So what happens when a person over-consumes antioxidants? In the short term, usually nothing. How about for weeks? Decent chance of leaving oneself open to catching a cold of some sort, or becoming sensitive to allergens, or picking up some type of acne. The immune system is being suppressed, in orders of 70% or more.
During this time, is the person eating sugar? This acts as chaff and distractions to the immune system, further deferring its usefulness, while invaders feast on those same sugars, increasing their virulence. Getting sick in some form is inevitable. Maybe the person "feels fine" while nefarious microorganisms build their compounds.
Allow such a scenario to play out over a much longer period of time. Like a heart attack or stroke, something is going to give - the start of a cascade failure. In modern times, we're all familiar with AIDS/HIV. It's a virus that continually strips away the immune system, and we know that's a bad thing, almost certainly resulting in death.
So when a person's immune system is chronically being suppressed, a man out is the same as a man dead, figuratively speaking. If the immune fighters, the white blood cells (leukocytes), are impaired, unable to kill the microorganism invaders with their oxidative burst, the net effect of CHAOS runs parallel to the net effect of HIV.
Thus, while CHAOS is generally, unwittingly, self-induced, late stages can cause significant host damage that may require heavy duty treatment to resolve. Simply removing antioxidants from the diet is not sufficient at that point, because the immune system has been damaged. Augmentation by top-shelf antibiotics is highly desirable, particularly in the classes of vancomycin, itraconazole, posaconazole, linezolid, and intravenous voriconazole.
Exercise during this period is not recommended due to the downregulating of oxidative bursts (while upregulating WBCs), leaving a person more open to pathogenic attack. Sexual activity may add a slight advantage as NK cell activity increases. Full and extra sleep is highly recommended to manufacture sufficient cytokines, another extremely important factor in combating infection.
Due to the hardly known (traditionally) concept of antioxidative stress, the concept of CHAOS is currently sparsely limited to a niche subset of medical scientists. However, because suppression levels vary from trivial to moderate to extreme, the resulting effects encompass a wide spectrum of overlying conditions among a vast clinical base - meaning, many millions of people are likely affected by this situation in some degree, while many thousands of others are meeting their fate due to misunderstandings of the underlying condition.
How unfortunate.
