Why You Shouldn’t Waste Your Time and Money On Supplements
A while ago, when I was working as a employee wellness coordinator, I got a call from a sales rep from a “nutraceuticals” company. He was pitching a partnership in which he would come to my workplace and scan our employees to measure the levels of antioxidants in their skin. If their scan found a low antioxidant level, they could buy the company’s antioxidant supplement. How convenient!
I’ve always been very skeptical of supplements. The claims are just too good to be true. When I got the call from this sales rep, I did more research and ended up having a long email exchange with him about their products.
Here’s what I found out.
The Supplement Sales Pitch
In my first email reply, I asked for some evidence of how the scanner works and for the efficacy of antioxidant supplements for health outcomes. The sales rep sent me a couple of press releases, a study done by the company itself (a big red flag), and his personal experience with taking the supplements.
His own scan had showed a low reading, but after taking the supplements for a few months his skin antioxidant levels reached the “green” zone.
That definitely wasn’t enough to convince me, so I looked up some research on my own.
The Whole Supplement Industry Is Based On A Very Shaky Foundation
There is a very, very short list of supplements with credible evidence to back them up. Folic acid during pregnancy to reduce the risk of neural tube defects is one. Melatonin and ginger also have some convincing evidence, and fish oil might be useful for cardiovascular disease, although the research there is mixed.
What about the hundreds of other supplements on the shelves of your local GNC? In the majority of studies, supplements don’t do anything. No effect.
The few studies that do find an effect, like the one that sales rep sent me, are sometimes conducted by the supplement company itself. Of course they have a vested interest in finding positive results. Often the company itself doesn’t conduct the study but does either fund it or pay the researchers.
An industry funded study isn’t necessarily an issue, but I always take it into account when reading research. Whenever you read a study, look for the disclosure or conflict of interest statement. It’s usually at the end of the paper before the reference section.
While most supplements don’t seem to have an effect either way, there are some cases where supplements actually increase health risks. For example, studies have found that taking high doses of Vitamin A, Vitamin B3, antioxidant mixtures, beta-carotene, and Vitamin E were associated with increased risks of cancers or premature death.
If you want an overview of the research on a particular supplement, Examine.com is a good place to start. You can also check the Dietary Supplement Fact Sheets from the National Institutes of Health.
Why Supplements Don’t Work
Nutrition science is incredibly complicated. It’s kind of shocking how little we actually know about how the things in our food affects our health.
Because food, and human beings, and the relationship between food and human beings, is so complex, nutrition science tries to distill it down to small, manageable parts. The basic idea is to isolate specific nutrients and then manipulate them and see what they do to our health.
This has been the strategy for decades – if we can figure out the nutrient that causes poor health (saturated fat, or cholesterol, or sugar, or sodium), we can just convince people to eat less of that nutrient and that will solve their health problems.
It hasn’t worked. Public health organizations have been telling people to eat low-fat (and low-cholesterol, and low-sodium) since the 1950s, and are we any healthier for it?
Maybe we’ve just focused on the wrong nutrient. Maybe, as many people now believe, fat wasn’t the enemy all along, it was carbs. The low-carb movement has also been around for decades.
Robert Atkins published his book on the Atkins diet in 1972, and recently the low-carb craze has exploded again… and guess what? We still have incredibly high levels of chronic disease.
It’s the same story with micronutrients. According to the supplement industry, you can take pills or powders with specific vitamins, minerals, and other compounds, and that will make up for any nutritional deficiency you might have. Easy, right? As we’ve already seen, that doesn’t work to improve health either.
The Problem With The Single-Nutrient Approach
As great as it would be if you could improve your health simply by taking a multivitamin or an antioxidant supplement, that’s just not how the human body works. Your body needs a lot of different nutrients to support normal body functioning and keep you healthy.
First, there are the three macronutrients: carbohydrates, fat, and protein. Thirteen essential vitamins have been identified along with about a dozen major minerals. Then there are the phytochemicals, substances like carotenoids and polyphenols which are chemicals found in plants that have certain effects on the human body. Several of these have antioxidant effects.
These chemicals are also found in animal products (when they come from an animal product like meat, eggs, seafood, or dairy, they’re called zoochemicals). Tens of thousands of phytochemicals have been discovered, and so far we only know what a very small number of them do.
What we do know is that these substances are found in whole foods, especially minimally processed foods like whole vegetables, fruits, beans, nuts, whole grains, etc.
We also know that people who eat a diet high in those foods tend to be healthier and at lower risk of chronic diseases like cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, and cancers, as well as having lower body weight and better mental health and well-being.
If the nutrients in fruits and vegetables improve your health, why wouldn’t those same nutrients work if you take them as a supplement? It’s probably because a vegetable or fruit is much more than the sum of its parts.
A whole food has dozens of compounds that work together. The way your body uses those nutrients in incredibly complicated and intricate, and many of them need each other in order to do their jobs.
