Dietary supplements should not be taken randomly

Unless they undergo a formal clinical nutritional assessment and are specifically recommended by a physician or registered dietitian, there is absolutely no need for the vast majority of ordinary people who eat a basically normal diet to take additional dietary supplements. Not only does random supplementation fail to achieve the effects of health care, beauty, and disease prevention, but it may increase metabolic burden, cause organ damage, and even increase the risk of long-term disease.

When I was rotating in the nutrition department of a tertiary hospital, I met a 28-year-old Internet programmer. I watched short videos and watched others talking about nicotinamide whitening, vitamin C antioxidant, fish oil to prevent hair loss, and lutein to protect eyes. In total, I had to take six or seven pills a day. I couldn't stop eating for three months. The unit test showed that the alanine aminotransferase was three times higher than the normal value. I was really scared. The doctor asked him to stop all supplements, eat normally and not stay up late. After half a month, he would check again and everything would be normal. To put it bluntly, he took too much supplements and his liver metabolism stopped working.

Of course, this cannot be said to be too absolute. There are currently two schools of thought in the nutrition community. One school believes that as long as the diet is followed, the daily diet can adequately cover nutritional needs. The other school believes that the food people eat now is too refined and takes out a high proportion. There is nothing wrong with supplementing with basic nutrients. I have also come across examples where supplementation is really needed. There was a girl who had been vegan for 5 years. She always felt weak and had light menstruation. Her serum vitamin B12 was only one-third of the normal value. This kind of daily vegetarian supplement could not be supplemented. The doctor prescribed B12 supplements. After taking it for two months, the index returned and her overall condition was much better. For example, folic acid supplements are required in the first three months of pregnancy, postmenopausal women are prone to calcium deficiency and vitamin D deficiency, and elderly people with weak digestive functions may need to supplement protein powder. These are reasonable needs after evaluation and do not fall into the category of "eating indiscriminately."

But the problem is that most people buy supplements indiscriminately without knowing whether they are deficient or not. When you read Xiaohongshu, do you often come across “A must-have health list for migrant workers” and “Eat these three things to fight aging and prevent hair loss”? Many people place orders with the mentality of "it's not harmful anyway, supplementing is better than not supplementing at all", and they don't even know what ingredients are in the food they eat. Interestingly, many businesses are now always exaggerating the anxiety that "daily diet is not nutritious and everyone needs to supplement it." This is actually only half right - if your diet is really bad enough that you need to rely on supplements to make ends meet, the most important thing you should change is your eating habits, rather than counting on a few small pills to save you.

Let’s talk about the most common multivitamins. If you are already drinking fortified breakfast milk with vitamins added every day, and you take additional multivitamins, and then drink vitamin C effervescent tablets as water, it is easy to overdose. In particular, fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E, and K are not excreted in the urine and remain in the liver for a long time, causing nausea and dizziness in mild cases and liver damage in severe cases. In the past, there were cases where parents fed their children too much cod liver oil every day, and eventually the children were sent to the emergency room with bulging fontanelles and elevated intracranial pressure. This is really not alarmist. Even if it is water-soluble vitamin C, consuming more than 1,000 mg per day for a long time will greatly increase the risk of kidney stones. It is not a matter of "it's okay to take more supplements".

I have been in a trap before. During that time, I always stayed up late to catch up on projects. I was given liver-protecting tablets by a certain Internet celebrity. They said that staying up late is just needed for partying, and taking them can offset the damage caused by staying up late. I always felt sick in my stomach after taking it for a week, so I asked the teacher in the nutrition department. They said that my liver metabolism was fine, but I was intolerant to the milk thistle component. I stopped for two days and it was fine. I just spent money to find fault.

In fact, dietary supplements are, to put it bluntly, "nutritional patches." If your clothes have no holes, if you force yourself to put a patch on them, it will not only look unsightly but also make you feel uncomfortable. Only patching the holes will be useful. It’s not impossible to supplement if you really want to. First do a serum nutrient test, or ask a registered dietitian to do a one-week dietary survey to see what you are lacking, and then supplement in a targeted manner. It is much more useful than buying a bunch of Internet celebrity products blindly.

By the way, there is another piece of trivia that many people don’t know. Our country’s Food and Drug Administration has never approved any dietary supplement to have therapeutic effects. Those claims of “anti-cancer”, “prevention of sudden death” and “radical cure of hair loss” are all nonsense made by merchants. It’s better to be careful about what you put into your mouth, and don’t use your liver and kidneys as a test field.