Very interesting book excerpt. I've never been a vitamin taker while everyone around me (best friends, relatives, spousal unit) all take fistfuls of vitamins every day. Another acquaintance is claiming Vitamin D3 will reduce breast cancer using numbers similar to those Linus Pauling used in his Vitamin C claims. People who love me keep buying me Vitamin D3 which I don't take. Recently though, a massage therapist/chiro/healer whose maneuvers removed a bad lower back pain (oh thank you!) told me that as women get older, their body is less able to metabolize (?) potassium and magnesium and supplements would help with x, y, or z. I was only half listening. He seemed authoritative AND he did fix my back.... I'm so not in the habit of taking supplements but I'll try the thing he recommended - for a month. I should figure out a way to measure any effect. One other over-the-counter supplement recommended by my doctor was evening primrose oil and miraculously, the pain it was supposed to eliminate, disappeared quite quickly. He cited a huge British study. Anyone out there notice real differences due to their supplements?
On baby, so much can be said about this paragraph alone. For one, a chiropractor is not qualified to diagnose diseases nor prescribe medicine. Very often, they (And other CAM providers) may recommend supplements that have no guarantee of efficacy, safety, nor quality control, but this practice sees very little use in the world of trained MDs. Perhaps if you have celiac disease or rickets, you might benefit from their use, but this is little conclusive evidence that those supplements would do anything more for you than turn into overpriced poop. (Your acquaintance's (secondary) source is also not the only commentary on the matter[1]) Sadly, the supplement market does not share the drug market's requirement of a burden of proof, so suppliers get away with making dubious health claims, oftentimes illegally[2]: In spite of this one requirement, you'll very often see supplement sellers promoting their products with dubious claims backed by preliminary evidence far beyond the expertise of any layman to analyze. Also, I don't have the goal of trying to be too much of a dick, but I will point out that your planned experiment has no placebo, is unblinded, and has a sample size of 1. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16481636 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dietary_supplement#United_Stat...Recently though, a massage therapist/chiro/healer whose maneuvers removed a bad lower back pain (oh thank you!) told me that as women get older, their body is less able to metabolize (?) potassium and magnesium and supplements would help with x, y, or z. I was only half listening. He seemed authoritative AND he did fix my back.... I'm so not in the habit of taking supplements but I'll try the thing he recommended - for a month. I should figure out a way to measure any effect.
In the name of deregulation, the Dietary Supplement Health And Education Act of 1994 restricted the Food and Drug Administration from exerting authority over supplements as long as manufacturers made no claims about preventing or treating disease. As a result, the (FDA) currently regulates dietary supplements as a category of food, and not drugs.