Here’s why you probably shouldn’t trust vitamins and herbal supplements:
A group of researchers went into a whole heap of pharmacies and got every possible echinacea supplement they could get their hands on.
They managed to get 59 different echinacea supplements and they then tested each one of them in the lab.
They found that 10 percent of them didn’t actually have any echinacea in them whatsoever!
In 50% of them, the ingredients in the tablets did not match what was written on the label.
And there was a very poor correlation between the dose of echinacea claimed on the label and what was actually measured in the lab.
See, here’s the deal. Supplements and vitamins do not go through the same level of regulation as do prescription medications.
Which means they don’t have to prove that they work. They’re allowed to make claims on their packaging without any scientific evidence for those claims. And they don’t even have to rigorously prove that they’re safe! For example we now know that Vitamin E supplements increase your chance of dying.
So here’s the deal. I’m gonna spend a few episodes going through the harms and benefits of each vitamin individually, but don’t just think that because it’s a vitamin, or because it’s natural, that it’s safe. It might not be. It might not even be the dose or ingredients that they’re claiming. And I can assure you, the vitamins that DO have good evidence that they work, have already been adopted by mainstream medicine.
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