Dietary Supplement Trends, 1999-2012

SOURCE: Kantor ED, Rehm CD, Du M, et al. Trends in dietary supplement use among US adults from 1999-2012. JAMA 2016;316:1464-1474.

According to results from in-home interviews with 37,859 U.S. adults, 52% reported use of a supplement within the 30 days prior to the interview. Included under the canopy of “supplements” were multivitamins, fish oil, and individual supplements (such as vitamin D). Of concern (depending on your personal philosophical-scientific position on the issue), the use of supplements has remained essentially stable during the 1999-2012 interval.

Although some major players have declined over the past decade (multivitamin/multimineral use decreased from 37% to 31%), others have increased substantially: fish oil use increased from 1.3% in 1999 to 12% in 2012, and vitamin D increased from 5.3% to 19%. The authors reported that approximately 25% of supplement use had been recommended by a healthcare provider.

With the exception of folate supplementation for women, support for the benefits of supplements, in the absence of predefined deficiency, is scant.

The item that provided me that greatest reason for pause was not in the article itself but an editorial about this article in the same issue of JAMA, which I believe deserves to be quoted in full (reader discretion is advised): “... even after high-quality studies that show no meaningful clinical differences between supplements and placebos are published, the law provides [supplement] manufacturers latitude to continue advertising their products based on earlier, low-quality data. For example, Ginkgo biloba continues to be sold ‘to support mental sharpness’ despite a large, high-quality, NIH-funded study that found evidence to the contrary.”

I am already reasonably supple. In the absence of strong evidence, I will continue to eschew supplements.