Do Supplements Kill?

Politics and marketing campaigns aside, the short answer is: anything can kill you if you consume enough of it, including water. If you’ve heard me speak about this issue you’ve heard me talk about a “window of benefit” that is dose dependent for anything we ingest. Everything we consume creates reactions inside us that are both beneficial and detrimental. Health is created when the benefits consistently outweigh the problems, and healthy cell and system function is supported.

Take a look at water for example. There is a huge window of benefit for water consumption and a significant problem if none is ingested. You have to get to a point where you overwhelm the capacity of the kidneys before you can cause death be essentially internal drowning.

Alcohol, on the other hand, has a very small window of benefit and there is no detriment to abstention. Consuming about one serving of alcohol per day confers some benefit to the cardiovascular system and contributes to stress reduction, but more than this and you end up rapidly pushing into the problem area where the damage caused by this toxin escalates beyond the benefits gained.

Everything we take in essentially is either food, medicine or poison depending on dose. For a bit of morbid humor, check out this website where you can find out how much of certain popular foods and drinks will be the death of you. I discovered it would take 51.87 Starbucks Mocha Grandes in rapid succession for me to be pushing up daisies.

I often hear clients say things like “it’s natural, so I took 6 instead of 2”. This can be a HUGE mistake. Keep in mind that nearly all our medications were at least originally derived from herbs and other compounds found in the natural world. The heart medication digitalis, for example, is derived from the plant that bears it’s name. Digitalis, or Foxglove, can be deadly: in sufficient quantities it will stop the heart.

Two supplements that have been in the news lately for being supposedly "deadly" are vitamin E and calcium. It is important to understand a few things about what gets reported and why. First, most of these studies are conducted by what’s called “meta analysis” which means researchers went back into the results of older studies to see if they could find any other interesting results or patterns. These are not studies that were done specifically on the nutrient in question. The calcium study has another issue as well which is that participants "self reported" their calcium intake. Often self reporting is extremely inaccurate (just try remembering what you had for dinner every day this week).

Another problem is a fundamental scientific process mistake:often results that show association between elements infer causation. Still further issues are the lack of ability to remove enough variables to make the results meaningful such as what dose that was taken (especially if self-reported), the type or quality of the supplement source, if it was combined with other nutrients or not, medication interaction, food intake, activity level or type, current state of participants' health, or anything about the toxic loads these people were carrying. It is next to impossible to isolate the effects of a single nutrient in these "studies".

In the case of the meta-analysis "study" of vitamin E there was no consideration of type or isolate. Vitamin E is actually a family of similar compounds with a wide range of actions. There are now believed to be 12 different types. Most supplements only include one: d-alpha tocopherol. Most of the studies that were done specifically on “vitamin E” actually were done using dl-alpha tocopherol (notice there is an “l” after the “d”) which is a laboratory created version of this single constituent of the vitamin E family. If we have learned anything in nutrition in general it is that the natural world doesn’t do well when it is out of balance. Hyper-loading of a single form of vitamin E (and a synthetic version on top of that) throws the internal environment out of balance and pushes us out of the window of benefit for this substance.

Another thing to keep in mind is the comparison of death rates by cause before you get super uptight and worried about supplements. There are thousands and thousands of more deaths caused by adverse medication reactions or medication mistakes than any herb or supplement use. The number of deaths in the US that can be attributed to medical mistakes is estimated at over 200,000 per year, and that doesn’t include medication overdoses. In 2008, the number of deaths due to prescription pain killers alone was over 41,000 which exceeded the 38,000 deaths due to car accidents. The record for the year with the highest number of deaths attributed to supplements is 2005. The total number that year? 230.

One more thing to remember is you often get what you pay for with supplements. The cheapest brands use the cheapest base materials. Yes, there may be “x” amount of milligrams of a nutrient in that tablet, but it may be in a form the body can’t even recognize or use so all you end up doing is adding to your detoxification load and possibly compromising the function of vital organs. That said, just because a supplement is pricey, doesn't mean it's good or that you need it.

Although supplements can help correct medication induced nutrient deficiencies, they can also can interact with medications in dangerous ways. It is extremely important that you work with someone who really knows about nutrients and reads up regularly on the latest research so you know what the results actually mean for you and your health, especially if you are taking any pharmaceuticals. Too many people self-prescribe natural substances in toxic doses from inferior materials and end up causing more problems than they solve. For another good perspective please visit this article published on the well respected medical news feed Medscape. Get Educated. Get Safe. Get Real.