lillo9546 wrote: ↑Thu Jun 01, 2023 2:54 am
what's your POV about supplements
This thread kinda died quickly, but I think there can be some conceptual "meat on the bone" to discuss beyond typical anecdotes/industry issues. A couple of thoughts to hopefully spur on that conversation, in no particular order:
1) Why supplement? A common perspective in certain nutrition/diet communities is something like "if you just ate a "good"/"healthy" diet, you'll get everything you need." Certainly, a lot of people could improve their diets. No argument there. But there is often a moral flavor to these arguments that brushes over some issues that aren't about personal responsibility. You could have a generally excellent diet quality, but have a SNP that dramatically affects certain vitamin/mineral levels. Or, for example, the soil quality of the farmland where your food is grown could be depleted of certain minerals, etc. Point being, there are often very good reasons to supplement that don't have to do with "you just eat a SAD diet- that is your problem." Some of those reasons, like soil depletion, might become even more compelling in the future.
2) How much to supplement? Hormesis is a concept that everyone would be better off familiarizing themselves with when it comes to biology. It is a gateway drug into thinking of metabolism as a system of chemical reactions. Balance is the point. Not too much, not too little. The wrinkle on top of this, though, is that some supplements can be safely dosed at high levels, some cannot (e.g. water vs fat soluble). That doesn't mean higher doses of those is "better", just "safer" than overdosing other things.
3) A statistical framework for supplementation? I personally do this. What are you most likely to be deficient in? What has the highest consequence if you are deficient? What has the lowest negative consequence if you supplement too much? This will vary from person to person, based on diet, genetics, activity levels, etc. I personally (read as: not in any way medical advice) supplement Vitamin D3, EPA/DHA, zinc/copper, B12, magnesium, and occasionally iron. It sounds like a lot, and even a decade ago I would probably have rolled my eyes if someone told me that. But I started each of these because they are actually quite common to be deficient in (different populations with different risk profiles), and they can be high consequence if you are deficient in them. (Also, these particularly happen to have a very large body of research on them.) I dose the supplements as
supplement to my diet. I am not looking to have supernatural levels; I am looking to stay away from deficiency/insufficiency. This strategy, to my thinking, gives the most bang for the buck. I'm probably in the ballpark of about a dollar a day or so for my supplementation.
4) Is it a realistic expectation to think you can be adequately informed about a given supplement? This sounds so obnoxiously arrogant, but is also a real issue. I have a Ph.D. in a biological field and have been reading peer-reviewed nutrition journal articles for decades now, and it's honestly difficult for me to decipher much of the nutrition research. Nutrition/metabolism is extremely complex. Add on top of that nutrition
science is extremely difficult to
perform and
interpret. Not all trials are equally well done. Not all meta-analyses are equally well done. Nuances in dosage/statistics/study design that
even the scientists running them don't fully grasp can be make-or-break in terms of outcome. This is a big factor in why I personally stick to the most common, most researched topics with the biggest effect sizes whenever possible. And then supplement in such a way that, if all that research is somehow wrong, my regimen isn't likely to do me harm.
Anyway, that is some of my POV, from someone who has slowly gone from "it's ridiculous to supplement" to "I think it can make an awful lot of sense, and I personally do it" over the last couple decades.