Next to weight, feeling good is a prime target. We spend billions on things that we believe we lead to better health, grow thicker hair, improve our sex lives, or somehow enhance other parts of our lives and bodies.
It all sounds good, and there’s always a demand for things like vitamins, herbs, minerals, plant-based supplements, or extracts and essences. Whether taken in pill form, via eye dropper, syringe or just gulped down in food or drink, these supplements promise a better, more vigorous and enhanced quality of life.
There’s just one problem: Some of them can actually make life and health extremely worse, causing problems you didn’t have before taking the supplements. In some cases, they can even kill you.
Supplements are available in just about every grocery store, pharmacy and health food store. They include powders, pills, oils, energy bars and liquid drinks, some made from plants and others culled from algae, animal parts, yeasts, mushrooms or other fungus. Some are true home remedies; others are carefully created in laboratories and ideally bottled under sanitary conditions.
The efficacy of any supplement should always be questioned, and studies have shown that some, despite what they say on the labels, contain little to none of the promised substances and certainly don’t produce the results the marketers claim. It’s a Wild West part of the food and drug chain, and it’s largely unregulated and under-monitored by the Food and Drug Administration.