Are supplements "Real"? Are they worth anything?
Disclaimer.. My older posts may not have the most valuable solutions for the value and I don't make any claim to the value to diagnose or cure any health issue and you want to see your doctor before making any changes in healthcare. In general, my newer posts tend to have more value than my older ones about reduced cost et cetera, and also the improved value. While these are the best methods especially the more recent ones with twenty five years of research I've found so far, I make no claim that these are up to date or that there are not any better methods yet.. You use this site at your own risk.
I was listening to NPR and they had this cool show about how supplements are not proven to be safe, starting with the events about Prevagen a supposed memory enhancing herb.. Show the story goes! In the late 90s there was the son of this lady who had MS multiple sclerosis and she reads in Wired magazine this cool article!
About how somehow jellyfish have good memory I don't know how! So "her son the inventor" takes to it like a dog to a bone, goes back to the lab, and eventually synthesizes glowing jellyfish protein and tries to sell it.
The FDA doesn't approve it, and after back and forth several times while he's selling it anyway he decides to use a method to get around the FDA limit. Industry lawyers recommend that they put it in a food product and leave it as food and so it's Generally Recognized As Safe (GRAS).. And now he's gotten around the pesky FDA limit, and he's made 150 million dollars selling it.
They finally sue the inventor because there has been only one clinical study done and it didn't improve memory but it was still considered to be reasonably safe so now instead of on the package "Proven to Improve Memory" now it says, "For Your Brain"!
But glowing jellyfish don't have a brain, and while they are bright there is no evidence that Prevagen improves memory even while it's one of the top five best selling all time vitamin herbal combination products on Amazon, and people go right on buying it.
Then they interview healthcare legend Marion Nessile who's now 89 and she says it with "one word with a dish" good nutrition!
She says she doesn't take any supplements because there's no way to know what's in them it costs far too much to do the research to find out what's in them for anybody to be able to afford to do this other than some special certified labs.
Even so she says the danger of poison like arsenic or lead is low mostly and so while there is no evidence that supplements work or much with the really that harmful there is evidence that it's a really good placebo.
Most healthcare promoters who talk about supplements indeed don't toss out their supplements..
Marion says things are really tough these days and if a placebo works why the heck not take it. And they're both saying "Placebos" I like placebos "I like placebos too!" Where's my giant radiant energy placebo!-for a feel-good event at the end of the show.
But there's one claim that Marion Nessle says that seems unusual and that is "There is no evidence that supplements improve health for healthy people".
I've also read this claim by experts in Scientific American..
And here's where I kind of divide the line because are we to say that aspirin has no value? Certainly it's been well established that ginger the several more times for nausea or pain relief than aspirin. "Give me some ginger snaps stat!" ( they might say in the ER).
Or turmeric..is there no evidence it works? Turmeric has been used for centuries in india, for eczema and this is staff and I can tell you it's strong enough for eczema.
There's a way you can be a believer in this if you like and that is to try it on your toothache if like chances are you're in the 50% you have toothache or severe toothache at any given time.
Turmeric as you would expect if it's strong enough for staff is also strong enough for toothache. you can get dramatic short-term and considerably long-term like for weeks defense against the toothache.
"Click here or see the same link below for my ideas about toothache if you like.. while turmeric is really good "just picked by a bit of luck sort of" the deeper truth about toothache I think is about vitamin k2 which 97% are deficient in.
As well as vitamin d3 which boosts vitamin k2 as in natto the best food for it as I'll show you how on the link below.. these are both supplements too..are we to say that because most people are deficient in both of these and they do things like reverse the calcium problem of toothache or cardio that they have no value because they're supplements and there's no evidence they have proof?
I think the real truth is that we can measure all these adverse events OTCs have.
When I first started learning about complimentary medicine I looked at the vitamin catalog and there you see problems and what seem to be solutions, improve cardio improve fitness boost immunity etc by these methods..
What they don't say as with prescriptions by doctors this is a minefield of adverse events I found that two out of three of these alternate herbs have problems like nerve damage blood pressure changes allergies and more and more of what's and whats!
It's argued by those who promote these type of alternate health care events that doctors kill most of their patients with prescriptions by accident or whatever but OTCs have a much lower mortality rate..
This is claimed to be because they don't build up in her system so they don't become toxic like prescriptions, and so on.
Ultimately though if you see all these adverse events which you can easily find on webmd "If there are adverse events why couldn't there be positive events too"? Do you seriously expect if there's one there wouldn't be the other?
Perhaps the main point is let the buyer beware because it may be said if you want the rainbow you have to put up with the rain or I would say go search for pots of gold and silver while you're at it!
If you think of it like kind of a lottery and if you get good enough at it you win then you can see while OTCs have as much risk as the doctors perhaps and probably not as much not only do you get the placebo but you may also have better health like for taking natto or even aspirin than you would have if you listen to these health experts.
The idea is that they don't have any use I think is without merit if you know what you're looking for.
For me in particular I've searched for about 25 years for the best herbs, maybe it's just that the people who are doing the research aren't looking long enough to find the OTCs or herbs that have value.
Most of the studies would be short-term and a lot of the effects like about natto and K2 take about 6 months to show up.
If almost all the sulfur has been processed out of our food will we not be better off taking MSM which is a sulfur compound often touted for this? While they stopped the people who were promoting MSM because they were making too many claims the claims for sulfur itself are quite considerable.
Tricaprin from coconut oil lot of people were swearing about it in the old days, a lot of doctors and now they may be swearing more because it's been found by the University of Osaka Japan to actually reverse cardio!
So too almost all the silica has been processed out of our food and it has many values like about fibromyalgia. Certainly at least we would want to eat foods that have a lot of silica or sulfur, or if we don't feel like eating those foods we could Right..At any rate take the supplement!
As I said of course there are adverse events with about 2/3 of OTC's but I've been searching so long that I seem to have found ones that are really valuable for different health issues. My site is not the Venture Capitalist phase of my research about these herbs to the degree that I know about them. ( Here I repeat my disclaimer... that my older posts may not be the most valuable ones for the value and I don't make any claim to the value to diagnose or cure any health issue and you want to see your doctor before making any changes in healthcare. While these are the best methods I've found so far I make no claim that these are up to date or that there are not any better methods yet.. You use this site at your own risk.)
For example about the value of OTCs for CFS and cancer I make and take my own FWGE also known as Avemar, this particular OTC was discovered by Wartburg who was involved with the Nobel prize for vitamin c and did a lot of research to find that fermented wheat germ extract which originally was sourdough bread can completely repair even a severely damaged immune system.
Surely if OTCs have no value, no one would have thought to pay $400 a month when they first started with selling Avemar. While it's not perfect for cancer when I take the Avemar I brewed up, I'm not in pain and when I don't take it the pain starts.
Many cancer doctors recommend that every single person with cancer take Avemar..
Marion Nessle the healthcare legend has written over 17 books and is established in biology science and while she's 89 years old I might wonder if she might do even better if she took supplements to replace the sulfur the vitamin k2 the lack of d3 the silica or the sulfur deficiency that most people have these days.
While having a placebo is good, our food is getting weaker because of things like the Generally Recognized As Safe ingredient event above where basically food processors or even supplement makers like Prevagen can make a fast profit at the expense of general decrease in value of what we eat..
This about value and also the hazards of supplements with adverse events is so against my experience that I couldn't believe these experts actually make a claim like this the supplements have no potential of any sort!
For example Click here for my post about reducing toothache by remineralizing your teeth in 6 months and you're out of the loop of toothache flossing and brushing woe!









