How supplements can help or harm you!

Based on the American Osteopathic Association, eighty-six percent of Americans are taking a vitamin or supplement and only about twenty percent actually tested positive for nutritional deficiency. Now this confirms that people are taking these supplements unnecessarily. Where does this craze come from? This obsession with vitamins might come from the constant need to improve our performance, this unrealistic body image that's pushed on us everywhere. 

If you just go on Instagram, the unrealistic figures that people have is crazy. Most of it is plastic surgery, Photoshop or Face Tune, or maybe sometimes performance enhancing drugs, but what marketers do is they prey on your insecurities. They sell you products with unproven claims. How many times have you seen boost your immune system, build muscle, fast abs, six hours of continuous energy on a label? 
Unfortunately, this happens all the time. What upsets us most is when health professionals transform into IKA experts. The epidemic of the I know all expert. There are too many of these experts out there, claiming all of the answers, when the rest of the scientific community has questions. While, there are certain instances where evidence shows that vitamin supplementation is beneficial. If your doctor tells you have very low levels of Vitamin D, it makes sense to supplement. If you have a chronic health condition, like a malabsorption syndrome where you can't actively absorb vitamins, it also makes sense to take one. 

In pregnancy, or if you're even thinking about getting pregnant, you may take a prenatal supplement. And if you're following a restrictive diet, you also might be recommended supplementation in that case. Odds are you don't have one of these health conditions. Odds are your doctor didn't tell you to be taking a supplement. So, let's get into it and take about the harms of taking these. 
First of all, most vitamins have minimal proof, if any, of benefit. You're spending money, but for what? Vitamins really give you this false reassurance where you may say, "Ah, I don't need to eat these vegetables, I'm going to take a multivitamin". It doesn't work that way. You're better off spending your time and effort on changing your lifestyle in other meaningful ways. Surprisingly, even some supplements have even been shown to decrease the effectiveness of very common medications like insulin, or Xanax, so you have to be really careful. It's pretty rare to get toxicity of water-soluble vitamins, but for fat soluble vitamins, D, E, K, A, you can get yourself into trouble with toxicity because they can build up in your fat stores. 

The biggest risk when it comes to taking vitamins is the unknown. It sounds kind of funny. It actually sounds like a movie title. No, no. In all seriousness, the FDA does not check this. Companies don't need to prove the safety or effectiveness of the product that they're selling. I can, right now, create a supplement sitting right here, pour it into little capsules, go and sell it in the store, and it's perfectly legal. Consumer lab has done testing and found that the ingredients inside many supplements don't match what's said on the label. Proprietary blends of weight loss formulas have been found to be toxic to the liver. And some scary articles have been coming out showing taking high doses of certain vitamins increases risk of cancer. 

So, If your doctor recommended them for you, or you have a medical necessity, continue taking them. But if you want to take them just to stay healthy, or you're having some kind of symptom that you're ready to blame on a vitamin deficiency, talk to your doctor first, because that's usually not the case. And as any honest doctor will tell you, while we know a lot about vitamins, there's a lot more that we don't know!