day they're bad for you. So what's going on here? Well, studies come and studies go.

But when you look at the whole body of research, there is actually good evidence that eating chocolate and drinking wine and coffee are linked with reducing your risk of heart disease and increasing your likelihood of living longer. But the secret is, and it's not a real secret, that you have to consume these things, can everyone say it with me, in moderation. No, it's moderation. But what exactly is moderation? That's our last question for today. So we've looked at some of the biggest and most consistent research to find out.

And it turns out that drinking one or two glasses of wine a day has been associated in large, long-term studies with having a healthier heart, lower risk of heart attack and stroke, and a decreased risk of dying from all causes. But drink much more than a glass or two and all of those benefits turn into risks. That is, you're more likely to get heart disease and die relative to someone who doesn't drink at all.

And what about coffee? Well, a study of around 400,000 people and an analysis of a bunch of studies involving almost a million people found that drinking three or four cups of coffee a day has been linked to lowering your risk of heart disease and increasing your likelihood of living longer. Yeah, four glasses. Go above that, up to five cups or more a day, and just like wine, coffee actually increases the risk of coronary heart disease.

As for chocolate, a large UK study found that around 25 grams of chocolate per day had a lower risk, people who ate 25 grams had a lower risk of heart disease than those who didn't eat any chocolate at all. 25 grams actually isn lower risk of heart disease than those who didn't eat any chocolate at all. 25 grams actually isn't that much. In the office we were like, woohoo, and then we were like, meh. So we think this stuff does have benefits, and we don't know the exact mechanism as to why chocolate, wine and coffee might be good for you.

Maybe it is the antioxidants, maybe it is the sirtuins, maybe it's both, maybe it's none of them. And this is science, so, of course, there's another complicating factor. Given that these recommendations are averages based on big populations and everyone is different, Bruce, who's pushing 90, is pretty philosophical about all of these diets. Oh, well, there are always fads. Humans go through fads of this and fads of that, so I wouldn't worry too much about it. And Bruce says that even science has fads.

So you just want to always be checking your ideas against the evidence and changing when you need to. And after that? And after that, enjoy life. That's science versus red wine, coffee and chocolate. Enjoy, just don't get carried away. That was the stage show. I hope you liked it. And just a quick update here.

So in the last week, reports have been coming out that another celebrity is on the Sirt Food diet. Pippa Middleton. If you don't know who she is, neither did I. Someone related to something royalty. Anyway, she's on the diet to lose weight for her wedding. And so we wanted to tell you a little bit more about the Sirtfood diet. And that is that apart from eating these quote unquote Sirtfoods, it also involves severely restricting how many calories that you eat for the first week of being on the diet. Now, diets like this that ask you to severely cut your calorie intake are kind of known as fasting diets, and they've recently been touted as having a whole lot of benefits, not just for losing weight, for weddings, but people say they will stave off aging and even stop cancer.

But we're going to explore the science of fasting in a future episode of Science Versus. Oh, come on. Also, I wanted to say thank you so much to all of the people who signed up as Gimlet members after our episode on abortion last week. We really, really appreciate it. And as a little bit of thank you, we'll be sending out the Q&A that happened after this live show just to members. So if you're not a member, you can easily become one. Head to gimletmedia.com and click join. It's just $5 a month, which is pretty much one fancy New York coffee a month to support good quality journalism. Anyway, thank you very much. Now, roll the credits.

This episode has been produced by me, Heather Rogers, Diane Wu and Shruti Ravindran. Our senior producer is Caitlin Sori. Edited by Annie Rose Strasser, fact-checking by Diane Wu and Ben Kebrick. Sound design and music production by Matthew Boll and mixed by Austin Thompson and Bobby Lord. Original music written by Bobby Lord. Extra thanks to Martin Peralta, Rachel Ward, Eric Mennell and the Bell House. And in our live show, we use these amazing pictures of General Sir Chewan rallying his army, which were created by Alice Lay. Head to our Facebook page, facebook.com slash science vs

podcast to have a look. Coming up next week, science versus true love. Are we really meant to be with one person for our entire lives? Why don't you have a piece of fruit? And I said, I don't feel like having fruit. He says, have a piece of fruit. And there was this ring box. So I opened it and there was the engagement ring with a nice sized diamond. And I said, hmm, this is pretty good. I'm Wendy Zuckerman.

Back to you next time.