Most of us would almost certainly never have heard of either free radicals or antioxidants if a research chemist in California named Denham Harman had not, in 1945, read an article about ageing in his wife’s Ladies’ Home Journal and developed a theory that free radicals and antioxidants are at the heart of human ageing.12 Harman’s idea was never anything more than a hunch, and subsequent research proved it to be wrong, but nonetheless the idea has taken hold and will not go away. The sale of antioxidant supplements alone is now worth well over $2 billion a year. ‘It is a massive racket,’ David
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