Wendy Ouriel
You can’t fool mother nature and there is no trick to a billion years of evolution. Despite advances in medicine and technology, your biology hasn’t changed much, and biology doesn’t know what year it is. This means that you cannot replace a pill for a healthy lifestyle, and it also means that vitamin/mineral supplements are ineffective and can make you unhealthy in the long run.
I believe the foundation of the supplement industry is based on a massive delusion that healthy eating (and the resulting diseases that result from a poor diet) is something that can be avoided if you’re cunning enough. There’s a certain level of magical thinking involved with this kind of thing, and it makes people think that healthy eating is just an inconvenience for those who aren’t smart enough to pick the right cocktail of pills at the grocery store.
During my research, I had to read many published studies on nutrition, disease, genetics, and evolution. While studying evolution, we learned about a common myth and why it is untrue. The myth is that evolution always moves towards perfection. For example, we like to think that evolution weeds out “bad” or “weak” genes and allows “good” or “strong” genes to survive, and with each generation we are finessed toward a more perfect species.
Evolution as a perfection mechanism is false. If evolution moved towards perfection, dinosaurs such as e.g Deinonychus (represented as Velociraptor in the Jurassic Park series), which was a fierce, intelligent and master hunter, would have survived while a gentler, weaker, less intelligent animal like the green turtle would have died out. But what ultimately happened is that the environment during the Jurassic period favored the green turtle’s genes that allowed it to survive and did not favor Deinonychus, which caused it and other dinosaurs to become extinct.
We also learned about the inefficiency of human biology. And it is absolutely ineffective when unnatural things are introduced into our body. Our bodies have spent millions of years evolving in a natural world, only recently have we been exposed to synthetic, man-made materials. And consequently, our bodies are not made to incorporate unnatural things and still function efficiently.
And this is why supplements mostly don’t work. Our bodies were engineered through evolution by natural selection to get our nutrition from food. Not from a pill. And when we try to get our nutrition from pills, our bodies just don’t know what to do with them and just discard them as waste.
For visualization, we are trying to run Mac OS 10 software on a pocket calculator from 1971. It doesn’t work, there is only so much a pocket calculator can do and the rest of the information is lost and unused.
The reason supplements are a problem is because most people use them instead of a healthy diet. And there’s always an excuse not to eat healthy in America. Or people take unnecessary medication that causes them to be deficient in a certain vitamin or mineral, and instead of going off their pills and eating a healthy diet (which might eliminate the health problem that requires the medication in the first place) they just take more pills. But regardless of the excuse or reason for maintaining an unhealthy lifestyle, eventually trading food for pills will catch up with you.
For example, Lieberman et al. (2017) tested the claim that gingko biloba supplementation could improve liver function and found that people who took the supplement saw less improvement than those who just decided to stop drinking as much alcohol.
A collection of eighteen studies with 2019862 participants and 18363326 person-years of follow-up found that multivitamin and mineral supplementation did not improve cardiovascular outcomes in the general population (Kim et al., 2018).
Gray et al., (2008) found that taking vitamin C and vitamin E did not reduce the incidence of Alzheimer’s disease.
No free lunch
Finding that supplements have no ability to improve health may just cause some to shrug their shoulders and say, well, it couldn’t hurt to take them just in case. However, research has found that supplement use could cause real health problems.
Studies have found the following risks associated with supplement use
1. Calcium supplements have no beneficial effect in reducing osteoporosis but will actually cause cardiovascular blockages and disease.
2. Vitamin C in supplement form acts as a pro-oxidant and can cause atherosclerosis and cardiovascular disease. Vitamin C supplementation in pregnant women has also been associated with low birth weight of their newborn babies. Other studies have linked vitamin C supplements to periodontal disease, a higher risk of cataracts, and an increased risk of developing calcium kidney stones.
3. Multivitamin use and increased risk of colon cancer
Fraud and manipulation in the supplement industry
Marcus, DM, & Grollman, AP (2012) discussed in their research on supplements and their consequences how the lack of oversight in the supplement industry has led to contamination of vitamin supplements with prescription drugs and heavy metals. According to the US Food and Drug Administration, which governs the supplement industry in the United States, dietary supplement manufacturers are not required to provide evidence of safety or effectiveness before marketing or, prior to 2007, to report adverse reactions. And increased supplement consumption has also been accompanied by reports of serious side effects due to supplement contamination.
What makes the adulteration and lack of regulation in supplements worse is that it is common for doctors to recommend supplements to their patients who have very serious illnesses such as cancer. Despite the large number of trials that have been initiated, the FDA has not yet approved any dietary supplement or food to prevent cancer, inhibit its growth, or prevent its recurrence (Paller et al., 2016).
