By Dr. George Savastio, ND
I recently read an article from the Wall Street Journal titled: Most Dietary Supplements Don’t Do Anything. Why Do We Spend $35 billion a year on them? As evidence for her claim, the author cites the opinions of two researchers employed by the National Institute of Health (NIH). In their view, only a couple of nutrients merit any claim to “well-established benefits”. The author laments that “perfectly respectable public-health initiatives such as vaccines and water fluoridation give rise to suspicion and conspiracy theories” while the “rip-off dietary supplement industry gets a free pass”. The author asks, “Dietary supplements – where is the outrage, people?”
One issue here is that the public, and apparently this author, believe that there is an institution called “Science” or the “Scientific Community” that rises above petty opinions and beliefs, and arrives at hard facts based on their impeccable research. First, there is no such institution or community. Scientists are people, and they argue with each other all the time about their research results and what they might mean. Second, there are many alarm bells going off in science about shoddy research being done with an agenda. Furthermore, the concept of “scientific proof” is no longer viable. Now we recognize that research studies and experiments can be said only to either support or negate a given hypothesis. A hypothesis is nothing more than a logically-derived “educated guess”, that is, a guess based on previous educated guesses.
Moreover, it seems that there may be an agenda afoot to discredit herbs and supplements. This author, with her claims of “perfectly respectable public-health initiatives” shows her own bias immediately. The media, largely owned by big corporations, also operate with an agenda. They happily report statements like the ones referenced above without delving any deeper. Additionally, many research trials of supplements seem to purposely build in mistakes. It’s hard to know what the thinking is, but it gives rise to suspicion. For example, we’ve seen trials of echinacea where the dose is too small for it to work properly. Or trials of vitamin E that use a form of the vitamin that we don’t use in practice and that actually blocks Vitamin E from working in the body. In a world where bungling is more common than good practice, it’s possible that these are just mistakes. But one wonders, especially when there are $35 billion a year at stake.
Even more discouraging is that there are thousands of research studies that do show that nutrients and herbs provide benefit. However, there aren’t a lot of available funds to do this kind of research, which is expensive. Therefore, research projects on dietary supplements tend to be smaller studies, which don’t qualify as scientific evidence by people of the stripe mentioned in the first paragraph. Instead of saying that there are many small studies that indicate promising benefits from herbs and dietary supplements and that we would need to conduct larger studies to have a better idea of whether they meet the standard of “well-established benefits”, the author and her cited authorities just attempt to smear the entire field of natural medicine.
