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SnakeOil? Scientific evidence for health supplements

Have just come across this really useful tool from the Information is Beautiful website:

Quote:

SnakeOil? Scientific evidence for health supplements

A generative data-visualisation of all the scientific evidence for popular health supplements by David McCandless and Andy Perkins.

I’m a bit of a health nut. Keeping fit. Streamlining my diet. I plan to live to the age of 150 in fact. But I get frustrated by constant, conflicting reports and studies about health supplements.

Is Vitamin C worth taking or not? Does Echinacea kill colds? Am I missing out not drinking litres of Goji juice, wheatgrass extract and flaxseed oil every day?

In an effort to give myself a quick reference guide, I dove into the scientific evidence and created a visualization for my book. And then worked with the awesome Andy Perkins on a further interactive, generative “living image”.

Play with interactive version | See the still image

This visualisation generates itself from this Google Doc. So when new research comes out, we can quickly update the data and regenerate the image. (How cool is that??) Hopefully then this should be a useful web resources for years to come.

About the image

This image is a “balloon race”. The higher a bubble, the greater the evidence for its effectiveness. But the supplements are only effective for the conditions listed inside the bubble.

You might also see multiple bubbles for certain supps. These is because some supps affect a range of conditions, but the evidence quality varies from condition to condition. For example, there’s strong evidence that Green Tea is good for cholesterol levels. But evidence for its anti-cancer effects is conflicting. In these cases, we give a supp another bubble.

The evidence

We only considered large, human, randomized placebo-controlled trials in our data scrape – wherever possible. No animal trials. No cell studies. Many of the health claims made by the $23 billion supplements industry are based on non-human trials. We wanted to cut through that.

This piece was doggedly researched by myself, and researchers Pearl Doughty-White and Alexia Wdowski. We looked at the abstracts of over 1500 studies on PubMed (run by US National Library Of Medicine) and Cochrane.org (which hosts meta-studies of scientific research). It took us several months to seek out the evidence – or lack of.

You can see our key results in this spreadsheet. (It’s the same spreadsheet that generates the interactive image).

Click here for further updates: http://www.informationisbeautiful.n...th-supplements/

Liked the supplement map - interesting - there is so much conflicting info and hard to separate marketing hype, fads, and real evidence.

Well done on keeping the weight steady :wave:

That is pretty interesting and fairly useful I would think. It is nice to be able to choose a condition and see what comes up.

I am surprised that their are so few items showing as benefit for "general health", I would think that in fact most all vitamins would fall into this category as there seems to be pretty good evidence that for most vitamins we cannot consume enough vitamin rich sources to provide what our body could optimally utilize.

The viewpoint is the typical western scientific model or "magic bullet", i.e. that one thing can cure a disease. I prefer a holistic model where many factors combine to provide optimal health. Which also implies that each one of us has our own unique requirements and that testing against the general population is not that meaningful.

To accomplish valid efficacy testing for supplements first there needs to be an assessment of the level of the nutrient/herb in the individuals to be tested which I believe is very difficult to do in a meaningful way. If they are deficient and then you add the supplement to their regimen you have a more valid test of whether that particular nutrient shows promise in resolving the condition. On the other hand if the individuals are already at an optimal level for that nutrient it is meaningless to go further with the test. This is a significant error in most of the supplements tests that I have seen.

I personally believe that probiotics make a significant contribution to "general health" and I believe I have seen numerous studies that support that viewpoint. But then that would be only be the case if the particular individual was deficient in probiotics.

Thanks for sharing this.