Snakeoil?

Scientific Evidence for Health Supplements

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 notice multiple bubbles for certain supplements. This is because some supplements affect a range of medical/physical conditions, but the quality (or validity) of the evidence 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, they give a supplement another bubble.

In creating this image, they only considered large, human, randomized placebo-controlled trials in our datascape – 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.)

This piece was doggedly researched. They looked at the abstracts of over 1500 studies on PubMed (US National Library Of Medicine) and Cochrane.org (which hosts meta-studies of scientific research). It took several months to seek out the evidence – or lack thereof.

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