Subpar Supplements: Why Supplements Shouldn't Be Your Main Focus

The sheer complexity of the chemistry that drives us is overwhelming. Honestly, have you seen even simplified schematics of even one biochemical cascade.

Really Really Really complex.

Despite it's overwhelming complexity, we want to understand it to then be able to manipulate it to our ends. One way to approach this messy lack of clarity is to use methodologies that reduce the complexity. In nutrition this is called nutrition reductionism. This is the approach that leads to the headlines of "beta-carotene improves eye sight", or "supplementing with zinc will reduce your risk of colds."

What is likely going on here is that the chemical in question is a good proxy for the presence of all the other chemicals that are required for a complex chemical pathway to function. After all, if you are eating real food there is no such thing as a berry made purely out of zinc or a beta-carotene banana.

Drawing from that we would expect to find that people with high levels of zinc, or beta-carotene, or vitamin D, or omega 3s, or vitamin C, or [insert your favorite vitamin here] naturally likely are healthy. However, if you give someone a bunch of zinc in isolation, it will definitely raise the amount of zinc found on your next blood test, but it likely won't do much to improve your health.

An guess what... this is how the data plays out. In a future blog post I will cover the papers that show this. But for now I wanted to share an analogy that I recently started using which I find helpful to elucidate this concept.

I just started watching professional soccer and picked Arsenal as my team because a kid that lives down the street likes them. A thought occurred to me when I was watching a game.

Let's say you were the coach of Arsenal and you wanted to win more games. You go ahead and do a big analysis of your last 10 seasons. In this analysis you measure everything: the average speed of every player, the number of gym towels used per week, the length of the grass, the median salary of the opposing players midfielder... everything.

You notice that one metric, the number of cleats on the field shows statical significance for games won. Amazing you think! All we need to do is get more cleats on the field!

Your assistant coach tells you something to the effect of: "Hold on coach, we always start with 11 guys, so 22 cleats. Maybe this is picking up that when we get a red card and lose a man, going down to 20 cleats on the field we tend to lose the game. Perhaps we should focus more on not getting red cards."

"Quiet you!" you scream. "I see the data! It is clear we need more cleats on the field!"

So at your next game you as the head coach put 5 pairs of cleats on the field just next to your sideline. The refs look at you weird but don't say anything.

You tie your first game...

hmmmm must need more cleats.

Next game you put 10 pairs of cleats on the field next to your sidelines.

You lose that game...

hmmmm maybe the cleats need to be closer to the opposing teams goal, so you line them on the goal line.

You win that game...

Yep, now we are getting somewhere.

And continue into cleat madness as hilarity ensues.

This I feel is the same approach to supplements many take. They follow numbers and try to do very specific targeted interventions without taking the incredible complexity of the system into account.

It ends up being more difficult to admit that we are often uncertain about how things work. It is often tempting to grab onto a simple concept that gives the illusion of knowledge and control. Sitting with the discomfort of not knowing takes a lot of maturity, but it is ultimately the best way to get closer to the truth.