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Today’s Health Upgrade

• The truth about supplementing with antioxidants

• Is intense exercise bad for your heart?

• Adam’s Corner: The permit year

Fact Or Fiction
Will Antioxidants Help You Prevent Cancer And Live Longer?

Studies suggest that people who eat a lot of produce get less cancer and live longer. And fruits and vegetables are loaded with antioxidants. So the theory went, if you bottle the antioxidants, then you bottle the benefit. It’s why many people take vitamin C or E and assume it will offer similar protection.

Researchers tested that idea, and the findings aren’t what many people expected.

If you take vitamin C, vitamin E, or beta-carotene pills to live longer or prevent cancer, a review of randomized controlled trials found no benefit, and some supplements slightly increased risk.

A Cochrane review went through 78 randomized trials involving nearly 300,000 people, most of whom were healthy. The trials lasted anywhere from one month to 12 years and tested vitamin C, vitamin E, beta-carotene, vitamin A, and selenium.

None of the supplements helped people live longer. When researchers narrowed the analysis to the 56 highest-quality trials, beta-carotene and vitamin E performed slightly worse than placebo. 

To be clear, the difference was small (about a 3 to 5 percent increase in relative risk). Still, the result pointed in the wrong direction.

And it wasn’t just that one analysis. The SELECT trial looked at 35,000 men, and those taking 400 IU of vitamin E per day developed 76 prostate cancers per 1,000 men, compared with 65 per 1,000 in the placebo group. 

That works out to 11 additional cases per 1,000 men over seven years. That also does not mean Vitamin E causes cancer. But it does suggest that taking antioxidants is not inherently protective.

Some researchers believe that free radicals aren’t simply waste products to eliminate. In normal amounts, they help cells communicate, repair damage, and adapt to stress, including exercise. 

Large doses of isolated antioxidants may interfere with those signals. That mechanism remains a theory, however. The trials showed what happened, but they didn’t test or prove why.

And none of this makes fruits and vegetables any less valuable. Food contains fiber, vitamins, minerals, and thousands of compounds that interact in ways a single nutrient in a capsule can’t reproduce.

This evidence applies to antioxidant supplements, especially high-dose versions. It doesn’t apply to the vitamins naturally found in food, and it doesn’t settle the separate question of whether multivitamins are useful.

So if you megadose antioxidants, a better bet is to get them naturally through your diet. 

Fitness
Don’t Let AFib Headlines Scare You Away From Hard Exercise

It’s easy to understand why someone might hesitate to push harder during exercise. Stories about endurance athletes developing abnormal heart rhythms make caution sound sensible.

But unless your doctor has given you specific limits, treating intensity as dangerous is likely to steer you away from something that overwhelmingly protects your heart.

The most recent fear was triggered when a new study suggested that higher fitness was associated with a small increase in atrial fibrillation. 

But that buried the real story: exercise was also linked to a larger reduction in heart attacks, heart failure, stroke, and other cardiovascular disease. 

And when you look at the study, and the endless research on exercise, the overall case for exercise remains firmly positive.

In the most recent study, researchers measured the fitness of more than 1 million men using a maximal bike test, then followed their health records for up to 50 years. They also compared more than 470,000 brothers with different fitness levels, which helped account for some of the genetics and upbringing they shared.

The fitter men were slightly more likely to develop atrial fibrillation, or AFib, an irregular heartbeat that begins in the heart’s upper chambers. But the risk was still very low (about 4 percent).

The bigger takeaway was exercise's protective effect.

Heart attacks, heart failure, and strokes were more than twice as common overall, and higher fitness was associated with a larger reduction in those conditions than the relative increase in AFib. 

The study can’t explain why fitness might raise AFib risk because researchers didn’t examine changes inside the heart. Other research offers a possible explanation: training can make the heart larger and more efficient, slowing its resting rate and slightly stretching the upper chambers. Those adaptations may also make an irregular rhythm a little more likely. 

And when the researchers compared brothers, the association with AFib weakened, suggesting that family factors may explain part of the link previously blamed on fitness.

Despite the headlines, the study offers strong reassurance for everyone worried that hard exercise is quietly damaging their heart.

If your doctor has given you restrictions, then follow those. And if you have a persistent fluttering or irregular heartbeat, get it checked. Otherwise, a small association with AFib isn’t a good reason to hold back from becoming fitter.

Adam’s Corner
The Permit Year

My wife and I spent the drive to our anniversary dinner looking back.

When you get married, you have dreams and visions of what will happen, but you don’t know what you’ll meet along the way.

For us, we reflected on 15 years of marriage, which meant talking about our jobs, our homes, and our three kids who changed everything.

I've never thought of marriage as easy. It’s work, and it’s worth it.

You're two people who keep growing and evolving, while life piles on stress that can pull anyone apart. We've always been committed to the effort it takes to make ours great, and by the time we sat down, fifteen years felt like proof the work had paid off.

Then our waiter said something as a joke. And it was funny, but it changed how I thought about the journey of marriage, and really, the journey of anything you invest in. 

He told us we were in the permit year of our marriage. Next year, we'll finally get our license.

All the way to dinner, we added up how far we'd come. In a passing comment meant as humor, our waiter measured it against how much road was left, and our marriage suddenly looked a lot younger than it had in the car.

The Perspective Of Time

When I got my driver’s permit, I felt like my whole life was ahead of me. And getting a license meant everything was about to open up.

Time plays tricks on you when you’re younger, and it keeps playing them no matter how old you get. 

