well..
that doesn't seem right, clearly. the science around anti-oxidants is not in question, the question with things like flavonoids is whether you can actually absorb them or not.
here's my hunch about that: if you give people multivitamins, and insist they rely on them for nutrient requirements, what's likely going to happen is that they're going to end up deficient in the vitamin that they're being tested for because they're just going to piss it out.
so, yeah - somebody that relies on a daily multivitamin or chemical supplementation may end up showing increased risk for certain disease, but it could very well be because they're actually deficient due to relying on the multivitamin and not getting enough through the course of the day.
that said, it's worth pointing out that the studies they've done have very explicitly tested whether vitamin e can undo the effects of smoking. the anti-vitamin people forget to tell you that. so, no - vitamin e is not an antidote to smoking. but, that does not mean that high doses of vitamin e will cause cancer, it just means it won't protect against other known risk factors. the real point of these studies was consistently about the dangers of smoking and pollution, not about the dangers of vitamins. but, we know who runs the world, right?
that said, as mentioned, there doesn't seem to be any evidence to overdo it with much of anything except c. c won't cure your cold on it's own, but it will sure help. besides glucose, it's probably the most important chemical in your body. there's no real reason to take a pill when it's so readily available in food, but it's really the only thing you should be looking at extremely high intakes of - just so long as you stagger it. and, if you have to take pills, take smaller ones 2-3x times a day instead of big ones once a day.
what we've learned, what we can say for certain, is that we're not evolved to store vitamins like we once thought we were; we don't store most of them at all, and the ones that we do store are only stored for a few days at a time. what that means is that you need to eat small, frequent meals - or take small, frequent supplements.