Where to Get Reliable Vitamin & Supplement Information Online
A lot of my patients and friends look for health information online. It can be a great resource, but winnowing out the real information from amongst the deluge of marketing messages can be pretty tough. In particular, the vitamin and nutritional supplement makers are relentless marketers. And it works (for them). Billions of dollars a year are spent on supplements that are anywhere from useless to risky. And consumers are generally encouraged to take massive doses of supplements based on the flimsiest of research.
- Just because a particular molecule found in your body is important for your health doesn’t mean that taking it orally will be of any benefit. (It may not even survive intact through your digestive system and your liver.)
- More isn’t necessarily better. In fact, it usually isn’t.
- Many vendors push pills based on “research” that did not involve actually taking the products they are selling.
- A lot of research used to sell supplements is based on tiny, poorly designed studies that never get substantiated by additional studies. In fact, a series of follow-up studies may give opposite results, but the marketers aren’t going to tell you about those.
- The top results you see when searching on the Internet will typically be those pages with the biggest marketing budgets behind them – probably not your most reliable source of information.So what’s a person to do? Check out this post for some good sources to research health information:
I addressed this issue in some of the questions that have come in, and posted the results on another page that I’ll link to below. I hope you find the resources mentioned to be of value to you.
Click for reliable online resources about vitamins & nutritional supplements
