What’s everyone’s opinion on taking supplements like a daily vitamin, glucosamine, fish oil, calcium, protein shakes, single vitamins like C, D, E, etc? Lately, I’ve seen all kinds of different supplements like raspberry and cinnamon - not even sure what they’re supposed to do.
My last doctor said don’t bother unless you have a health issue. If you’re relatively healthy it’s just a waste of money.
My husband takes all kinds of crap every day. I take a fiber gummy chew once in the morning and once in the evening - that’s it. He complains of aches and pains, stomach issues, etc. I feel fine all the time. So I wonder if he’d feel worse if he didn’t take his daily concoctions and if I’m just lucky…so far and am just blessed with better genes.
Although opinions are widespread, the concensus is that you’re essentially pissing your money away. Unless, as you mention, there is a specific diagnosis to be treated.
The bottom line: few “dietary supplements” actually have value for most of the population, and poor government regulation means it’s difficult to trust what the label says.
My doctor put me on Iron and Vitamin D for 5 months. My blood work improved, hemoglobin went back to normal. He had me stop.
Iron gives you the shits. I didn’t have a firm BM for the entire five months. I told the Doc and he smiled and said patients tell him that all the time.
I see the Doc again in a few weeks. I’m really hoping my blood work will be ok. I don’t want to get back on iron.
If your diet is sufficiently terrible, then a multivitamin each day might not be a bad idea. But a better option is to just eat a non-terrible diet to begin with.
Meanwhile, there’s almost no regulation on what products are allowed to call themselves “supplements”. I could go out and scrape up some dirt from my mom’s backyard, and legally sell it as a “supplement”. Given an environment like that, you’d expect that the vast majority of them would be worthless garbage, and a fair number would be actively harmful, and that is in fact exactly what you find.
I always thought the claim that because the industry is unregulated, therefore its products are worthless was a silly argument.
Most non-food products available for sale are also completely unregulated, yet most of the products I’ve purchased over the course of my life have performed pretty much as I expected.
I take a gummy multivitamin every day because I don’t allow myself candy anymore and it’s a guilt free dose of gummy goodness. Also my diet is shit (I can’t cook and mostly subsist off of deli food of negligible variety), but seriously, it’s the candy thing.
I took a one a day vitamin/mineral for years and it was just a habit. I said that on another thread here and a few members said I was wasting my money and to go to some legitimate medical and science sites and read up on it. I did and my ignorance was fought.
I take a vitamin D pill once a day under doctors orders and my wife feeds me healthy foods.
65 years old and feel good.
When I was a child, there were still piles of tailings around the hand-dug well in our yard. I used to like digging through the different colored “dirt”, and there were some patches of a bright white material that I know now was kaolin. I don’t know how deep I’d need to dig to find that, but thereisamarketforit.
The argument is that you don’t know whether they are worthless or not. Since supplement makers don’t know that their stuff works, because they don’t test it, you don’t either. You also don’t know what kind of crap gets into the supplements because good process control costs money that eats into profits.
If your lightbulb doesn’t work, you know it right away. Not so with supplements.
We can know whether a particular supplement works based on studies, hence, QtM’s statement regarding vitamin D.
We can buy from long time supplement companies with good reputation that does there own third-party testing and shares the analyses with the public. Also, third party companies do testing of bigger companies’ supplements without their request and share with the public for a fee or free.
^ We should also check labels for USP verification (not just on vitamins, but other supps such as Omega-3). Alan Aragon is a well-respected nutrition researcher:
Vitamin D and multivitamins are probably fine - though it appears that multivitamins don’t really do us a lot of good. More esoteric supplements haven’t been tested, not to the level of drugs (the companies can’t afford to) and are a lot riskier.
If you have the expertise to read and understand the reports, fine. My wife is a biologist and a medical writer. She does. We don’t take supplements beyond Calcium and and a multi-vitamin, and that more out of habit.
I’m definitely not saying that all supplements are evil. Lots are iffy.
I never implied that you said all supplements are evil. Not sure why you quoted me to say the above. My statements were based on what I quoted of you.
Regarding multivitamins not doing “us” a lot of good, that depends on who the individual is. There are good reasons to take a multi or individual nutrients, omega-3 for instance, based on individual factors.