Choosing the Best Nutritional Supplements

What Nutritional Supplements are Best for Me?

You’re interested in nutritional supplements as a way to promote health and reduce the risk of illness. However, with all of the nutritional supplements on the market, how do you choose?  Here are some insights by Dr. J. Michael Bennett from a Houston radio show.

This is a transcript of a Dr. Jay Show broadcast on 1560TheGame.  Dr. J. Michael Bennett is a Board Certified Orthopedic Surgeon and a Fellowship Trained Sports Medicine Physician serving patients from Katy, Fort Bend County, Metro Houston and Southeast Texas from offices in Houston, near the Houston Galleria, and Sugar Land, TX.  Call 281-633-8600 for an appointment.

Here’s the first portion of the Show:

Usually the show is about sports medicine and wellness, but today we’re going to focus more on the wellness and nutrition side of things. For those of you tuning in for the first time, my name is Dr. J. Michael Bennett, I’m a board-certified orthopedic surgeon and I practice here in the Greater Houston area out in Sugar Land, Texas. I did my residency at Baylor College of Medicine, followed by a sports medicine fellowship at the University of Miami. I am a member of the Fondren Orthopedic Groups. 

The purpose of the show is to primarily break down the myths and misconceptions regarding sports medicine, wellness and orthopedics in general, as well as to talk about some nutritional aspects. Today we’re going to talk about supplementation, the anti-aging movement, and some of the supplements you can buy over the counter – what’s good, what’s not good, and how you can differentiate between what we recommend and what you can buy. There really are a lot of smokescreens out there, a lot of marketing and media, and sometimes it becomes hard to determine what is actually beneficial and is going to help you, and what might hurt you. Our number here is 281-633-8600 and we want you guys to call in.

So, first off, I want to talk about something I always harp on, and that’s questions to ask yourself whether you’re going to visit your doctor or whether you’re going to get a procedure done or whether you’re going to buy a nutritional supplement or try a new diet or what have you.

1. Does the product promise rapid improvement in health and performance? They often market these things like they sound like it’s too good to be true half the time and for the majority of cases, that it the case. You’ve got to be very careful when you see a product or somebody promising that a product will give you 100 percent recovery or you’ll lose weight over two to three days or you’ll have better cognition or better memory over a day or so. It’s really not true because you’ve got to tie in a lot of factors here. 
2. Does it seem too good to be true? And that’s exactly what I said to the first one; they kind of correlate or bounce off each other there. 
3. Are the results evidence based? You’re really going to see this in supplements across the board because a lot of the supplements out there are not evidence based. And when I say evidence based I mean that there are actually studies that show these supplements or nutritional foods do you some good long term and whether or not there’s actually a study or a report that has looked at it long term objectively and compared a group of people that have tried it, a group that haven’t and a group of people that have tried a different type of supplement and seeing what the differences are and the results are. I think that’s something key to also take into consideration. 
4. What’s the absorption rate on the supplement? The average absorption rate on a supplement on the market is about 25 percent. So you’re spending all of this money out there for a supplement that you’re only absorbing a small portion of and excreting the rest out of your system.  Most supplements do not say on the box what their absorption rate is. The only way you can really determine if it’s a good absorption rate is to see if it’s pharmaceutical grade because that is a code word for 75 percent absorption. So you want to make sure it’s at least pharmaceutical grade.
5. Does the manufacturer follow any kind of guidelines? The big problem with the supplement industry and the nutritional industry these days is that there are no guidelines out there. There’s the FDA, but they do not provide standards for supplementation. So anybody can put anything out there on the market and tell you it is the Number One supplement or nutritional product you are looking for because there’s no regulation. And I think, honestly, that within the next five to ten years, this is probably going to change. But as of right now, you’ve got to do your due diligence, you’ve got to go in there, you’ve got to make sure you do your research and you get it from reputable sources like the American Medical Association or the Mayo Clinic or a well-established medical facility. Beware of the Internet. It’s interesting to see how far this has all come.  When I was in medical school alternative medicine was a taboo kind of thing. Now this is actually considered a part of mainstream medicine and is being incorporated in clinics across the country, large institutions like M.D. Anderson, where they’re incorporating things like nutritional therapy, music therapy, acupuncture and meditation in addition to the traditional medical treatments. It’s becoming more of a holistic approach and I think it’s impressive when you see that. It’s amazing that just ten or fifteen years ago, when I was in medical school, people were looking down on this and saying, “That’s not going to go anywhere” and now we’re seeing it in some of the biggest hospitals around and for the sickest patients around. I think that there’s a lot to be said about that and we’re going to talk about that a little bit here later on today as well. 

Author

Dr. J. Michael Bennett