Nutritional supplements: a balance between science and marketing

Vitamin C, B12, zinc, magnesium, iron, calcium, omega-3, … the little colourful pills fill shelves by the dozen in pharmacies, parapharmacies, drugstores and supermarkets, both analogue and digital. Around 5.12 billion euros were spent in Europe alone in 2024 by people who wanted to give their system that little extra boost or who were prescribed them by their doctor – and the trend is rising.

However, it is anything but easy to draw the line between humbug and cure in the midst of marketing and new medical findings. Depending on who and where you ask, the substances are true miracle cures, a waste of money or even harmful to health. As is usually the case, the truth lies between the extremes – and the devil is in the detail.

What do they actually complement?

The name itself is interesting: "food supplements". It implies that something needs to be added to our diet. So is something missing? Yes, in some cases it is, says Dr Diederich. The general practitioner specialised in functional and preventive medicine in a second Master's degree, in which nutrition also plays an important role. "I'm talking about patients who come to the practice because of physical problems, not 'people you just meet in the pedestrian zone'. With the former, we see that they often need additional substances simply because their food no longer fulfils their needs. On the one hand, this is because today we are exposed to many more harmful substances that cause oxidative stress in the body and we need these nutrients to break them down. On the other hand, there simply are less nutrients in our food. Nutrients have decreased over the years."