Doctors do take nutritional supplements!
The public believes that doctors and conventional medicine don’t believe that nutritional supplements are necessary is far from the truth.
The cardiology website – the Heart.org Medscape polled its readers in 2018, asking them whether they recommended supplements to their patients and if they took supplements themselves. This was an anonymous questionnaire, and thus individuals were happy to give their honest opinion.
Of the 950 physicians who responded, 31% recommended to the patients that they should take supplements, and exactly the same number (31%) took supplements themselves.
However, when they looked at family physicians, specialist doctors looking after the medical care of patients rather than surgeons etc., the number who took nutritional supplements rocketed to 74%!
The reasons doctors gave for taking supplements (the ones they mostly took were multivitamin and multi-minerals, and some additional fish oils) were – improving health and well-being, filling nutritional gaps and preventing diseases.
Unfortunately for the medical profession is not PC to support supplements, even though many believe that they should.
One of the major reasons for not supporting supplements is that most trials using supplements have not shown any benefit. There are many reasons for this, but most likely it is because they used poor quality supplements that only gave the bare minimum of additional nutrition.
When you look at the guidelines for supplements, the RDA (recommended daily allowance) was designed in World War I to make certain that soldiers and civilians had enough nutrition to prevent deficiency diseases. To quote the National Research Council which published the RDA- “the RDA is the minimal intake of any nutrient that will maintain normal function and health”. However, a further NRC paper in 1953 said – “although the optimal intake of essential dietary nutrients remains largely speculative, there is considerable evidence that improvement in growth and function occurs when the intake of certain nutrients is increased above the level just sufficient to prevent signs of deficiency diseases.”
So even and their own literature, the National research Council admits that there is evidence that higher than RDA levels of supplements improves growth and function.
Specialist physicians obviously see the results in their patients, and from their reading and experience, this is the reason why so many are taking supplements. Obviously, if you are taking supplements, take ones that contain significantly more than the RDA!
I take a quality multi and at least 3 grams of fish oil daily and recommend that my patients do the same.