Anti-oxidant supplements are now generally believed to provide no real benefit, and might even have detrimental effects. See http://annals.org/article.aspx?arti

Anti-oxidant supplements are now generally believed to provide no real benefit, and might even have detrimental effects. See http://annals.org/article.aspx?articleid=709255 http://annals.org/article.aspx?articleid=709255 This research is about _supplements_, though. It doesn't say that it's a bad idea to consume vegetables and fruits where the anti-oxidants occur naturally, which is what OP was referring to. That said, the real gain of eating vegetables is probably not that they happen to contain anti-oxidants. Rather, they contain any number of things that are good to us which are hard to quantify individually but has been observed to do us good as a whole. To attribute the positive health effects of something as complex as an apple to a single class of components - such as anti-oxidants - is most likely cargo-cult science in its purest form.