Are antioxidants, polyphenols, and phytonutrients something to really pay attention to?

So in some of the reading I was doing it was using phytonutrients and antioxidants interchangeable and in others highlighting difference so I am not exactly sure if they are the exact same or different lol But putting that aside, this area of food science when it comes to individual nutrition and well being is it important to do a lot of inclusion in diets in regards to this if you have the funds? Or is the science just not fully developed enough and stick to the big macros and vitamins/minerals and such?

Answer

Hot take.

Antioxidants are overrated and have not been demonstrated to be benifit humans in most cases. Supplementation even increases all cause mortality in humans.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7766648/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3765487/

You will find association studies between antioxidant levels benefiting, but that just means eating plants has benifits, not nessassirly antioxidants.

https://academic.oup.com/advances/article/9/6/701/5103922

Still plenty of reasons to eat plants, and some phytocompounds have benifits outside of antioxidant properties. Just IMO people focus on antioxidant activity because it sounds reasonable that it be beneficial to combat ROS (which is a component of nearly every disease) but there are a lot of missing steps in that logic.