"But one thing I now believe in 100% is the need to very carefully-conducted, FDA-regulated double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trials for any drug or intervention." - First of all the FDA has zero credibility, second: 90% of trials are very poorly designed and yield little information, third: too many of us have too many decades of using supplements and observing excellent benefits and thus we aren't about to stop taking and recommending supplements.
Having said that, there are a lot of supplements that are a massive waste of money. Either they are not cost effective (very expensive for very small benefits) or they are very poor products.
The bottleneck for your vision of running clinical trials for any supplements will be cost, time, and confounders. With things like vitamins that are used by a more general populations, there is less control over confounders in lifestyle, diet, etc. to show a significant correlation between a vitamin and a phenotype. Any comment on how to facilitate faster, cheaper trials to show efficacy?
"But one thing I now believe in 100% is the need to very carefully-conducted, FDA-regulated double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trials for any drug or intervention." - First of all the FDA has zero credibility, second: 90% of trials are very poorly designed and yield little information, third: too many of us have too many decades of using supplements and observing excellent benefits and thus we aren't about to stop taking and recommending supplements.
Having said that, there are a lot of supplements that are a massive waste of money. Either they are not cost effective (very expensive for very small benefits) or they are very poor products.
The bottleneck for your vision of running clinical trials for any supplements will be cost, time, and confounders. With things like vitamins that are used by a more general populations, there is less control over confounders in lifestyle, diet, etc. to show a significant correlation between a vitamin and a phenotype. Any comment on how to facilitate faster, cheaper trials to show efficacy?