Antioxidant supplements in exercise: worse than useless?

authors report that very large doses of antioxidant vitamins do not prevent the exercise-induced adaptive responses of muscle mitochondria, GLUT4, and insulin action to exercise. As clearly stated in the paper, their data disagree with those reported by three independent research groups from Germany (14), Australia (17), and Spain (4). Using a significantly different experimental protocol regard-ing exercise training intensity and duration, antioxidant sup-plementation (doses and types of antioxidants), and molecular parameters analyzed (mRNA vs. protein levels), Higashida et al. compared their data with ours and came to exactly the opposite conclusions, i.e., that antioxidant vitamin supplemen-tation does not have an inhibitory effect on the adaptive responses of skeletal muscle to exercise. Regarding our study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (4), we