A certain vitamin might only be absorbed when another vitamin is also in the circulation. A phytochemical might only be able to reach its target destination because the fiber in the food slows digestion so that it doesn’t get destroyed or absorbed too soon.
Sometimes too much of one vitamin or mineral can block the action of another one. That can be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on the situation.
None of the substances in our foods work alone, they are a team. A good team gets the job done when it has all the members it needs, and when those team members have varied and complimentary skills and can work together to achieve their goals.
In an office, that means everyone, even the underappreciated assistants, janitors, and “behind-the-scenes” workers contribute to the success of the business. Try to stack the deck with flashy executives and salespeople and you might be ok for a while, but your business will eventually break down without support staff.
With supplements, you get a single vitamin, mineral, or antioxidant (or sometimes a combination of two or three). You don’t get dozens of compounds working together in the right proportions like you do in whole foods, and that’s why taking an antioxidant supplement is not the same as eating whole veggies and fruits full of antioxidants.
What’s The Harm In Taking A Supplement?
I think the research is pretty clear that the vast majority of supplements don’t work. The logic of why they don’t work also makes sense, even if scientists haven’t figured out all the details yet.
But this sales rep still tried to convince me that letting him sell supplements at my workplace was a good idea.
The reality, he said, is that most people don’t get the recommended serving of fruits, vegetables, and other whole foods. So why don’t we do something practical and realistic by helping people avoid nutrient deficiencies through supplements. What’s the harm in taking a supplement as an insurance policy, just in case?
I think that argument definitely resonates with people. While some people might believe the overhyped benefits marketed by supplement companies, I think many more people understand that the claims are too good to be true, but think “I might as well take one anyway, just in case”.
It doesn’t seem like there would be any harm, except for the expense. If you can afford it, why not, right?
I actually think there are a few reasons why you shouldn’t take supplements, even if you’re not concerned about wasting your money.
More isn’t always better.
High doses of certain vitamins can actually increase the risk of health problems, like the ones in the studies I mentioned earlier in this article. Some supplements can interact with medications and cause problems. In some cases, like ephedra, people have actually died from taking a supplement.
Supplements aren’t regulated.
In the U.S., most supplements are never evaluated and approved by the FDA. In fact, the FDA doesn’t review supplements at all before they go to market. They only get involved after issues are reported, if ever. That means the supplement industry basically operates on the honor system.
It’s almost impossible to know for sure what’s in a product you’re taking, and there are cases of supplements containing much less (or much more) of an ingredient than they claim, and even containing things that aren’t listed on ingredient labels at all. That can be dangerous.
Shortcuts discourage people from doing the things that are actually healthy.
My biggest problem with supplements is that they’re marketed as a shortcut and a quick fix. If you opt to take a shortcut, you’re less likely to do the harder things that will actually make a difference to your health.
I think you should only turn to supplements when you’re doing all the major things right:
Eating mostly whole, minimally processed foods each day:
2 servings of whole grains
A source of protein with each meal
Healthy fats
Limiting ultra-processed foods
Keeping portion sizes under control
Balancing meals
If you’re already doing all this, then you can consider taking a supplement to fill in a nutrient gap (like one that’s been diagnosed by a doctor), but in that case you wouldn’t have many gaps to fill.
Even the sales rep admitted that supplements can’t replace a healthy diet. He also said that supplement companies don’t try to market their products as a substitute for whole foods. I have to call B.S. on that.
If someone’s scan found a low antioxidant level, do you think that sales rep would tell the person to start by eating more fruits and vegetables?
Of course not. He would be showing them the supplement brochure the minute the scan was over.
In my years of experience working in the health and fitness industry, I’ve seen the shortcut mentality many, many times.
Sometimes I’ll ask a client to replace some of the refined grains in their diet with whole grains or add whole vegetables or fruits to some of their existing meals.
They’ll come up with a long list of reasons why they can’t do that, and then tell me they take a multivitamin or meal replacement so it’s ok because they’ll still get their nutrients.
It’s not necessarily their fault – the supplement industry does a great job of marketing their products so these people don’t realize that they’re doing the wrong thing.
What Should You Do Instead Of Taking A Supplement
If you want good health, you need to build an effective team of nutrients from the foods you choose to eat. You do that not by focusing on one trendy nutrient at a time, you do it by stocking your body with as many varied nutrients from as many varied whole food sources as possible.
So how do you make sure you have all the nutrients you need in the right amounts and combinations? It’s really simple. Eat whole, minimally processed foods.
Humans have been eating whole foods for thousands of years. Our bodies have evolved alongside our food sources to be able to use the nutrients they give us, in the amounts and combinations they contain, to make our bodies work properly.
If you eat a variety of whole, minimally processed foods, the details take care of themselves, and you really don’t have to worry about specific nutrients or expensive supplements.
As for the sales rep, after several emails we decided to agree to disagree on the effectiveness of supplements in general, and I turned down his offer to come to my work and try to scam, oh sorry, I mean “scan” us.
If You Need Help
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