Further studies have found that supplement advertising is mostly based on false claims that have never been substantiated by any scientific studies. Avery et al. (2009) in examining the health claims made by supplement companies in their advertising found that supplement companies would associate their supplement with serious ailments and diseases and in advertising use subtle but persuasive language that their supplements would cure such diseases, which is prohibited by the FDA. The authors of this report found that such supplement claims create confusion in interpretation and potential public health concerns. Their advertising will also include claims that a product is “scientifically proven” or “guaranteed” to cure a disease, which is largely unsubstantiated by the clinical literature. Advertisements bearing externally validating seals of approval were particularly common, further acting as a manipulative advertising tool.
And as I’ve stated in previous Mask of Vanity articles, there is no such thing as “proven” in science, and clinical trials are largely a marketing tool to sell products.
What I do for my best skin
The only supplement I take is vitamin D3 because I believe the research conclusively shows that it is beneficial to health. Every other essential vitamin and mineral I need, I get from food. Research has shown time and time again that getting vitamins from supplements is no substitute for getting vitamins from food.
In the past, when I tried taking zinc, or manganese, or any other supplement to try to improve my skin, I either saw no benefit or saw a decrease in the quality of my skin. It wasn’t until I gave up these supplements and made sure I was drinking plenty of water, eating a balanced, mostly vegetarian diet with exercise and a proper skin care regimen that my skin looked better than ever.
There is no strange trick to health. There is no trick. There is no secret. What you have to do for health is simply not what you want to do. You just need to get your nutrition from real, wholesome foods. It’s really that simple, it’s been done for millions of years.
Wendy Ouriel is the author of this article, a cell biologist by research and background and the CEO of OUMERE.
bibliographical references
Avery, RJ, Eisenberg, MD, & Cantor, JH (2017). An examination of structure-function claims in US dietary supplement advertising: 2003–2009. Preventive Medicine, 97, 86-92.
Baxmann, AC, De OG Mendonca, C., & Heilberg, IP (2003). Effect of vitamin C supplementation on urinary oxalate and pH in calcium stone forming patients. International kidney, 63(3), 1066-1071.
Kim, J., Choi, J., Kwon, SY, McEvoy, JW, Blaha, MJ, Blumenthal, RS, … & Michos, ED (2018). Association of multivitamin and mineral supplementation and cardiovascular disease risk: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Circulation: Cardiovascular quality and outcomes, 11(7), e004224.
Gray, SL, Anderson, ML, Crane, PK, Breitner, JC, McCormick, W., Bowen, JD, … & Larson, E. (2008). Use of antioxidant vitamin supplements and risk of dementia or Alzheimer’s disease in older adults. Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, 56(2), 291-295.
Lee, DH, Folsom, AR, Harnack, L., Halliwell, B., & Jacobs Jr, DR (2004). Does supplemental vitamin C increase cardiovascular disease risk in women with diabetes?. The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 80(5), 1194-1200.
Lieberman, HR, Kellogg, MD, Fulgoni III, VL, & Agarwal, S. (2017). Moderate doses of commercial Ginkgo biloba preparations do not alter markers of liver function, but moderate alcohol intake does: A new approach to identify and quantify biomarkers of dietary supplement ‘adverse effects’. Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology, 8445-53.
Marcus, DM, & Grollman, AP (2012). The consequences of ineffective regulation of dietary supplements. Archives of internal medicine, 172(13), 1035-1036.
Nishida, M., Grossi, SG, Dunford, RG, Ho, AW, Trevisan, M., & Genco, RJ (2000). Dietary vitamin C and risk of periodontal disease. Periodontology, 71(8), 1215-1223.
Paik, JM, Curhan, GC, Sun, Q., Rexrode, KM, Manson, JE, Rimm, EB, & Taylor, EN (2014). Calcium supplement intake and risk of cardiovascular disease in women. Osteoporosis International, 25(8), 2047-2056.
Paller, CJ, Denmeade, SR, & Carducci, MA (2016). Challenges of conducting clinical trials of natural products to fight cancer. Clinical Advances in Hematology and Oncology: H&O, 14(6), 447.
Poston, L., Briley, AL, Seed, PT, Kelly, FJ, Shennan, AH, and Vitamins in Pre-eclampsia (VIP) Consortium Trial. (2006). Vitamin C and vitamin E in pregnant women at risk of preeclampsia (VIP trial): randomized placebo-controlled trial. The Lancet, 367(9517), 1145-1154.
Rautiainen, S., Lindblad, BE, Morgenstern, R., & Wolk, A. (2010). Vitamin C supplementation and age-related cataract risk: a population-based prospective cohort study in women. The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 91(2), 487-493.