A stressful week can feel like it will never end. A single year can feel like a lifetime. At fifteen, a year was a fifteenth of everything I'd ever lived, so of course it felt enormous.

Kids are the easiest place to see the illusion. A baby's first year is the one everyone marvels at because the changes are impossible to miss. The years that follow change a kid just as much, often more when you add them up, but they happen too gradually to notice while you're living them. I see it with my kids.

But compare a 1-year-old to a 2-year-old, and the growth is unreal. Compare a 5-year-old to a 10-year-old, and they’re not the same person in almost any way. 

Then compare 10 to 20, and the jumps are impossible to deny.

We can see it in age, maturity, and growth. 

But why do we struggle to see it in the things we do, the goals we set, and the challenges we want to overcome?

Tell someone they need to spend 20 years to become great at something, and many will quit before they start. 

After the waiter’s comment, I’m starting to think the permit year provides perspective that can help us persist, especially when frustrated.

Years ago, researchers at the National Institutes of Health put cameras and sensors in the cars of Virginia teenagers and followed them from their learner's permit through their first year of driving alone. 

With a parent in the passenger seat, the teens drove about as safely as the adults did. In the three months after they got their license, their rate of crashes and near misses was eight times higher than in their last three months on a permit.

That's one small study, but it lines up with decades of insurance data showing the first months after licensure are the riskiest stretch for a new driver.

Kids pass a test and think they are great. But once they are alone, they are nowhere near as good as they think.

A license doesn't certify that you can drive. It lets you keep learning without anyone in the passenger seat.

Most of what we care about works like this, and we rarely treat it that way. 

Just look at a common health frustration. You might take 20 years to arrive at a weight where you finally say, “Enough!” And then you want it all gone in 4 weeks.

And the same thing happens with job promotions, relationships, and personal growth.

When your progress doesn't happen on schedule or to your expectations, it's easy to decide we're doing something wrong. Sometimes we are. Often, you need more time.

You might feel old in age or in effort. But relative to the time it takes to become great, we are just infants, impatient and unaware of our own infancy. 

Embrace The Apprenticeship

Time is hard to appreciate.

When we are younger, we want it to speed up. When we are older, we want it to slow down. But a second is a second, and none of us know how much time we get. 

The real task is learning to appreciate the moments we’re in, and however much time it takes to accomplish whatever it is you’re chasing, because one day, you’ll wish there was more of it. 

I've also watched enough people run out of time and studied death and regrets to wonder what I think I'd gain by rushing. 

Aging is a privilege, and so is the time it takes. 

People regret a lot of things at the end. Not appreciating the time they got is one of them, and that includes the years spent as an apprentice, learning and struggling and figuring it out.

I think many of us would find more peace, joy, and patience if we appreciated life's apprenticeship.

It’s not that you won’t reach your goal, or the weight won’t come off, or the relationship won’t get better, or the raise and promotion won’t happen. 

You’re still learning to master the things that help it all click so more good happens in your favor. 

If you quit while you’re an apprentice, you never get to experience the benefits of being a master.

Mastery is something you earn, and it rarely (if ever) comes quickly or easily. 

And when you quit, you ultimately end up starting over with something else where, once again, you’re an apprentice. Or, even worse, you sit on the sidelines and let life pass you by.

When something in your life feels stuck, it can help to ask how old it is.

A year of consistent lifting isn’t even a learner's permit. It’s more like learning to walk. And no one who just figured out how to walk gets to drive. 

The same goes for six months of cooking your own dinners, figuring out the nutrition that will fuel your body, or trying to build a new habit or quit an old one. In so many ways, you're still the kid driving without a parent for the first time. 

You’re supposed to make mistakes. You’re supposed to struggle. You’re supposed to embrace trial and error. 

But you’re not supposed to quit and abandon the experience and action that make you wiser and better. 

I know this from coaching people with their fitness, nutrition, and habits. It’s easy for me to see the road and path needed to help others. But it's easy to lose that perspective in my own life. 

Walking into dinner, fifteen years felt like a big accomplishment. And it is. 

Walking out, I felt like a teenager in my marriage. And that’s a good thing.

It helped me realize I’m still so young in most of the places that matter.

I have three kids, but I’m just 11 years old as a dad.  I’ve run and owned multiple businesses over the past 18 years, but as Co-CEO of The Pump Club, I’m only 3-years old. 

As a coach, I’ve been doing this now for 24 years. And as a writer, I’ve been getting paid for 26 years. But when I was in my mid-20s, I still knew almost nothing, and the whole world was in front of me.

The older I get, the more I think it’s a great place to be. Old enough to have perspective. Young enough in the journey to see how much room there is to grow.

We all spend our lives as apprentices at something. But too many quit before the good parts of mastery because we mistake being early for being bad. 

The next time the goal you're working on feels nowhere near where you thought it would be, check its age (and your effort and consistency) before you decide what that means. 

Even if you’ve been at it a while, you might just be in your permit year.

And that means despite your biological age, you're younger at it than you think. It also means your best years haven't happened yet. 

Hang in there long enough, and you’ll finally get to experience them. -AB

-Adam Bornstein is the co-founder and co-editor-in-chief of Arnold’s Pump Club

The Positive Corner of The Internet
About Arnold’s Pump Club Editorial Standards

We do things a bit differently here, starting with transparency.

1. The Content: All APC emails are researched, written, and fact-checked by the APC editors (see bottom of the email), with written contributions from Arnold (noted with “Arnold’s Corner”). Links take you to original studies (not second-hand sources).

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Publisher: Arnold Schwarzenegger​

Editors-in-chief: Adam Bornstein and Daniel Ketchell