What are dietary supplements?

The regular dietary supplements we come into contact with every day basically cover the aspects of supplementing essential nutrients for the human body, natural animal and plant extracts, and active ingredients with specific functions. They range from vitamin C tablets that cost a few yuan a bottle in drugstores to deep-sea fish oil and NMN that cost thousands of yuan. They all fall into this category. They are not all the ridiculously expensive "foreign health care products" that everyone thinks.

A while ago, I went to the drugstore with my elderly family members to buy calcium. Calcium carbonate D3 tablets and calcium citrate gummies were displayed in the most conspicuous places on the shelf. There were also active folic acid commonly eaten by girls preparing for pregnancy, iron supplements for people with iron deficiency anemia as prescribed by the doctor, and multivitamins that many people take daily. They are all the most basic necessities. Nutrient supplements are the category with the most sufficient clinical evidence and the least controversy at present. To put it bluntly, you do not eat enough nutrients in daily meals and rely on supplements to quickly make up for it. For example, folic acid taken during pregnancy has been clearly proven to reduce the risk of fetal neural tube defects and is a recommended category.

If you visit more imported health supermarkets or watch live health specials, you will encounter a bunch of categories with names that sound "efficacious", such as grape seed extract, cranberry capsules, milk thistle tablets, GABA sleep-aid gummies that have been so popular that they have been sold out in the past two years, and even NMN that sold for thousands of dollars a bottle in the past two years. Most of these are functional active ingredients extracted from natural animals and plants or artificially synthesized. This part is much more controversial - there are several people around me who stay up late every day. Friends on the Internet keep milk thistle all year round. They say that they feel much better when they wake up the next day without feeling dizzy or swollen. However, I asked a nutritionist I know well and the other person said that there is currently insufficient large-scale clinical evidence to prove that healthy people regularly eat milk thistle to prevent liver damage. As for NMN, which is touted as an "anti-aging miracle drug", most of the current efficacy evidence comes from animal experiments. The safety of long-term use in humans has not been fully verified. If you spend a lot of money to buy it, it is more like paying for your own anti-aging anxiety.

There are also many supplements designed for specific groups of people, such as creatine and branched-chain amino acids commonly consumed by bodybuilders, hydrolyzed lactoferrin for babies with allergies, and even vitamin B12 that is specially supplemented by some long-term vegans, all of which fall into this category. Take creatine as an example. Athletes in professional endurance or strength sports who take it at the recommended dosage for a long time can indeed improve their sports performance and reduce sports injuries. However, if you run at most twice a week and sit in the office the rest of the time, you will not see any additional effects except maybe gaining some water and weight.

Nowadays, the opinions on dietary supplements on the Internet are extremely polarized. Some people think that they are all an IQ tax, while others think that they can cure all diseases. In fact, both of them are wrong. my country's laws and regulations clearly stipulate that dietary supplements belong to the category of food and cannot replace medicines, nor can they claim any therapeutic effect. I have met visitors before who bought thousands of antioxidant supplements after listening to the scammers in the live broadcast room, saying that they can eliminate breast nodules. After taking them for half a year, the nodules became larger after a review, which was a waste of money and delayed formal treatment.

I have been doing nutritional consulting for five or six years, but I rarely proactively recommend supplements to clients. If you have regular meals, are not picky about food, and do not have special needs such as pregnancy preparation, vegetarianism, or high-intensity exercise, you really don’t need to follow the trend and buy a bunch of them at home to expire. If you really want to take supplements, it is best to ask a doctor or a registered dietitian first. Don’t just stock up on what others eat.