I think when it comes to health and supplements, you have to be willing to consider all points of view with an open mind, and not grow overly attached to any one opinion or position, because new research could come out tomorrow that completely contradicts whatever you thought you knew. When health is at stake there is no room for ego or pride.
Funkodyssey,
This is especially effective if one reads and attempts to make decisions based upon one's own interpretation of the primary literature in conjunction with some background in biochemistry (attainable fairly easily for motivated folks with no prior exposure -- a few semesters at community college and a willingness to dig into Stryer, say. I've seen it done.)
What's bothersome for me are articles like the Scientific American (SA) one noted above. Unfortunately, SA is for-profit, unlike peer reviewed journals, and, even ore significant, they need to couch their offerings to have the highest probability of doing the greatest good for the largest segment of the public. This leads to the same sorts of conclusions we've seen year after year from SA wrt to intervention in the aging process or, if you prefer, "alterations in structure and function at the cellular-, tissue-, organ- and organ system-level over time." They consistently filter, set up paper tigers they can easily defeat (such as secondary pop literature on 'anti-aging'), and quote selectively from 'experts' who, since they are speaking to a very wide audience via SA, will naturally want to craft their response to 'first do no harm'. Their conclusions in primary publications, or in publications intended for consumption by other experts, may be quite different.
The primary literature, when peer reviewed and published in good journals (Korean Cloning scandal aside) is the only place the data can *speak for itself*. One need not even read the conclusions voiced by the authors. Unfortunately, most motivated individuals who achieve and understanding and willingness to read the primary literature will be limited to abstracts at www.pubmed.org. Access to the complete article via a university library is probably not feasible for most. This leads to difficulty in rationalizing apparently disparate conclusions, as the abstracts can often be pretty sparse on detail, or even misleading.
Fortunately, networks like *this* exist, where some folks who have access to primary electronic journals can attempt to support and clarify, making your position above, even stronger and more workable.
Again, unfortunately, most folks I know take their cue from newspapers, and other tertiary sources, and are hopelessly misled and suffer from a lag of years wrt their "data" sources, as "consensus" views wrt public good aren't very useful for fine tuning approaches to radical life extension.
So, more power to folks like us who attempt to stay on the edge, and not buy into a theme set forth by the pop anti-aging person of the day, or the pop molecule of the day, like Resveratrol. I'm still optimistic and not terribly concerned about low level consumption of Resveratrol, or, if I am, it's only to the extent that we take risk with any supplement (a la the Beta Carotene 'scandal') that hasn't seen decade long clinical trials. Yet we all know these studies won't happen for most of what we consume, as there's less and less funding for science in the public domain; most will be patentable molecules via for-profit pharma, which I'm for, but it only addresses the underlying causes of aging, so far, indirectly (metformin, say, and type-2 diabetes). There is also risk that increasing control over public domain molecules will be exerted, as seen, say, in the case submitted to FDA for pyridoxamine (pending). Years back, there was even talk of patenting Melatonin; a terrible precedent that fortunately failed. Still, we see that bills before congress to restrict access to hormones might prevent access to a wide array of molecular classes, including DHEA [Pardon the digression.
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So, supplementing has inherent risk, which as noted above, needs to be evaluated wrt potential reward as assessed by a review of the primary literature rather than interviews with experts, or secondary literature like SA.
