How trustworthy are supplements?

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The global supplement market size was over $220 billion in 2022, and that’s a lot. More than 50% of adults report that they take supplements regularly for a multitude of reasons. But supplements have often been controversial for overstating their benefits with only weak data as evidence for their effectiveness.

The placebo effect can easily contribute to an improvement in health issues on its own, so in many cases what people might report as supplements being helpful could simply be the placebo effect at work. Obviously medical trials try to compare placebo with the supplement to test this, however medical trials for diet and health over a long term are notoriously hard to control for and are generally statistically weaker than more acute related studies.

Supplements as a market is relatively unregulated, especially compared to the medicine market. Supplements are considered a type of foodstuff rather than a medicine, which is a strange category to be in when people are taking supplements for medical issues. Of course, diet plays an important part in recovery from illness and health in general, and this is where supplement companies generally target their audience. People also take supplements for other reasons, for fitness, skincare or for preventative reasons.

But how can you trust a supplement company? From the manufacturing process to the ingredients, it’s often unclear how safe supplements are, especially in the long term. The balance of chemicals in the body is very hard to monitor and administer, yet people seemingly take large doses of vitamins and other compounds to target certain ailments, often trusting these companies who have specially marketed “health-related” names mainly based on just how professional the packaging looks.

Some of the supplement manufacturers produce certification on their website, to prove there are no heavy metals or other toxins in their supplements. However, this is fairly rare and most customers aren’t looking for this information.

There are a few supplement companies which have made a name for themselves as being trustworthy and these companies generally garner the most trust out of customers just based on the fact that the companies are so large. However without an independent, government-backed body to rigorously monitor and test supplements, supplement safety and effectiveness generally just comes down to belief in what’s marketed to you, word of mouth and trial and error.

If you compare supplements to medications, many might feel medications are similarly untrustworthy, especially with the plethora of warned side effects many medications warn of. But there is a framework of higher level testing and consideration with medications that generally makes them the preferred avenue for treatment. Supplements don’t have the same framework, therefore industry is more filled with charlatans and modern snake oil salesmen.

As a consumer, it feels like every supplement is a trial and error risk. In many cases, it makes more sense to just choose the particular food that would provide the supplement rather than overpaying for tablets, that might have less desirable fillers and ingredients added.

I personally have taken a very wide range of supplements over the years of my illness, although I’m still a long way from having tried everything on the market. So far, there hasn’t been anything that has made a long-lasting significant change to my chronic illness as whole. Even considering it’s very difficult to notice changes anyway, I generally have the viewpoint that supplements don’t make too much difference on their own. Supposing one supplement could improve your health by 1% if you took it every day for 6 months; it’s very difficult to evaluate a 1% improvement, especially since health varies so much based on the many variables of life such as mood, weather, activity, diet, and sleep etc.

My opinion is that some people might even need to find 10-20 supplements that all work to truly cause a momentum shift in their health, and realistically this needs to be done alongside other things such as exercise, diet, sleep, medication, physical therapy, mood improvement, social support and financial support. If everything comes together then I can see it as a worthwhile endeavor to pay for even expensive supplements; but if you think that a supplement on its own will cure you, you are likely going to be disappointed.