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Comment by minfitzgerald | Hacker News Reader

I agree with you, kayhi. This is our health, and we want to make it so that everyone in the world not only top-tier athletes are never deficient.

Sure, here's a CDC report: https://www.cdc.gov/nutritionreport/pdf/Nutrition_Book_compl... as well as this secondary study that summarizes some of the findings https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4822995/.

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Thanks, but these references are reporting demographic and biochemical indicators. They do not state that people with a normal diet need supplementation.

Summary reference:

"The Nutrition Report has limitations. First, it does not cover information beyond biochemical indicators, such as dietary intake, supplement usage, hematologic measurements, and anthropometric body measurements, which are generally used together with the biomarker information to comprehensively assess nutritional status."

"forfeit insight into the association between variables unique to each individual biomarker"

Hi Kayhi, quickly, what do you define people with normal diet? There is an array of different diet and different health spectrum that doesn't constitute a visit to the doctor or even have the thought of getting a blood panel. As mentioned above, the scientific rigor for each supplement efficacy on some human clinical trials are sometimes over-simplification of findings from very short trials that don't look into more longitudinal studies. And this is just the non-healthy populations. Most clinical trials that do work on healthy populations tend to focus on athletes. We are still looking more studies that focus on "average" populations that aren't necessarily unhealthy and pro athlete population.

In the end, what we are doing is using data to see if controlling for purity in supplementation improves people's definition of health. If we can control parameters (purity, vitamin active form, etc.), can we see those changes quantitatively rather than qualitatively.

Thanks for your inquiry.

Controlling for purity should not be a major problem and should be a baseline for being in the food business. Lifestyle (diet, sleep, stress, alcohol consumption, disease, genetics, etc.) will far outweigh the variable of supplement purity.

I hope you find more studies, but the variables such as those mentioned above will make it very difficult to determine causation.

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