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Comment by miketery | Hacker News Reader

I was walking in Manhattan at a pretty busy corner, and noticed this supplement store. Typically they're filtered and you forget you ever saw it. But I couldnt help but think about the amounts of pills or supplements this store had. The various varieties for any kind of "need" one might have. How was it selling enough to rent real estate...

I wondered how do people by this stuff believing it helps them (as opposed to the usual remedy of sleep, exercise, and good diet). Than I asked my self, maybe I'm missing something! Should I be taking supplements too?

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These stores do just fine. They prey on hypochondriacs and people who believe they have a special condition or are in on some sort of health secret. The vitamins are mostly harmless and come in colorful plastic packaging adorned with outlandish but noncommittal promises.

Each type of supplement comes at a range of prices. There's the cheapo which no one expects to work and few people buy; it's there so you feel good about the higher priced item your about to purchase. Then there are a handful of mid priced supplements. These are the ones people actually buy. They are also tiered so the store can capture the price point of the varied economic classes of its patrons. Finally, come the ridiculously over priced uber strength supplements. They have price tags starting around $80 and heading into the hundreds. Only fanatics and the most gullible dupes actually purchase these. Their main purpose is to make you feel like the money you blew on gelatin, starch and lactose was well spent.

> I wondered how do people by this stuff believing it helps them

Read Amazon reviews. It's pretty amazing what people can come up with.

I take the usual suspects: Magnesium (I run almost every day) and a Omega 3/Vitamin D combo (I don't eat fish and we don't get a lot of sun here in northern Germany). Seems like a reasonable thing to be doing but I can't for the life of me tell any difference with or without them. I do buy the cheap ones though - maybe I'd feel 10 years younger if I'd buy the top shelf ones...

You have to get blood work done to see if there’s a difference

I read that 1 in 6 Americans have an autoimmune condition. I'm not sure if it's true however if it is that may explain a lot of this. Often autoimmune condition treatments include non-mainstream diets that can be extreme and therefore require supplementation.

The AARDA autoimmune patient advocacy organization says more than 50 million Americans suffer from an autoimmune disease, with 75% being women.

https://www.aarda.org/news-information/statistics/

Half of the stuff in a supplement score is either too specific for the general population or just plain BS (protip: the more over the top the name is - I dunno, "Drol-mass-max" or something - the more BS it is)

Then you have the dietary macronutrient supplements (Protein, Omega 3, etc), the multivitamins and the specific functional foods.

Your "good diet" is probably lacking some micronutrients (some websites or fitness trackers allow you to set your diet and they will show exactly what's missing related to the guidelines) so I'd rather go with multivitamins (or at least Vit D)

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