Today, the consumption of supplements has grown exponentially compared to twenty but also only 10 years ago. There are all types of supplements on the market, starting with vitamins and mineral salts. It is estimated that over 50% of the world’s population uses and abuses it.
In this article, we focus on the usefulness of supplements for the heart.

SUPPLEMENTS: WORK ONLY IN CASE OF DEFICIENCY

Many people rely on supplements without even knowing if they actually have a deficiency – when in doubt, what’s wrong with taking a pill?

It is always cheaper than having blood tests, also because blood tests to look for specific vitamins or mineral salts in our body are often expensive and are not all covered by the national health system, so you pay for them out of your own pocket and at a price. full.

But just if we don’t know if we need a particular supplement, a fortiori we shouldn’t take it, right?

But many people also take 5 different supplements a day.

This mostly happens to solve a health problem, rather than a specific deficiency. So I take a supplement, let’s take an example, of antioxidants to counteract aging, without knowing that if I overdo it with antioxidants I get the opposite effect, of weakening the immune system or of having side effects ( here and here of the studies) .

This without considering the additives that are added, the fact that many dry herbal or mushroom extracts are not yet known all the effects on the organism, that the doses are not personalized, that one thing is the synthetic supplement and the other is the natural one.

Today, a new study focuses on the effects of supplements on heart and cardiovascular health.

Are they really useful in reducing cardiovascular risk?

The study was conducted by Dr. Bruce Y. Lee , whom I had known for some time because he has been studying mitochondria in relation to stress and longevity for years. Dr. Lee benefited from the cooperation of researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health International Health Center. And this is the result of their research on heart supplements with the analysis of 277 studies on the subject.

SUPPLEMENTS FOR THE HEART AND CARDIOVASCULAR HEALTH.

• Niacin (the most common form of vitamin B3), generic multivitamins A to Z, vitamin B6, antioxidants, vitamin A, and iron offer no heart benefits of any kind.

Dr. Lee explains that this also applies to other supplements.
Cohort studies, he says, do nothing more than look at a population sample for certain periods of time, showing associations and correlations between the consumption of a product and the health of that sample, but do not demonstrate a cause-and-effect relationship. Furthermore, some supplements, when taken together, can increase the risk of cardiovascular problems: this is the case of the combination of calcium + vitamin D.

• Folic acid and omega3 are also considered positively in the study but with little margins of efficacy, i.e. there is not enough data to indicate that they really work, but scarce or barely enough.
  Dr. Lee says it is always best to get them from fresh sources, that is, from food, and not by means of supplements. There is no magic ingredient that will fix our health and make us live longer, he said.