Dr. Pickart, I have read many posts in which you recommend several antioxidants. Following your advices, I have very recently started taking MSM, Chelated Copper, ALA, Acetyl Carnitine and CoQ10, vitamin D every day that I do not spend at least 30 minutes in the sun.

I also took for some time a multivitamin but I stopped a couple of months ago after reading this paper:
"Antioxidants prevent health-promoting effects of physical exercise in humans" published in March 2009. (full text available here: http://www.pnas.org/content/ea...3485106.short?rss=1). It has also been widely referenced even if it is recent, so it sounds like it is pretty respectable.
That study basically suggests a bad impact of vitamin C and E, which would prevent people from getting the full benefits of physical exercise. Getting the same vitamins through diet did not interfere with the benefits from exercising.
The study is not directly focusing on the skin, but I believe the whole body should benefit from taking given supplements.
This is the bottom line of the study: " Taken together, we find that antioxidant supplements prevent the induction of molecular regulators of insulin sensitivity and endogenous antioxidant defense by physical exercise. Consistent with the concept of mitohormesis, we propose that transiently increased levels of oxidative stress reflect a potentially health-promoting process at least in regards to prevention of insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes mellitus."

What is your opinion about that?
My very first anti-aging strategy, which I started when I was 6 years old, is daily physical exercise. I am totally healthy and never had any health problems. Now I am 28 and I plan on continuing doing lots of exercise daily as long as I live, if possible. So it's very important for me to know that my daily effort with sports is not "ruined" by the intake of multivitamins. I eat very healthy and I have been reading many books about healthy eating but of course the doses of vitamins in the supplements in some cases can't be reached daily through diet alone. So I'm torn between taking or not taking multivitamin supplements, in particular vitamin C and E, which were the focus of that study.
Thanks for any opinion!

There are some problems with this study.

They studied young men. But as we age, our antioxidant defenses drop sharply. So we may need more antioxidants.

Also, the study measured protein markers. But they should also have measured actual increases in endurance with and without the supplements.

Primates such as Chimps are very similar to humans. They and very activity physically and take in huge amounts of vitamin C and vitamin E each day from their diet. Linus Pauling estimated that humans would need to take 5 grams of vitamin C daily to match the Chimps.

It is always good to check what the researchers actually did against their actual experiments. 15 years ago, many gerontologists recommended avoiding exercise because it might speed oxidation of the tissues. Now the advice is totally different and 1 to 2 hours of exercise is said to slow aging and convert DNA activity into functioning more like that of a younger person.