The Truth About Supplements

For the last fifty years I have been studying the pharmacological effect of foods and food extracts, and how these can be used to reduce your chances of illness and to make you feel and function better.

Dr. Paul Clayton has a PhD in clinical pharmacology, is a former senior scientific advisor to the UK government committee on the Safety of Medicines and works as the Director of Science for LYMA.

What's Wrong With the Supplement Industry?

There are a lot of problems with the supplement industry in its current form. Today's supplement industry is irresponsible, characterised by unstandardised, unproven extracts. The largest sector of the supplement industry, the billion dollar fish oil industry, is a confidence trick. We all know Omegas 3, 6 and 9 are good for us, but there is little evidence that supplementing with fish oil capsules is an effective way to take these nutrients on board. Added to that, the Guardian recently covered an extensive report which found that most fish oil capsules were in fact rancid by the time they reached supermarket shelves. It's a similar story for many multivitamin brands: often the amount of benefit they deliver can easily be delivered as part of a balanced diet. Many deliver little benefit at all. The regulation is extremely poor. Meanwhile what regulation there is inhibits manufacturers of supplements with proven benefits being able to say exactly what their products can do.

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Why Doesn't the Medical World Focus On Preventative Health?

By the time a patient goes to a doctor, it's often too late. Rather like a fire engine arriving at a house long after the house is burnt three-quarters to the ground. By the time medics arrive on the scene, the tools that they have merely treat the symptoms. For years, the pharmaceutical industry has shown no interest in preventative health. Instead, their focus is on treating symptoms, rather than preventing disease occurring in the first place. The bulk of the medical business is not in cure, but in treatment. This is because health services are largely focussed on the treatment of chronic degenerative disease, the diseases that are attacking the health span of the western world. These include diabetes, cancer, osteoarthritis, Alzheimer's and osteoporosis. Doctors tend to come onto the scene to treat these diseases late in the day, as they burn long and slow under the surface in their preclinical phase. Most patients don't realise they are suffering, as it takes a long time for them to reach the point where so much healthy tissue has been destroyed, that the patient notices symptoms of pain or disability.

The Growing Public Health Disaster: What Can We Do?

We are a desperately unhealthy population, which the medical profession is not in a position to address. Focussed on reactive medicine, it is all they can do to firefight the symptoms, when they should be taking a step back to consider the cause. The reason for this is they don't have the right tools to prevent conditions from occurring. Drugs aren't the answer; instead we need to undo the problems that are creating the growing public health disaster. These tools are nutritional. This is where true prevention lies.

What Can Be Done to Help Prevent Chronic Degenerative Disease?

Pharmaco-nutritional tools can do far more than pharma-tools, so far as preventative disease is concerned. They act in a far more profound way. They reset the metabolic errors that drive chronic degenerative disease, getting to the heart of the matter in a way that pharmaceutical tools simply cannot do. I think that it's time to bring clarity and rigour to this sector because now that evidence-based nutrition is coming of age, we need to find a way to convey this information in simple, but honest ways, to consumers who can then use it to improve their own health. We need a new regulatory system.

The Supplement Industry Is Misleading. We Need Better Regulation

The supplement industry lacks regulation and ultimately puts consumers at risk. A vast amount of the products in the industry are unproven and the regulatory climate needs to be stricter. Meanwhile, peer-reviewed ingredients aren't allowed to make any medical claims. Contents should match label claims, but these are not rigorously checked, equally watch our for rancid ingredients that have long past their sell by date or are not stable enough to survive manufacture and distribution.

The current regulatory system makes it impossible for the few companies like LYMA who are formulating with validated nutritional ingredients to talk truthfully about what they have. So, the consumer has the worst of all possible worlds as the companies who are in a position to offer solutions are unable to legally talk about it.

The advent of processed food has brought about wide scale dysnutriton. As a society we are eating too much, and much of that is empty calories, not providing us with the nutrition our bodies need. The evidence for the therapeutic effects of nutritonal enhancement from epidemiological research, preclinical models and clinical trials is overwhelming and yet the regulatory system has not yet taken this into account. We desperately need a new regulatory system to look at the real, 21st century science that's being done in this sector, allowing responsible brands to speak about ingredients that have been shown repeatedly in a range of studies to exert benefits. At the moment we have this very odd situation where you have a lot of companies in the supplement sector who clearly, when you look at what they're selling, have no idea about what it is that they are selling, and consumers who are completely misinformed, and who don't know what they're buying. You wouldn't want to run a railroad or any other kind of industry on this basis.