Walk into pretty much any grocery store or pharmacy and you’re likely to see shelves lined with supplements: pills and gummies and capsules and powders and wellness shots that claim they’ll make you calmer, sharper, happier, thinner, younger-looking, better. On social media, the story’s the same: Ads target your deepest insecurities (how do they know I have, in fact, been feeling bloated lately!?) and/or promise a quick fix for your missing sex drive (like, okay, kinda presumptuous). Meanwhile, influencers with massive followings offer glowing testimonials of colloidal silver for sinus infections, collagen pills for wrinkles, and NAD+ (whatever that even is) for healthy aging.
It can be hard to resist the siren song of any product that supposedly will do wonders for your well-being with minimal effort on your part. I get it: I’ve bought vitamin C gummies when I felt a cold coming on and experimented with melatonin when I was sleep deprived. I tried magnesium powder at one point (for what, I do not know) and decided, for no real medical reason, that it would be in my best interest to take a women’s daily multivitamin (the gummy kind that tastes like strawberries, of course).
Did they work? In truth, I have no idea. But probably not, according to the experts I spoke with for this story. The general consensus is that the benefits of supplementation are largely unproven and most people don’t need them. Many of these products make spurious-at-best claims, are a waste of your money, and, in some cases, can even result in bad health consequences. “Best case scenario: You just pee it out,” Aimee Bernard, PhD, an assistant professor in the Department of Immunology & Microbiology at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, tells SELF. So before you pop a pill based on its too-good-to-be-true promises, here’s what the science says about taking supplements.
First, it’s important to know that most people don’t have nutrient deficiencies.
If you eat a decently balanced diet, you are most likely getting all the vitamins and minerals you need from your food. (If you’re curious, here are the government’s recommendations for daily nutrient intake.) You don’t need to be eating, say, organic brown rice, wild-caught salmon, and fresh broccoli around the clock to avoid deficiencies; in general, as long as you’re consuming a reasonable variety of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and proteins, you shouldn’t need any supplements, the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics states. “Assuming you eat, you surely get some nutrients,” Christopher Gardner, PhD, the director of nutrition studies at the Stanford Prevention Research Center, tells SELF.
Plus, many foods in the US are fortified, or intentionally enriched, with key nutrients to prevent deficiencies—so even if your go-to bowl of cereal is fairly high in added sugar, it might still be packed with folic acid, iron, and vitamin B12.
If you’re vegan or vegetarian, it might be a little trickier to get all the vitamins and minerals you need, particularly vitamin D, iron, vitamin B12, but with a bit of research and careful planning, it’s still very possible to do so, says Dr. Bernard. So many (too many!) people believe that it’s important to take a daily multivitamin—but, experts largely agree, most don’t need to.