A Little Bit More: Are Dietary Supplements Worth It?

Are you considering taking dietary supplements on your health quest? If you’re vigorously nodding, you ain’t alone! But are supplements safe and effective?

Dietary supplements: What you need to know

Basics

Dietary supplements include vitamins, minerals, probiotics, herbs, and amino acids. They come in many forms — like pills, powders, liquids, and bars — that you can eat or drink.

Many people take dietary supplements to fill in the nutritional gaps in their diet. Others supplement in hopes of preventing disease or achieving specific wellness goals.

The evidence on whether dietary supplements are effective is mixed.

Benefits

Supplementing may help you by:

• providing nutrients you can’t get from your diet
• increasing your levels of nutrients if you have deficiencies
• supporting overall and specific wellness goals
• complementing mainstream medical treatment plans
• offering alternative therapeutic options

Risks

On the other hand, dietary supplements may:

• interact with medications
• worsen existing health conditions
• cause side effects or allergic reactions
• complicate surgery
• lead to new — potentially serious — health issues

More than half of all American adults use supplements on the regular (and the percentage soars as we age). Given that dietary supplements might be part of your self-care strategy, ya might wanna know if they’ll help you reach your desired outcomes, such as boosting overall well-being or warding off illness.

Or will they just make your pee rainbow-colored and expensive? Worse, could dietary supplements be harmful to you? We popped the capsule of truth to let you know what’s what.

Benefits of dietary supplements

Let’s take a look at what dietary supplements may do for you — and whether they live up to that potential.

Dietary supplement benefits

There’s a huge variety of dietary supplements on the market — from vitamin A to zinc and everything in between — that aim to address a spectrum of health conditions.

We’re going to lump them into three categories:

• Providing general wellness support. This is your litany of multimineral + multivitamin formulas, probiotics, etc. Maybe you’d take these daily to cover for a less-than-stellar diet/sleep regimen/fitness plan. These don’t target particular health issues, instead aiming to boost day-to-day physical and mental well-being.
• Addressing specific health issues. You might take a supplement regimen with a specific health objective. For example, maybe you down some calcium + vitamin D to improve bone health. Or, to get real specific, folks with age-related macular degeneration might take a combination of vitamins C and E, zinc, copper, lutein, and zeaxanthin (aka AREDS) to slow down vision loss.
• Preventing illness or injury. Instead of using supplements to help with an existing issue, you may consider them a preventive measure. This, too, might mean taking a certain supplement for a specific reason. For instance, pregnant people often take folate or folic acid supplements to lower the risk of certain fetal development issues.

In a nutshell, there are countless dietary supplements that may yield benefits for an equally countless number of physical and mental health concerns. Buuuuuuut…

Efficacy of dietary supplements

Oh, wow, now this is a doozy of a topic. To put it mildly, effectiveness of dietary supplements is… inconclusive.

Observational studies vs. controlled trials

The number and quality of studies on dietary supplements is pretty uneven.

Many existing studies are observational, meaning that the researchers didn’t use any control groups. This could render the findings a bit skewed. Controlled randomized studies often generate results that are totally different from those of observational studies.

Certain celebrity supplements — like magnesium and potassium — have enjoyed being the subject of much research, so there’s a lot more hard data available to analyze on those.

Other supplements (the up-and-comers) don’t necessarily have loads of studies backing them, so there are still pretty big question marks about their effectiveness.

Clearly, we could all benefit from continued investigation of the effects of supplements.

When can’t you get nutrients from your diet?

Getting your nutrients from a healthful, well-balanced diet can be way more effective than getting them from supplements. (Plus, it could be cheaper and tastier!)

But certain groups of people can’t get the nutrients they need through diet alone for a variety of reasons, so supplements may be essential.

Dietary restrictions may lead to nutrient deficiency in some people (vegans, for example). An inability to fully absorb B12 from food as we age (which might be due to low stomach acid levels) or increased nutrient needs seen in hypermetabolic states like cancer might also be responsible.

Whatever the cause, supplements can plug these gaps in nutritional intake.

Supplements can also be really helpful for correcting a vitamin D deficiency. This type of deficiency is super common, and vitamin D doesn’t pop up in many foods. Vitamin D deficiency is much more common in people with obesity and people with certain health conditions.

So, unless you’re getting ample sunshine and are in perfect health, you have a pretty good chance of developing low vitamin D levels or a full-on deficiency.

Common meds — including certain types of birth control, metformin, and statins — can also deplete nutrients in your body. This can make it hard to get optimal amounts through your diet alone.