6 ways being a sucker for supplements can go wrong
Not many supplements have dangerous side effects at sane dosages, and so they are often defended by asking, “What’s the harm?” This is a naive cliché of medical credulity. Just because a supplement isn’t directly poisonous doesn’t mean there aren’t very real indirect and/or non-medical threats. And those are:
- Wasting time, attention, and money.+And spending money on most supplements is not just wasting it … it’s giving it to assholes. 😱 Straight into the deep pockets of corporate douchebags. Big Suppla is mostly a subsidiary of Big Pharma these days. And most of the exceptions? MLMs! Multi-level marketing scams run by shady creeps raking in the dough at the tops of their pyramid schemes.
- The “opportunity cost” of the road not taken.+Good health is at least 95% about “the basics.” Health “optimizations” are not just much less important, they also have a significant opportunity cost: every moment and dollar spent on the not-basics is stolen directly from the much more important basics!
- It’s often unsafe to replace or delay real medical care with supplements (or to combine them).
- Faith in supplements often leads to overzealous dosing and a much greater risk of side effects.
- Believing trivial bullshit leads to believing serious bullshit. (The pandemic demonstrated this vividly.)
- An unregulated and massively profitable industry (“Big Suppla”) means there’s a small but real risk of contamination/adulteration.
And of course all of these apply to most others kinds of snake oil.