Holford – “Don’t Waste Your Money on Vitamins”

Wow, I was browsing Patrick Holford‘s website, and I’ve found him saying something I agree with – there’s a whole report which (at least if you believe the title) is centred on the importance of not wasting your money on supplements. Sadly, while I like the title of the article, it quickly segues into Holford’s claims that readers need to waste their money on…sorry, I meant to say invest their money in supplement pills.

Holford argues that “the chances that your diet meets all the ‘RDAs’ [recommended daily allowances] are very slim”. It’s possible that many diets won’t meet all RDAs (though I’d suspect that many people who are going to the effort of buying expensive supplements will already be eating a pretty decent diet). However, the solution to a failure to eat enough of certain nutrients is, um, to eat more of them – basically, eat a varied, healthy diet. If you’re struggling to do this, your GP or a dietician may be able to help. If you’re curious, you can also work out roughly what your daily macro- and micronutrient intake is pretty easily – for example, I like fitday.com (though don’t take this as ‘serious’ diagnostic advice – calculations through this type of website can be a bit erratic). To get the nutrients you need, you should, by and large, spend you money on tasty, healthy food – but Holford wants you to waste money on pills.

For Holford, “what nutritional therapists do [is] they work out your optimum nutrition”. That’s strange, I thought professional scientists were doing research on our nutritional needs – for example, on what large doses of antioxidant pills do to us. I know that if someone is going to work out my nutritional needs, I want them to be well-qualified (qualified well beyond ION ‘foundation science degrees’). I’d also want to know that the person making these recommendations doesn’t stand to gain financially by selling the products that they’re recommending. I guess some people might trust Holford – whose only accredited university qualification is an undergrad degree in psychology, and who does make money by selling vitamin pills – to work out our ‘optimum nutrition’. If you follow Holford’s recommendations, though, you are likely to waste money on supplements.

Holford argues that “At the Institute for Optimum Nutrition we started from the top down. We asked the question “what intake of vitamin xx equates to the maximum possible wellbeing and the smallest possible risk of disease?”” This is the wrong approach to take: do this with drugs and you end up over-medicating patients; do it with supplement pills and patients end up, um, over-supplemented. We’ll look at vitamin C, as an example.

There’s some evidence that supplementing with vitamin C could, slightly, reduce the length of colds (those taking it appeared to stay at home with colds for an average of about half a day less). Does that we should all take vitamin C supplements to reduce the amount of time we spend suffering from colds? No – Dr Chalmers is probably correct to argue that he does “not consider the very minor potential benefit that might result from taking vitamin C three times a day for life worth either the effort or the risk, no matter how slight the latter might be.” Basically, supplementing with vitamin C isn’t worth the hassle, cost, or the (small) risk. This is especially so with the large doses Holford recommends – they can cause, cough, ‘digestive discomfort’, so ‘optimum nutrition’ might leave you spending rather too long sat uncomfortably on the toilet (albeit suffering from slightly shorter colds).

So, Holford’s report runs the risk of leaving people over-supplemented. He does recommend a wide range of supplements, including some which JAMA found to increase mortality. Oddly, Holford hasn’t got round to mentioning this meta-analysis in his report on why one shouldn’t waste money on supplements. Not sure why…

At any rate, if you do as Holford advises in his report on not wasting money on supplements, you’re very likely to end up wasting money on supplements. At the time of writing, Holford’s ‘own supplement regime’ is on sale for a mere £73.20 - I could eat, and eat well, for two months for that.

For most people, instead of spending time and money collecting a range of vitamin/mineral/fat pills and powders to swallow, the best way to get the nutrients is by eating a healthy, varied diet. This way’s much tastier, too.