Should you stack lots of supplements together to work synergistically or should you try one supplement at a time, in order to confirm whether or not it has benefits?
This is a difficult decision to make since both strategies have their pros and cons.
Supplements don’t work like medication, although they can have strong direct effects, their use is in the their name. They supplement your diet with necessary vitamins, minerals and chemical compounds that are beneficial to the body.
In this regard, they can’t be considered as an isolated treatment, they work together with the rest of what your body intakes to provide a sort of soup of nourishment. Stacking supplements that work together well is a common strategy because many supplements rely on others to allow the body to process them.
For example, Vitamin D uses the body’s reserves of magnesium to activate in the liver and kidneys to convert into calcitriol. Magnesium is also used to transport Vitamin D across cell membranes. It also works synergistically with Vitamin D to maintain bone health. Excessive intake of Vitamin D can deplete the magnesium levels in the body, disrupting magnesium homeostasis within cells. It’s essential to balance out many of the different necessary vitamins you consume because an imbalance can lead to negative outcomes.
Many supplement companies recognise this, and produce their own “complexes”, a set of ingredients that work well to combat specific symptoms, such as concentration, mood, heart health, eye health, etc. The most common complex is the well known “multi-vitamin”, which throws together all the necessary vitamins the body needs into one (usually large) tablet. For some time, doctors have scoffed at multi-vitamins, often calling them expensive urine, since the majority of the vitamins in these tablets is unused and expelled in people’s urine, often causing it turn a vibrant orange or yellow due to the high amounts of Vitamin B2 & B12 included in multivitamins. Scientists have generally worked out a recommended daily intake for vitamins, and in normal circumstances, you would get this from a well balanced diet.
However due to the poor modern diet and the emergence of widespread chronic illness, multi-vitamins have been an incredibly popular product for people to support their health with. The daily intake values for each vitamin in the multi-vitamin are often many times the recommended daily value, this is not dangerous because these are water-soluble vitamins, where the excessive amounts will simply be processed by the kidneys for expelling. The reason that multi-vitamins use a much higher amount than the recommended daily values is because if a person does have a deficiency in a particular vitamin, they generally need a much higher does than the recommended to rectify their deficiency. Various amounts are also required to offset other vitamin values, such as Vitamin C and Magnesium which are used more frequently by the body to process other vitamins.
The obvious downside to stacking supplements together, is whether it’s a waste of money and whether you suffer bad side effects. You simply can’t know which of the many ingredients are beneficial to you and which aren’t. Especially if you get a mixed reaction from a “complex” of different ingredients in one tablet.
That said, there are some supplement stacks that are well proven to work together well, and it makes no sense to try each supplement individually when there are hundreds to trial and limited time to try them all.
