There has been a lot of talk about antioxidants, and how they supposedly improve one's health.
But most of the antioxidants that have been studied, have multiple mechanisms of action.

Substances that are just antioxidants and nothing more, are actually not that good for you. It is true, they prevent damage of your genetic material by free radicals. But by doing so, they also prevent the destruction of damaged cells.

So that means that many antioxidants actually increase the risk of cancer: cells get damaged all the time, with or without antioxidants, it happens anyway.

So that got me thinking...isn't it odd that there are substances that, like any other antioxidant, prevent damage to cells, but that also help killing off damaged cells?

Substances like resveratrol, pterostilbene, kaempferol, fisetine and quercetine?

And what do all these substances have in common?

They are present in fruits. Especially all kinds of berries, that grow all over the planet.

And people have been eating fruits for millions of years.
So maybe we have through millions of years of evolution, become adapted to eating berries.
Maybe we have somehow become so adapted that some substances, like these polyphenols, actually at some point became vital to our immune system.

Not like vitamins. Because you can live without berries. You don't immediately die if you stop eating them. But eating berries definately increases your life expectancy significantly.

There are all kinds of ways this could have happened.

It is not unlikely that substances like resveratrol where initially toxic to our ancestors. Many polyphenols are slightly toxic, and they often are still toxic to us now, when to much is taken.
Getting the necessary sugars from fresh berries may have outweighed the downside of eating slightly toxic berries.
And we may have, over thousands of generations, become immune to these toxins.
But weak, unhealthy cells, may lack this immunity.
So that the toxins now only kill our bad cells, while still acting as an antioxidant at the same time.

That's just an example of how this could have happened.
So anyway, my theory is that we have become so adapted to eating berries, that polyphenols in berries have become vital to our immune system and they actually can be seen as having a function. So in that sense they actually wóuld be a bit like vitamins then.

This kind of hypothesis has drifted through my mind too from time to time, that is, the idea that plant polyphenols are a kind of quasi-vitamin (and also that harmala alkaloids could be included in an even broader category, but let's rein this in for a moment).

Evolution goes both ways as well - if happy humans (or their evolutionary predecessors) were enjoying tasty, health-boosting fruit then this may well have been to the plants' advantage in terms of seed dispersal, nutrition from hominid urine and other detritus, and maybe even through the fructivores' active caring for and defence of their favourite trees/shrubs/vines etc.

I would suggest reading "Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm" by Stephen H. Buhner. It is suggested that intelligence and agency are a driving principle within nature and we humans (taken as a whole) would do well to remember that we exist and operate within a relationship with this living system, and systems of systems.

Yeah, i think this hypothesis probably applies to substances in other plants as well. Like cruciferous vegetables.

In general i think you can say that our bodies are very much optimized for a hunter gatherer lifestyle.

The life expectancy of people in industrialized nations may be higher than that of our hunter gatherer ancestors, but it would most likely be a mistake to conclude that the lifestyle of modern people is therefore a healthier one.

Things like dental hygiene, modern healthcare, vaccines, etc contribute a lot to our higher life expectancies.

But something like intermittent fasting for instance, is a pretty recent trent, and scientists that study health and aging say that it's good for almost anything, from preventing diabetes to cancer, age related diseases, etc.

But it's basically just:"not eating all of the time".

It's probably how our ancestors lived. Hunting and gathering does not supply you with the same abundance of food that we have today.
Our bodies are probably build for something like a meal a day.

Eating just one meal each day triggers the process of autophagy. And i think that's probably just an integral part of how cells are meant to function naturally: when there's an abundance of nutrients, cells try to absorb as much as they can, to grow, to multiply or to do what they're supposed to: building new connections, if they're nerve cells, produce enzymes or neurotransmitters if they're part of glands, etc.

But then, after the daily flow of nutrients has subsided, they start to cleanse themselves, remove malfunctioning parts, and waste. It's likely just a part of a natural cycle, just like sleeping.

So i think, eating all the time just interupts this natural process.

There are many misunderstandings about our ancestors. The raw food trent is an example of that. The hunter gatherers had fire for millions of years, and they also had pots.
The paleo diet is probably wrong on some accounts as well. We don't know in great detail what the diet of our ancestors looked like. Why would they have avoided grains, eggs and milk? Milk is the only product of those three that would have been realy rare for hunter gatherers to have acces to.

But the underlying assumption, that our bodies are build for a hunter gatherer lifestyle, sounds more than plausible to me.