Nutrition and supplementation
Quality over hype. Education before supplementation.
This is the most crowded and least honest corner of the whole field. We are not going to tell you what to take. We are going to make you much harder to sell to.
A label can be true and still tell you almost nothing
Supplements sit in a lighter regulatory category than medicines. A product can legally contain an ingredient in a form your body absorbs poorly, at a dose far below anything studied, alongside fillers that make up most of the capsule, and the label will be entirely accurate.
This is not a conspiracy. It is simply what the category permits. Which means the useful skill is not knowing which brand to trust, it is knowing which questions make a bad product impossible to hide.
We are also not in the camp that says synthetic is bad and natural is good. Vitamin C is vitamin C. Some synthetic forms are better absorbed than their natural counterparts, some are worse, and the answer is specific to the compound rather than to the word on the front of the tub.
Six questions that make a bad product impossible to hide
Use these on anything, including anything we ever recommend.
Dose
How much is in a serving, and how does that compare to the dose used in the research being cited? Underdosing to hit a price point is the most common trick in the category.
Form and bioavailability
Which chemical form of the ingredient, and how well is it absorbed? Two products can list the same nutrient and deliver very different amounts of it into you.
Third-party testing
Has an independent laboratory verified what is in the bottle? A certificate of analysis for the batch you are holding is the single most informative document in this whole category.
Proprietary blends
A blend that lists ingredients without individual amounts hides the doses. Sometimes that protects a formula. More often it protects the fact that most of it is the cheapest ingredient.
The evidence being cited
Was the study in humans, at this dose, in this form, for a relevant duration? A great deal of supplement marketing rests on cell or animal work described as though it were clinical proof.
Whether you need it at all
The question nobody selling you something will ask. Supplementing a nutrient you are not short of usually does nothing, and in a few cases does harm.
Understand the science
01. What the nutrition research actually supports
02. When supplementation has the clearest case
03. Where supplements can genuinely do harm
What you can explore from here
Four routes, in whatever order suits you.
Food patterns first
Why the boring dietary advice keeps outperforming the interesting supplement.
Sports supplements
Contamination risk, batch testing and anti-doping. A category with real consequences.
Longevity supplements
The fastest-growing corner of the category and the one with the thinnest human evidence.
Never for your animals
Why a human supplement is not a small-dog supplement, and can be dangerous.
How we handle this subject
We publish the questions rather than the answers, deliberately. Handing you a list of what to take would be more useful in the short term and would make you dependent on our judgement rather than your own.
We do not claim that synthetic supplements are inherently harmful or that natural ones are inherently safe. We hold anything we ever recommend to the same six questions on this page, and we will always send you to a doctor or pharmacist where medication, pregnancy, a diagnosed condition or a child is involved.
Read the Medistic StandardBring us something you are already taking
The most useful conversation here is usually about the tub already in your cupboard. Your Medistic Health consultant can walk the six questions through it with you. Quite often the answer is that you can stop buying it.
Speak with your consultantMedistic Health publishes education about everyday wellbeing. Nothing here is medical advice, and nothing we publish is intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease. Speak to a doctor or pharmacist before taking any supplement if you are pregnant or breastfeeding, taking prescribed medication, living with a diagnosed condition, or buying for a child.
