Dietary supplement definition

Dietary supplements are a special category between ordinary foods and drugs. Their core purpose is to supplement specific dietary ingredients such as vitamins, minerals, animal and plant extracts, and probiotics. They are not intended to treat diseases and cannot replace a balanced daily diet.

Speaking of which, this definition is actually quite vague. The regulatory rules in different countries are very different, and there is no unified global standard at all. In the past two years, I helped a friend with the domestic registration of cross-border supplements and encountered pitfalls. The same anti-stress supplement containing ashwagandha is classified as a common food by the US FDA. It does not even need to conduct clinical trials before being put on the market. It only needs to be marked on the outer packaging with the sentence "This product is not used to treat or prevent any disease" before it can be put on the shelves. ； When you arrive in the EU, you have to go through the review of EFSA (European Food Safety Authority) and submit complete ingredient safety evidence and population consumption data. ； It was even more troublesome to get it domestically, because ashwagandha is not included in my country’s traditional eating habits and is a new food ingredient. It took less than half a year to complete the safety test report, and finally it was able to get the blue hat label and put it under the supervision of the "special food" category.

The academic circles have been arguing about its positioning for many years, and the two groups cannot agree at all. The old director of the Nutrition Department of a tertiary hospital that I followed was an absolute conservative. He lived to be almost 70 years old and never even took a single vitamin tablet. He always said to everyone that "eating well is better than anything else." In his eyes, as long as you can eat one pound of vegetables and half a pound of fruits, a handful of nuts and a cup of milk, and a combination of coarse and fine grains every day, there is no need to use any supplements. On the contrary, taking supplements indiscriminately may cause metabolic burdens. For example, excessive vitamin A supplementation can cause hair loss, and excessive vitamin D supplementation can cause hypercalcemia. But many colleagues I know who are engaged in sports nutrition have a completely different idea. Nowadays, it is the norm for young people to eat takeaways that are heavy in oil and salt, not enough green leafy vegetables, and no time to bask in the sun. Many people have been found to be deficient in vitamin D and B complex during their physical examination. In this case, it is much more realistic to take appropriate supplements than to force them to cook after get off work every day.

I have had personal experience myself. Last year, I worked on an industry report for three weeks, relying on takeout and rice balls from convenience stores. My mouth ulcers kept growing for half a month, and no medicine was effective. I checked my serum vitamin levels, and sure enough, B2 and B12 were both stuck below the critical value. I followed the doctor's advice and took medicinal B-complex, which cost a few yuan a bottle a week, and the ulcer disappeared the next day. But when I have a normal schedule and cook for myself, I never take the initiative to buy these. Nowadays, supplements on the market have penetrated into every corner of life: girls take grape seeds and nicotinamide for antioxidants, fitness people take protein powder and branched-chain amino acids, elderly people often buy calcium tablets and amino sugars, and people with insomnia take melatonin and γ-aminobutyric acid. In fact, they all belong to the category of dietary supplements.

There is also a controversy that has been raging for more than ten years about supplements: Are naturally extracted ones necessarily better than synthetic ones? Many brands boast that their ingredients are "natural and organically extracted" when marketing, and they sell for ten times more than synthetic products, and people pay for them. But in fact, as long as it is a product that meets national safety standards, even if it is a few yuan of medicinal synthetic vitamin C or a few hundred yuan of cherry-extracted vitamin C, as long as the dosage is the same, the difference in the absorption and utilization rate in the human body is not as big as what the merchants boast. A lot of the premium is paid for the packaging and marketing rhetoric. Of course, there are exceptions. For example, the absorption rate of naturally extracted folic acid for some people with MTHFR gene mutations is indeed higher than that of synthetic folic acid. This situation cannot be generalized.

After all, for us ordinary people, there is no need to worry about whether it is food or medicine. Remember the two core red lines and you will avoid pitfalls: first, it cannot be taken as medicine, and no supplement can replace anti-hypertensive drugs or anti-diabetic drugs. Don’t be like the Aunt Zhang I met before. After hearing a lecture saying that deep-sea fish oil can lower blood pressure, she secretly stopped the anti-hypertensive medicine, and finally her blood pressure soared to 180 and went to the emergency room.； Secondly, it cannot be eaten as a meal. Don’t think that if you take some multivitamins every day, you can eat fried chicken and milk tea every day. Dietary supplements, the key is the word “supplement”. You must supplement when you are lacking. If you are not lacking, eating indiscriminately may put a burden on the body. Anyway, every time when I give nutritional consultation to people, I don’t just recommend or deny supplements. I first ask about what I have eaten recently, what my daily routine is, and whether I have done any relevant nutritional testing. I can figure out whether I am really deficient, and then I will start.