Snake-oil supplements?
informationisbeautiful.net
informationisbeautiful.net
The origin of the term "snake oil salesman" was to disparage people who sold fake snake oil or pushed it for diseases it would not treat (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_oil).
The study that did not assess red yeast rice did assess lovastatin, which is assumed to be the active ingredient in red yeast rice, but if you're going to assume that they are equivalents, red yeast rice is definitely not "worth it" because you can buy a month's supply of the active ingredient for $4 at most any pharmacy, less than you would spend on the rice, and get a more precisely controlled dose.
Still a neat site design.
1. Some sort of way to account for type and frequency of side effects. For example if everyone who takes the supplement gets an intolerably bad taste in their mouth, that's a mild but prevalent side effect. If one person in 100,000 who takes the supplement dies, that's a comparatively rare but very serious side effect. This factors heavily into the "worth it" determination, because risk is a consideration.
2. Cost. If a supplement has a mild beneficial effect but costs $1,000 a month, I'm not sure most people would say it's "worth it."
3. Strength of effect. A statistically significant improvement is not necessarily clinically significant. For example, with a large sample a 1% decrease in LDL cholesterol may be statistically significant, but it is not clinically significant.
Those factors would help a person determine the pros and cons effectively. What is "worth it" varies considerably from person to person.
For instance, the data on creatine found an increase in cognitive ability in vegetarians. Since creatine is found primarily in muscle tissue, it makes sense that the vegetarians (who were most likely to be deficient in this substance) would see improvement. However, when they tested the supplement in normal adults, there was no improvement. Yet creatine is above the "worth it" line.
Contrast that with vitamin C. It's below the "worth it" line, and it probably is for any normal person. However, if you were to test it on sailors who had eaten nothing besides canned meat for the last 6 months, it would probably be at the top.
Sure, we can assume that most of us are not vitamin C deficient, but we can also assume that most of us are also not vegetarians and therefore not creatine deficient.
(Maybe they considered vegetarianism a "healthy diet"? But it should be obvious that it's not, since it's almost impossible to get many of the top nutrients on this chart from your diet. For instance, if you want to get omega-3 fatty acids from a vegetarian diet the only way is consume supplements extracted from algae.)
1. Vitamin E for nerves. Not nervousness, but things like a little random twitching, especially right below an eye. Clears it up in a few days.
2. Melatonin for sleep regulation. Never more than 3 days straight, but it's a really nice reset switch for sleep if I've been hacking late nights recently.
Of course, ymmv..
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For example, consider vitamin D. Humans make this in their skin, using sunlight. Now, what about those of us who live far from the equator and work indoors? For some time, the standard answer to this has been fortified milk. Okay, but most people in the world lack the mutation that lets most northern Europeans, and some Africans, digest milk sugar as adults. With the limited options available, vitamin D supplements start looking like a worthwhile option.
And then there are the non-nutrient supplements. A healthy diet should get you most of your vitamins, etc., but it won't get you the antidepressant found in St. John's wort. And it might not get you the probiotics that can combat H. Pylori infections, or the stuff in cinammon that seems to be effective against some kinds of diabetes.