Are Supplements Worth Taking? How To Sort Them Out

Today’s almonds have been activated by:

In A Rush?

Today’s 30-Second Summary

If you don’t have time to read the whole email today, here are some key takeaways:

• Supplements are a multibillion-dollar industry, and while many can help, many are more or less useless.

  • Today’s main feature examines some of the broad categories of supplements, and how to tell which are more likely to be worth it, and which are very skippable for most people.

• If it’s about time you had a break to look forward to, you’re in luck: today’s sponsor, Brad’s Deals (the coupon company and discount-finder we’ve mentioned a few times before), has put together a way to go to Disneyland for next to nothing. Enjoy!

• Today’s featured book is about overcoming emotional eating, leaving you free to enjoy food on your own terms.

Read on to learn more about these things, or click here to visit our archive

A Word To The Wise

Watch and Learn

What Different Kinds of Hair Loss/Thinning Say About Your Health

Dr. Siobhan Deshauer shows us different kinds of hair loss, what causes them, and what can be done about them:

Prefer text? The above video will take you to a 10almonds page with a text-overview, as well as the video!

Q&A Thursday

It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!

Have a question or a request? We love to hear from you!

In cases where we’ve already covered something, we might link to what we wrote before, but will always be happy to revisit any of our topics again in the future too—there’s always more to say!

As ever: if the question/request can be answered briefly, we’ll do it here in our Q&A Thursday edition. If not, we’ll make a main feature of it shortly afterwards!

So, no question/request too big or small 😎

❝There seems to be a lot of suggestions to take supplements for every thing, from your head to your toes. I know it’s up to the individual but what are the facts or stats to support taking them versus not?❞

Short answer:

• supplementary vitamins and minerals are probably neither needed nor beneficial for most (more on this later) people, with the exception of vitamin D which most people over a certain age need unless they are white and getting a lot of sun.

• other kinds of supplement can be very beneficial or useless, depending on what they are, of course, and also your own personal physiology.

With regard to vitamins and minerals, in most cases they should be covered by a healthy balanced diet, and the bioavailability is usually better from food anyway (bearing in mind, we say vitamin such-and-such, or name an elemental mineral, but there are usually multiple, often many, forms of each—and supplements will usually use whatever is cheapest to produce and most chemically stable).

However! It is also quite common for food to be grown in whatever way is cheapest and produces the greatest visible yield, rather than for micronutrient coverage.

This goes for most if not all plants, and it goes extra for animals (because of the greater costs and inefficiencies involved in rearing animals).

We wrote about this a while back in a mythbusting edition of 10almonds, covering:

• Food is less nutritious now than it used to be: True or False?

• Supplements aren’t absorbed properly and thus are a waste of money: True or False?

• We can get everything we need from our diet: True or False?

You can read the answers and explanations, and see the science that we presented, here:

Do We Need Supplements, And Do They Work?

You may be wondering: what was that about “most (more on this later) people”?

Sometimes someone will have a nutrient deficiency that can’t be easily remedied with diet. Often this occurs when their body:

1. has trouble absorbing that nutrient, or

2. does something inconvenient with it that makes a lot of it unusable when it gets it.

…which is why calcium, iron, vitamin B12, and vitamin D are quite common supplements to get prescribed by doctors after a certain age.

Still, it’s best to try getting things from one’s diet first all of all, of course.

Things we can’t (reasonably) get from food

This is another category entirely. There are many supplements that are convenient forms of things readily found in a lot of food, such as vitamins and minerals, or phytochemicals like quercetin, fisetin, and lycopene (to name just a few of very many).

Then there are things not readily found in food, or at least, not in food that’s readily available in supermarkets.

For example, if you go to your local supermarket and ask where the mimosa is, they’ll try to sell you a cocktail mix instead of the roots, bark, or leaves of a tropical tree. It is also unlikely they’ll stock lion’s mane mushroom, or reishi.

If perchance you do get the chance to acquire fresh lion’s mane mushroom, by the way, give it a try! It’s delicious shallow-fried in a little olive oil with black pepper and garlic.

In short, this last category, the things most of us can’t reasonably get from food without going far out of our way, are the kind of thing whereby supplements actually can be helpful.

And yet, still, not every supplement has evidence to support the claims made by its sellers, so it’s good to do your research beforehand. We do that on Mondays, with our “Research Review Monday” editions, of which you can find in our searchable research review archive ← we also review some drugs that can’t be classified as supplements, but mostly, it’s supplements.

Take care!

Our Sponsors Make This Publication Possible

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Please do visit our sponsors—they help keep 10almonds free

This Or That?

Vote on Which is Healthier

Yesterday we asked you to choose between mango and guava—we picked the guava (click here to read about why), as did just 28% of you!

Now for today’s choice:

Click on whichever you think is better for you!

Bonus (Sponsored) Recommendation

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One-Minute Book Review

Breaking Free from Emotional Eating – Geneen Roth

The isn’t a book about restrictive dieting, or even willpower. Rather, it’s about making the unconscious conscious, and changing your relationship with food from being one of compulsion, to one of choice, wherein you also get the choice of saying “no”.

Roth takes us through the various ways in which life seems to conspire to take consciousness away from eating, from obvious distractions such as TV, to less obvious ones, like “it doesn’t count if you’re not sitting down”. She also tackles other psychological aspects, such as those people get from parents—which can be a big factor for many.

Importantly, she teaches us that when it comes to “have your cake and eat it”, you can also, in fact, have your cake and not eat it. That’s an option too. Its mere presence in our house is not the boss of us. However, overcoming the “this then that” automatic process that goes from having to eating, is something that Roth gives quite some attention to, offering a number of reframes to make it a lot easier.

The style is friendly, conversational, pop-science, and the format dates it a little—this is very much a book formatted the way pop-science books were formatted 20–50 years ago (the book itself is from 2003, for what it’s worth). However, a lack of modern format doesn’t take away from its very valuable insights, and if anything, the older format rather promotes reading a book from cover to cover, which can be beneficial.

Bottom line: if emotional or compulsive eating is something that you’ve found tricky to overcome, then this book can help make it a lot easier.

Click here to check out Breaking Free From Emotional Eating, and indeed enjoy a freer life on your own terms!

Penny For Your Thoughts?

Wishing you a wonderful day of wellness,

The 10almonds Team