Supplements

Why supplements can help and not help, depending on which supplements we’re talking about

Allan Milne Lees
8 min readFeb 23, 2024
Image credit: Inverse

There’s a generic attitude among the media that supplements are a waste of money and can often be harmful (though most media organizations are happy to show ads for such things in order to pull in more revenue…). But one thing we can always be sure of is that empty-headed journalists are never a worthwhile source of information about anything of importance.

Moreover, lumping all supplements together into a single group is as meaningful as lumping all aircraft together into a single group. Comments relevant to the fuel burn per passenger of a Cessna 172 have no relevance to an Airbus 380.

So if we’re going to talk about supplements, we need to break them down into relevant categories. And within each category, we need to look at specific manufacturers and specific products. By way of analogy, we could have a category automobile, but within that category when it comes to reliability we can see that Toyota and Range Rover are in no way equivalent. So unless we segment adequately, anything we say will be wrong or misleading for most of what is in the category.

Let’s begin by stating very clearly that the generic media posture on supplements is stupid and wrong.

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Allan Milne Lees
Allan Milne Lees

Written by Allan Milne Lees

Anyone who enjoys my articles here on Medium may be interested in my books Why Democracy Failed and The Praying Ape, both available from Amazon.