Most replayed moment: Do you really need vitamin supplements? | David Seres

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
Hello, and welcome to ZOE Recap, where each week we find the best bits from one of our podcast episodes to help you improve your health.
Walk into any pharmacy or supermarket, and you'll find a shelf stacked with brightly colored jars, promising better immunity, stronger bones, and sharper minds. Of course, I'm talking about vitamin supplements. But despite looking like medical products, supplements aren't held to the same rigorous testing standards as medicines. So how much of what they promise is actually backed by science? I'm joined by Dr. David Seres to help cut through the confusion, and uncover what the science really says about vitamin C, vitamin D, and even the mysterious multivitamin.

**David Seres** (0:46)
The history of vitamins is miraculous because there were different deficiencies in different populations in the world. Iodine included, which would cause goiter, and cretinism in children, vitamin D, as I mentioned, which caused rickets, vitamin C in sailors, etc.
Each one of these was an enormous public health boon. I think that ever since then, we've been waiting for the next big, huge discovery around vitamins, and I think there aren't any left that we are aware of.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:21)
Why do you think that the promise of vitamins has become so attractive for people who view themselves as healthy, and who are not suffering from a deficiency that they're aware of, or a doctor has told them they have?

**David Seres** (1:36)
There's a general feeling in being human, that one would like to control one's destiny, and health is this mysterious black box, that if you are able to do something now that will give you extended health and longevity, that's very attractive to be able to do that. Vitamins have been held out as this without good proof, but nonetheless, the ability to market them in the way that they're marketed, suggestive of health benefits has fueled this.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:11)
So when did they move from being this niche thing to treat a particular disease to sort of widespread usage here in the States?

**David Seres** (2:22)
I think it was probably a gradual sort of thing. I know that in the 90s, a law was passed to deregulate the industry. But at the time, there was already enough money in the industry to have made large donations to political campaigns and so forth in order to promote the passage of this law, called the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1995, and DSHEA, or DCHEA as some people call it. And the primary promoters got people to believe that this was nutrition and it was nourishing. And people also believed that the FDA was trying to regulate these substances, when in fact no such effort was ongoing. And Mel Gibson was hired to do a commercial in which he is in his home, in his kitchen, in his bathrobe, surprised by a SWAT team arresting him because he's got vitamins.
And he called for people to write to Congress.
And that advertising campaign got more letters written to Congress than the entire Vietnam War. Wow. It was very successful.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:37)
So the ad was saying that I was going to have my vitamin C taken away.

**David Seres** (3:40)
Yes.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:41)
What was this legislation going to do?

**David Seres** (3:44)
So this legislation essentially deregulates anything brought to the market that's called a dietary supplement.
And by that, it takes away the ability for the US Food and Drug Administration to regulate these substances and left specific ways in which the supplements were allowed to advertise suggestively. So it's actually written into this that you can say that this stuff supports heart health or supports brain health without really any direct evidence of it.

**SPEAKER_1** (4:22)
And so they are allowed to make these health claims. Is that different from what would happen if you were a drug or if you were something else in terms of the claims you can make?

**David Seres** (4:34)
Couldn't be more different. So a drug company has to undergo a series of randomized control trials where people are randomly assigned to either the drug or a standard treatment or a placebo, and studied over time to determine whether or not the product does what it's supposed to do. And then that research has to pass muster with the FDA in order to be allowed to be sold as a medication or a drug.
Dietary supplements are treated as if they were a completely different thing where they are nutrients, so therefore they must be safe. Thus, we don't want to deprive people of the ability to access them. And so they're available without any science necessary, without any proof of benefit necessary, and frankly without any safety testing, although there is some accountability if that something is dangerous.