I am sitting in a small room painted emerald green as a nurse counts vials she will need to fill with my warm red blood. I have no needle phobia, and I am a living, breathing woman in America, so I am used to being poked and prodded. Still, she and I exchange a meaningful glance over the 13 glass tubes. “It looks worse than it is,” she tells me.
This assessment is taking place at The Lanby—a “holistic primary care” provider with annual fees starting at $5,000. Like most 30-somethings, I have the nagging feeling that I should be more committed to achieving optimal health. And like most 30-somethings who have stacked obligations like Jenga blocks, there is a limit to how much I am willing to do. I have not come to this place to be told to exercise more or to switch to a Paleo diet. I want a pill. Perhaps several.
Me, and most people you know. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than half of adults (and more women than men) take a supplement, and the proportion is trending upward. There are now around 100,000 different supplements—which the FDA defines in vague terms as ingestible products meant to augment the diet—on the market in the United States. Such interventions run the gamut from familiar add-ons like the humble vitamin to witchier formulations: microbiome “boosters”; sleep chews; tablets meant to reduce stress, bloat, and “toxins” in the bloodstream; and capsules formulated to speed metabolism. And that’s not counting injectable peptides or hormones or mushroom elixirs, all of which further stretch the rather elastic definition of a “supplement.” Most undergo no FDA approval process.
But not even the sober and sensible among us are immune to their quick-fix promises. An acquaintance (the daughter of two doctors) told me she turned to vitamin gummies after gobs of her hair fell out postpartum. She trawled the drugstore aisles for a product high in follicle-boosting biotin and has been housing an Olly supplement called Undeniable Beauty ever since. Is it working? Her nails seem healthier, and the biotin is water-soluble, which means any excess she ingests gets flushed down the toilet.
This friend did her research on the ground, reading labels in an actual store—a quaint approach, according to The Lanby’s cofounder Chloe Harrouche. “Most people are sourcing their supplements through Instagram,” she explains. “They’re like, ‘Well, if it worked for them....’ ” Around 55 percent of Americans report getting health information from social media, which can of course be rife with misinformation. (Supplements do not cure measles!) Lack of access to affordable health care in America cannot be helping matters. Over 100 million Americans do not have a primary care provider.
I have never missed an annual checkup, but I still wonder about the potions and pastilles I scroll past. Should I be subscribings to Grüns, the brand of “superfood gummies” that purports to combine a multivitamin with adaptogens, herbs, antioxidants, prebiotics, “super mushrooms,” and the nutritional equivalent of whole vegetables and fruits? Could I live to be 100 and nimble on AG1, a greens powder endorsed by neuroscientist and podcaster Andrew Huberman? Should I actually read one of the dozens of articles I’ve glimpsed about creatine, a compound said to boost muscle mass and improve cognition? (Yes, according to Abbie Smith-Ryan, a professor of exercise physiology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “It’s not the end-all-be-all magic supplement a lot of people are selling, but it can have impactful results,” she says.) Is this quest all about some unfulfilled longing for the Flintstones multivitamin that I was barred from taking as a child? (“Eat your broccoli, and then we’ll talk,” my mother told me.) Or could there be one encapsulated mineral standing between me and perfect focus with Jennifer Lawrence hair?
While I wait for The Lanby to interpret the blood sacrifice I left in Midtown, I end up in a back-and-forth with another friend who, a few months ago, in the lead-up to running a marathon, woke up with “the kind of cold you can just tell is not going to go away.” Two friends recommended a 30-plus vitamin concoction called Wellness Formula. One friend had taken and loved it; the other claimed that the most stylish women she knew were on it. Less than a week later, she ran the marathon with—“cards on the table”—both a megadose of Wellness Formula coursing through her veins and a prescription steroid. The supplement tasted terrible (“garlic-forward,” as she puts it) and contained percentages of vitamin C that gave her pause. But she made it through the race. Months later, she is still taking it. Reviews online are rhapsodic, but whether it “works” depends a bit on your faith in botanicals like echinacea and mullein. Her zeal drives me to test out the similarly marketed AG1, which I mix into a murky brew and attempt to consume a handful of times before concluding that total optimization isn’t worth it.
Perhaps for the best. Observing data from 63 hospitals over the course of a decade, researchers have found that adverse effects from supplements are responsible for around 23,000 ER visits nationwide each year. Weight-loss supplements are the top culprit, but others aimed at sleep, heart health, and “detoxification” round out the list. “When people self-treat with a supplement, they might be short-circuiting a medical workup,” says Shelly Latte-Naor, MD, a New York–based internist. She points out that most supplements tout claims that have never been tested in robust clinical studies and use buzzy terms like “breast health,” which mean nothing. “We have to educate people about what we know and what we don’t.” In the former bucket: People whose blood work reveals vitamin deficiencies can sometimes benefit from supplementation.
In the latter bucket, just about everything else.
“Supplements are supposed to do just that: supplement,” adds Jillian O’Neil, a dietitian and a fitness coach at Equinox. “They’re for what you’re not getting on your plate and to fill in what isn’t realistic for you to consume.” She would scream it from the rooftops if she could: None are a replacement for fundamental good habits—adequate sleep, movement, nutrition. Amy Shah, MD, author of Hormone Havoc: A Science-Backed Protocol for Perimenopause & Menopause, also prefers people work on their diets first and foremost—chew before swallowing, that is—but she broadly recommends the three supplements with the most impressive data: vitamin D, for those of us who suffer through gray winters; omega-3s, purported to boost heart health (with mixed results in studies); and magnesium, for sleep and possible mental health benefits. She stops short of advising some universal protocol. Dosing is individual.
And for some people, supplements—because of their actual efficacy or thanks to the almighty placebo effect—do make a real difference. A writer friend started taking standard-issue Garden of Life Vitamin Code Raw One for Women multivitamins and found relief for the first time in her life from “unmanageable” periods that she had long chalked up to fibroids. A New York publicist and believer in Western medicine turned to supplements after labs showed that her cholesterol had shot up. She was put on an intensive action plan of capsules and pills care of the membership-based testing platform Function Health: the compound red yeast rice, fish oil, CoQ10, and berberine. Six months later, her blood work shocked her doctor. She had gone from being “off the charts” to just out of range. (This is the part where I say: This is not medical advice.)
For those who suspect simple vitamin deficiencies but would rather not “subscribe” to health care, I can report getting good results from insurance-accepting medical professionals with sheer pushiness. Years ago, I requested a set of labs that found me so deficient in B₁₂ that my endocrinologist made me return for repeat testing, suspecting contamination. I have been supplementing and more cheerful ever since. Last summer, I was diagnosed with anemia while pregnant and tried three iron supplements before discovering a gentler form that I still take. It was less chic to get this news in a subterranean Weill Cornell practice than it might have been elsewhere, but the pills work just the same.
In the end, The Lanby schedules a one-hour consultation with me to read the tea leaves. A few numbers come back borderline: vitamin D (I need more sun) and cortisol (I need less stress). One result drove the team to ask me whether I had just gotten over a cold. (I had.) Across almost 100 metrics, the biggest flags are the aforementioned sagging vitamin D levels, a dip in docosahexaenoic acid that a fish oil supplement could turn right around, and the fact that I need to be consuming more fiber. Also, it might be a decent idea to meditate. It’s about as good a showing as an ambition-addled New Yorker could hope for.
