The research was published this month in the International Journal for Vitamin and Nutrition Research. It was conducted by two experts from the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging, Tufts University in Boston. The researchers noted that questions persist about the effectiveness of supplements, as do disagreements about the best way to answer those questions, especially on a population wide scale.
“Despite this widespread acceptance of supplements on the part of the public and health care providers, questions about both the safety and effectiveness of dietary supplements continue to be raised. The gold standard for determining the safety and efficacy of a new pharmaceutical agent is the double-blind, placebo-controlled, randomized clinical trial (RCT), and there has been a movement to hold supplements to the same standard, but this is exceedingly difficult to do for a number of reasons. Observational studies are an alternative to RCTs for considering the question of supplement safety and efficacy, although these studies can be plagued by many issues related to confounding by other healthy lifestyle behaviors associated with supplement use and measurement of usual supplement use,” the authors wrote.
Research took advantage of unique data set of MLM distributors
The research follows on earlier research conducted using data from the 2007–2010 National Health and Examination Survey (NHANES) that found that participants who used multiple dietary…
