What do dietary supplements generally refer to?

The dietary supplements we often talk about are essentially oral products with the core purpose of supplementing vitamins, minerals, and bioactive ingredients from animal and plant sources. They can neither replace three meals a day, nor have they any disease treatment effect.

For example, the lutein you buy to eat when you stay up late scrolling through your mobile phone, the calcium tablets you buy for leg cramps after sitting for a long time, the folic acid your doctor ordered you to take when you were pregnant, even the protein powder that fitness parties often drink, and the melatonin that people stay up late to stock up on. As long as these nutritional supplement products are registered in compliance with regulations, they all fall into the category of dietary supplements.

Many people tend to confuse it with ordinary health care products and medicines. When I helped my mother screen the "joint miracle medicine" recommended by her square dancing friend, I checked it carefully. Any supplement that claims to cure diseases is false. Regular supplements will have a clear warning on the outer packaging that "cannot replace drug treatment." Most of the dietary supplements that are compliant in my country now belong to the health food category with the blue hat logo, but not all blue hat products are supplements. Those functional health products that focus on "regulating immunity" and "assisting in lowering blood lipids" are only considered if their core function is to fill nutritional gaps.

To be honest, dietary supplements are like emergency power banks for mobile phones. Eating three normal meals with nutritious and balanced meals is like plugging in and charging every day. There is no need for them at all.； But if you eat takeout every day and don’t get enough vegetables, vegetarians are deficient in B12, and the elderly lose calcium quickly, supplementing as needed at this time can indeed make up for the dietary gap, which is better than struggling with malnutrition.

However, the use of supplements has always been controversial. Many experts in the field of nutrition believe that ordinary people do not need to spend such wasteful money as long as they eat a balanced diet. Some studies even show that blindly supplementing excessive amounts of fat-soluble vitamins will increase the burden on the liver and kidneys.； Some clinicians also pointed out that the dietary structure of office workers is generally unbalanced. The benefits of appropriate supplementation with multivitamins outweigh the disadvantages. There is currently no completely unified conclusion. There are friends around me who stock up on more than a dozen bottles of multivitamins, fish oil, and probiotics and take them every day. In fact, it is really unnecessary. If you are not sure what you are lacking, go to the nutrition department to do a simple evaluation before making a choice. It is much more reliable than buying blindly from Internet celebrities.