magic pill or health cure

The number of dietary supplements offered is growing every year. It would seem that this is a simple solution: throw the pills in your mouth, pour water over them and go live your life, and you don’t have to do anything else. They also promise to help you lose weight – how can you pass by? Is everything so simple and safe in this approach to health? People wonder when they encounter the consequences.

My name is Ekaterina Sergey. I am a nutritionist, health & medical coach, expert in hormonal regulation of metabolism. Speaker at healthy lifestyle events for IT companies and banks. I am guided by an evidence-based approach.

As a health professional, I often receive offers to attend healthy lifestyle events. That's how I got to the presentation of “New Generation Dietary Supplements”. I went to understand how these “magic pills” get to people who want to be healthy. I listened to the speaker and waited for the question session. What came out of it, read on.

Dietary supplements and drugs: what's the difference

The first block talked about how important it is for vitamins and minerals to enter the human body every day. I don’t argue with that, it’s important. But then the host of the event said that “only dietary supplements completely cover the daily norms of vitamins and minerals.” And here is the first stop.

Let me remind you that there are dietary supplements and medicinal preparations. The same zinc, calcium and vitamin D are found in both forms. Only there is a global difference between them:

Dietary supplements are tested only for safety, from the point of view of “is it poison?” There are no studies on their effect on the body if taken over a long period of time and in different dosages. Let me clarify – studies with a sufficient level of accuracy. The experiment “8 weeks on 3 mice” does not suit us. The dietologist who prescribed you 100500 jars does not bear any responsibility for the consequences of taking dietary supplements.

The drugs undergo clinical trials. Thanks to them, we know the optimal dosage, the effects at different intervals of use, side effects, which drugs can be combined with and which cannot. How to use them with food, after or during, and we assess the risks of taking the drug. If something happens to people because of the drug, both the doctor and the pharmaceutical company that released it are responsible. Criminal, including.

This is the question about safety that I asked. Of course, the presenter smoothly veered off topic – evading responsibility is so common.

Tales of Raw Materials

In the next block they told us that the raw materials for dietary supplements are grown in “pristine fields” that are not fertilized, herbicides, or pesticides are not used. After all, this is what scares people about ordinary vegetables and fruits that are available in stores or at the market.

It seems like an interesting fairy tale, if you don’t understand ecology. But they were unlucky. I defended a project on ecology in front of professors when I was 17. And I am very familiar with such a concept as the ecology of the Earth. To put it briefly, everything in the world is interconnected. If vegetables and fruits for the production of dietary supplements are grown in China and the USA, and in most cases this is the case, then they are no different from vegetables and fruits from these countries in stores and on the market.

Remember the scandal with the Kyoto Protocol on reducing emissions of pollutants into the atmosphere. Some countries signed it, others did not. It is possible to stop or at least reduce air pollution only if all countries comply with it, and not as is happening now.

When I asked how they achieve such a content of substances in the raw materials, no one answered, and asked the next question. This is done by ordinary agronomy: fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides to preserve and increase the harvest. They are also not worth fearing, but we will talk about this another time. If they had answered, then the fairy tale about “clean fields” would have been forgotten immediately.

Section Three or What's the Innovation?

Here we focused on antagonist substances that prevent each other from being absorbed. Let me remind you that there are no “pure” or mono-products. Each product contains vitamins and minerals, but in different quantities. A person is not able to eat such a quantity of products in a day as to prevent all the substances from another product from being absorbed. There will be losses, but not as terrible as you are told. The absorption of substances is influenced by more factors than knowing whether they are antagonists or not. There is no guarantee of 100% absorption of substances. Losses are compensated when the diet is balanced.

The innovation was to use microgranules with bran in powder form. The microgranules would end up in the same place as the food, and to this question the presenter answered that in the end it was “of course, unimportant.”

Dietary supplements and consequences: where dreams lead

Amid increased demand for dietary supplements, large-scale studies were conducted in 2022, which showed that the number of patients who need a liver transplant due to taking herbal and nutritional supplements, the very same dietary supplements we talked about, has increased 8-fold over the past 10 years – from 2.9% to 24.1%.

Here we have counted only the most severe cases, when it is already impossible to save and help an organ that has a rare property of regeneration – restoration, and a transplant is required. If we take all the cases where the liver was damaged by taking dietary supplements, then the overall picture looks many times worse.

I would like to point out that the liver was not damaged by taking medications that were prescribed to patients to treat complex or fatal diseases such as epilepsy, tuberculosis, HIV, etc. In these cases, a person has no choice and is forced to take medications to live. These are cases where people voluntarily took supplements to lose weight and improve their quality of life. “Get clean, lose weight, build muscle” and other tempting and life-saving promises.

If you think, “I’ll just drink herbal tea and nothing will happen to me,” then you’re also wrong. A number of herbs and their combinations are known to be toxic to the liver, as confirmed by research in 2021. Among them are 79 herbs and plant compounds that are often found in dietary supplements. For example, green tea extract, skullcap, senna and aloe vera are not as harmless as we are led to believe. 10.4% of cases of liver damage from herbal teas ended in death. So, if you take capsules “to improve metabolism” with green tea extract, you risk being in the 1.5% of people who will eventually develop chronic liver damage. In my practice, there was a case when, after visiting badologists, a woman got treatment in time and then came to me to remove the jars from her life.

It’s interesting how people who are afraid of gluten, dairy products, added sugar and believe that vegetables and fruits in stores are poisoned (remember the stories about “clean fields”) so calmly swallow capsules whose composition does not undergo any control.

People want to find a “magic pill” that will solve their problems. This is how dietary supplements are presented: buy, drink and be healthy. But the body is not so simple, millions of processes occur in it. It is impossible to calculate and write them in the form of a program code, where a pill will fix a bug. Vitamins and minerals are important for the health of the body. But also fiber, proteins, fats and carbohydrates. The body is a system where everything is interconnected. Do not look for “magic pills”, but work on your lifestyle and nutrition.

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