Do you take vitamins or dietary supplements? Sure they’re working? Information is Beautiful has a wonderful chart that shows graphically the effectiveness of various dietary supplements. The chart shows me two major things: first, there’s way too much money spent on ineffective supplements and second, our diets are way out of whack if we’re needing (or even thing we’re needing) all these extras.
I’m personally in the camp of no supplements. Find the vitamins or supplements you are told you are lacking and find a real food that gives what you’re missing. 9 times out of 10 when it comes to food science they find down the road that they were wrong with the supplement and you need the whole food / whole diet to get the best effect. Plus why on earth would you take a green tea pill when green tea is so yummy
For a better look at why food science is constantly changing it’s mind when it comes to healthy and harmful ingredients (a lot of the time these are harmful ingredients food science introduced in the first place) and why isolating particular ingredients from foods might not provide all that you’re needing check out In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan.
Paul
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4 comments
Oli says:
Mar 30, 2010
Great posting, Paul. I’m in the camp on the other side of the mountain taking supplements. I think it really depends on the individual, I eat a very healthy daily diet and hit the gym regularly. I take multi vitamins to supplement the areas where I don’t get it during each day, it’s important for me to eat those foods rich in nutrients. Of course,I think it’s alright to take no supplements at all when you are already eating all those wonderful foods that’s bursting with those vitamins that taking it in a tablet can’t match up to. However, I do think it’s a waste of time for people to take supplements when they are not treating their bodies well and eating junk food in the first place.. what’s the point, right? it’s all or nothing. I like my supplements but i don’t preach to others about it, except to my husband. haha.
Marie says:
Apr 1, 2010
You’re missing the top of the chart!
I think sometimes supplements are helpful but we should try to get it through our regular healthy food intake. For instance, some people take garlic as a supplement when you could just eat a clove of garlic and get way more out of it. Sometimes the information is wrong and you can’t always believe what’s written on the labels either. Some garlic supplements were tested and the cheapest one was the better one, and even at that, a clove of garlic is much cheaper and gives you much more!
emma says:
Apr 5, 2010
Hi Paul, you might want to check out Food Rules, also by Michael Pollan, which distills all these complicated “food science” mumbo jumbo down into a set of real easy (and commonsensical!) “rules”. I so agree that we need to return to real food and not breakdown proper nutrition into complicated components to be taken in pills.
Paul says:
Apr 6, 2010
Yeah, we bought that one as well. Some funny rules that seem so obvious but actually hard to implement. The “shop at the periphery of the grocery store” bit is hard… at the grocery store I go to in Singapore that leaves me online one, sad little wall…