Health Supplements

Questions and model answers

1. Do you take any health supplements?

   Vitamin D in the winter, and that's it, and I only take that because a blood test told me to. Everything else I've tried I stopped, not because it didn't work but because I couldn't tell whether it had. That's the awkward thing about supplements. The effect, if there is one, is smaller than the noise around it. I slept badly all through March for about nine different reasons, and whether the magnesium was one of them I genuinely cannot say. Nobody runs a controlled trial on themselves. The vitamin D stayed because there was a number before and a number after, and the number moved. If somebody handed me that for the others I would take them too.

2. Would you rather get your nutrients from food or from supplements?

   Food, and not for the reason people usually give. The natural-versus-synthetic argument does not persuade me, because a molecule does not know where it came from, and vitamin C from a tablet is vitamin C. What food has is everything nobody has isolated yet. Every decade the industry extracts whatever compound that year's research liked, sells it on its own, and discovers it does rather less than it did inside the orange. That has happened often enough now to be a pattern rather than bad luck. So I would take the orange, on the grounds that it contains the thing we have not named. Where supplements win is when you are genuinely deficient, which is a medical question rather than a lifestyle one.

3. Tell me about a supplement or health product that did not do what you expected.

   I took a fish oil for eight months because a colleague said it had fixed his joints. Mine did not hurt. I have genuinely no idea what I expected it to do. I think I had absorbed the idea that a person who takes something is doing better than a person who takes nothing, and the capsule was mostly evidence of effort rather than a treatment for anything. What ended it was moving apartments and losing the bottle for three weeks, and noticing precisely nothing. That is when I worked out I had never had any way of telling in the first place. Now I do not start anything unless I can say in advance what would count as it working.

4. Do you think more people should take supplements for their health?

   Fewer people, taking fewer things, on better evidence. The pattern at the moment is that the people taking the most are the ones who need them least. The worried well already eat properly and are buying reassurance, while genuine deficiency sits with people who never get tested at all. Iron in menstruating women, B12 in older adults, vitamin D at northern latitudes. Those are real, measurable and cheap to correct, and they are also the least marketed. Selling forty capsules to somebody with a good diet does nothing except move money. So I would say the question has the wrong shape. The useful version is whether more people should be tested, because once you have the number the taking decides itself.

The Korean translation, the expression breakdowns, the reusable frames and the common-mistake notes for these four questions are in the book. The recording and this transcript are free, here and on YouTube.