I was reading an article about the best single supplement that experts in their fields take every day. The list was good. Turmeric in your coffee to help with inflammation. Vitamin D for people living in a northern climate. Probiotics and prebiotics to help balance the gut. And then one expert decided that all his colleagues (why is it always a guy?) were wrong and that nobody should take any supplements, ever.
Can we put this in context?
The entire supplement industry in the U.S. is $42 billion or maybe it's just $31 billion or maybe that's how big the global market is growing in the next three years. Anyway, who cares if the numbers are off by billions, it's enormous!
Or is it? We spend $2 billion in the U.S. on Oreo cookies last year, not cookies, just Oreos.
We spent $36 billion at McDonalds. Not all fast food, just McDonalds.
And in 2018 we spent $253 billion on soft drinks in the U.S. $32 billion on Coke alone.
Now, I'm not saying that spending all that money on carbonated sugar beverages is bad. If you want to rot your teeth and thin your bones, it's your choice. Heck, you can eat at McDonald's until you go blind like this teenager. That's fine. But my point is that we spend far more on worsening our health than we do on trying to make our health better. (We've also got more gyms than anywhere else in the world, but that doesn't mean we're using them.)
The worst thing you can say about supplements is that they are expensive urine. But I want to point out that the alternative (keeping all those vitamins in your body forever) would by lethal. Your body is meant to excrete things once they're used up.
In comparison, the worst thing you can say about the $107 billion dollars people in the U.S. spend on tobacco is that it will kill you.
Taking supplements is a gamble (U.S. citizens gamble away $900 billion a year). They may not help you. But I can guarantee that the chances of them helping you are higher than your chances of winning the lottery, which cost U.S. citizens $70 billion back in 2014.
But the angry expert did not stop with just saying supplements were a waste of money. He said they were bad for you. When giving evidence for his opinion, the expert cited - not a study, but an editorial. That's literally using someone else's opinion as your authority. And if you read their opinion, it's pretty wishy-washy. Yes, they say that healthy, well-nourished patients don't benefit from supplements. Good luck finding those people in the U.S. Most of us can barely drag ourselves from the couch into the kitchen. But even the negative opinion writers couldn't agree on whether vitamin D was good or not.
Now, does that mean the angry expert was wrong? Maybe.
Even if you don't have a "no supplement" axe to grind, it's pretty clear that healthy, well fed people don't need supplements. But anyone with a chronic disease might benefit. In a recent analysis of high blood pressure, people with chronic disease did show a benefit from taking a multivitamin. Pregnant mothers benefit from extra folic acid for their babies. An analysis of different supplements found that some lowered colon cancer risk.
So while supplements may not help you, there is no real evidence of harm. None of the major studies support that opinion. There are a few well-publicized studies that show specific supplements may harm particular groups of patients. The key word is may, and only in very specific groups. We need follow up studies to really show if the supplements did anything wrong.
When I've asked people like that angry expert why they're so bent out of shape, they say that they don't want people to waste their money. To this I reply:
I absolutely agree. Don't spend your food money or your rent money on supplements. But feel free to spend your cigarette money, your gambling money, your soft drink money, and your fast food money on supplements. Until we spend more on supplements than we do on tobacco, I think the ire of the critics is misdirected. Enough is enough. Let people spend their pocket money on harmless pills instead of cancer sticks.
Can we put this in context?
The entire supplement industry in the U.S. is $42 billion or maybe it's just $31 billion or maybe that's how big the global market is growing in the next three years. Anyway, who cares if the numbers are off by billions, it's enormous!
Or is it? We spend $2 billion in the U.S. on Oreo cookies last year, not cookies, just Oreos.
We spent $36 billion at McDonalds. Not all fast food, just McDonalds.
And in 2018 we spent $253 billion on soft drinks in the U.S. $32 billion on Coke alone.
Now, I'm not saying that spending all that money on carbonated sugar beverages is bad. If you want to rot your teeth and thin your bones, it's your choice. Heck, you can eat at McDonald's until you go blind like this teenager. That's fine. But my point is that we spend far more on worsening our health than we do on trying to make our health better. (We've also got more gyms than anywhere else in the world, but that doesn't mean we're using them.)
The worst thing you can say about supplements is that they are expensive urine. But I want to point out that the alternative (keeping all those vitamins in your body forever) would by lethal. Your body is meant to excrete things once they're used up.
In comparison, the worst thing you can say about the $107 billion dollars people in the U.S. spend on tobacco is that it will kill you.
Taking supplements is a gamble (U.S. citizens gamble away $900 billion a year). They may not help you. But I can guarantee that the chances of them helping you are higher than your chances of winning the lottery, which cost U.S. citizens $70 billion back in 2014.
But the angry expert did not stop with just saying supplements were a waste of money. He said they were bad for you. When giving evidence for his opinion, the expert cited - not a study, but an editorial. That's literally using someone else's opinion as your authority. And if you read their opinion, it's pretty wishy-washy. Yes, they say that healthy, well-nourished patients don't benefit from supplements. Good luck finding those people in the U.S. Most of us can barely drag ourselves from the couch into the kitchen. But even the negative opinion writers couldn't agree on whether vitamin D was good or not.
Now, does that mean the angry expert was wrong? Maybe.
Even if you don't have a "no supplement" axe to grind, it's pretty clear that healthy, well fed people don't need supplements. But anyone with a chronic disease might benefit. In a recent analysis of high blood pressure, people with chronic disease did show a benefit from taking a multivitamin. Pregnant mothers benefit from extra folic acid for their babies. An analysis of different supplements found that some lowered colon cancer risk.
So while supplements may not help you, there is no real evidence of harm. None of the major studies support that opinion. There are a few well-publicized studies that show specific supplements may harm particular groups of patients. The key word is may, and only in very specific groups. We need follow up studies to really show if the supplements did anything wrong.
When I've asked people like that angry expert why they're so bent out of shape, they say that they don't want people to waste their money. To this I reply:
I absolutely agree. Don't spend your food money or your rent money on supplements. But feel free to spend your cigarette money, your gambling money, your soft drink money, and your fast food money on supplements. Until we spend more on supplements than we do on tobacco, I think the ire of the critics is misdirected. Enough is enough. Let people spend their pocket money on harmless pills instead of cancer sticks.
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