Anti-Oxidant Nutrients in Integrative Healing

The following excerpt taken from Lester Packer’s bestselling book The Anti Oxidant Miracle is actually already twenty years old as it was written in 1992, but it hits the point home that I am trying to make, and elegantly; more elegantly perhaps than most of the more recent publications. After all, throughout his teaching and writing career at Packer Labs at the University of California in Berkeley, Lester Packer was and still is worldwide the leading authority on anti oxidant nutrients. He is an eloquent speaker, yet very matter of fact, and so is his writing. Very few scientists share the same communicative abilities, and with these, he can teach us much. Unfortunately, too few doctors know about his work – or about the role of nutrition and micronutrients in maintaining health and preventing disease.

The fact is and increasingly so that, in the present day environment, the human body has to suffer the onslaught of more and more free radicals due to pollutants in air and water – and, the food that we eat. Although our life expectancy is higher than that of our forefathers, very often today, the quality of life drastically diminishes in our waning years. We do not really live longer, in the true sense of the word – in many cases we only vegetate longer.

However, with the right kind of preventive measures, it is now possible to live a long, high quality life in a strong vigorous body – as the ancient Greeks used to say’ “To die as young as possible as old as possible.” Which is definitely one of the goals that integrative medicine wants to achieve for its patients.

Given the amount of available data from research that has already been done, there is no explanation for the lack of knowledge in general medical circles, regarding the beneficial effects that anti oxidant nutrients have on the body in general, and on slowing down the aging process in the cells, in particular.

In June 1992, I helped organize a meeting of seventeen of the world’s leading scientists at the village of Saas Fee, Switzerland, where the air is crystal clear and the skiing is magnificent even in June. In that idyllic environment, this group of researchers, who have dedicated their professional lives to studying antioxidant and free radical biology, examined and celebrated some startling new discoveries about the role of anti oxidants and free radicals in the prevention and treatment of many chronic and degenerative diseases.

In the Saas Fee meeting, we studied the overwhelming body of evidence that shows that if used strategically, antioxidants can help maintain health and vigor well into our seventh, eighth and ninth decades, and perhaps even longer. With great excitement we listened, as our colleagues reported on groundbreaking research that will profoundly affect the way medicine will be practiced in the twenty-first century, which is right around the corner. Eager to generate greater scientific and public interest in the field of anti oxidants, eight of the conference participants (including me) composed and affixed our signatures to a document we called the “Saas Fee Declaration”. The essence of the declaration is that the scientific evidence that anti oxidants play a pivotal role in maintaining health and preventing disease is now overwhelming and incontrovertible, and that scientists, health care professionals and government have a duty to inform the public about this.

After the meeting, we circulated the “Saas Fee Declaration” among our colleagues around the world, and it has since been signed by hundreds of others. In fact, the response of the international scientific community has been so overwhelming that we have run out of room for signatures! I would like to share the “Saas Fee Declaration” with you here so that you can begin to understand what the excitement is all about.

Saas Fee Declaration

On the Significance of Anti oxidant Nutrients in Preventive Medicine

1. The intensive research on free radicals of the past fifteen years by scientists worldwide has lead to the statement in 1992 that anti oxidant nutrients may have major significance in the prevention of a number of diseases. These include cardiovascular and cerebrovascular disease, some forms of cancer, and several other disorders, many of which may be age-related.

2. There is now general agreement that there is a need for further work at the fundamental scientific level, as well as in large-scale randomized trials and in clinical medicine, which can be expected to lead to more precise information being made available.

3. The major objective of this work is the prevention of disease. This may be achieved by the use of anti oxidants, which are natural physiological substances. The strategy should be to achieve optimal intakes of these anti oxidant nutrients as part of preventive medicine.

4. It is quite clear that many environmental sources of free radicals exist […] such as forms of radiation, smog, dust and other atmospheric pollutants. The optimal intake of anti oxidants provides a preventive measure against these hazards.

5. There is a great need for improvement in public awareness of the potential preventive benefits of anti oxidant nutrient intake. There is overwhelming evidence that the anti oxidant nutrients such as vitamin E, vitamin C, carotenoids, alpha-lipoic acid, and others are safe even at high levels of intake.

6. Moreover, there is now substantial agreement that governmental agencies, health professionals and media should promote information transfer to the general public, particularly when evidence exists that benefits for human health and public expenditure are overwhelming.

Igor Afanas’ev, Moscow, Russia

Julie E. Burning, Harvard, USA

Anthony T. Diplock, London, England

Charles H. Hennekens, Harvard,USA

Bodo Kucklinski, Rostock, Germany

Mathilde Maiorino, Padua, Italy,

Lester Packer, Berkeley, USA

Mulchand S. Patel, Cleveland, USA

Karlhinz Schmidt, Tuebingen, Germany