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Comment by twofornone | Hacker News Reader

>These are dark days for supplements. Although they are a $30-plus billion market in the United States alone, vitamin A, vitamin C, vitamin E, selenium, beta-carotene, glucosamine, chondroitin, and fish oil have now flopped in study after study

Since the byline brings up race, its kind an aside but I'm almost convinced that a lot of our large scale nutritional/alternative medical studies give mixed results (and are not reproducable) because researchers are unwilling to sufficiently control for genes. High level categories like "black, white, hispanic, asian" are not enough.

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If the advice they’re testing was actually strong, it’d work no matter the genes you have.

Dietary genes aren’t correlated to race of course, except for rare ones like Inuits adapting to eating more fat.

For a large scale study I would check if they correlated for geography, blood markers and diet outside the supplements.

Maybe. It is also plausible that ancestral diets have primed people to react to different diets and needs.

I think its absolutely certain that thousands of generations of specialization for local geographies post africa lead to disparate dietary needs. Yeah, humans can pretty much eat anything, but regularly consuming the same diet may may be ideal for one ethnic group and unhealthy for another.

Hell, look at the distribution of lactose intolerance. Is drinking milk racist?

Probably more that being racially blind is a form of racism. Probably not the worst, usually.

Lactose intolerant cultures don’t all avoid milk. They develop cultural ways of processing it like kefir that eliminate lactose, or they’re Japanese and just drink it anyway because they’re masochists and think it builds character.

Actually, the most lactose intolerant people I know are totally white and I think actually have worse undiagnosed medical problems but just think they’re lactose intolerant. And Asians I know aren’t lactose intolerant because even though they “are Asian” culturally and would look Asian to you they’re actually 2/3 genetically Scottish.

Testing milk as a supplement would be interesting I guess; I know in the 90s we were all taught it was needed for bones but more recently this is said to not be true because 1. bones need vitamin K which we don’t get enough of and 2. cows milk contains galactose which is bad for bones and may cause osteoporosis.

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