A BBC article caught our attention this week.
"Popping a cocktail of supplements every day might be doing you more harm than good."
It is the sort of headline that many supplement companies might disagree with.
We did not.
In fact, we found ourselves agreeing with much of what it said.
These statistics in particular stood out.
76% of people take at least one supplement daily.
Nearly 1 in 5 people take four or more every day.
Taking supplements is no longer unusual—it’s standard practice. While they certainly play an important role when used appropriately, the real issue lies elsewhere: do we actually know what we’re taking?
Most people don’t wake up one morning and decide to take half a dozen supplements. It happens gradually—a recommendation from a friend, a podcast mention, a news article, or a social media post. Before long, the cupboard is full of multivitamins, Vitamin D, magnesium, fish oil, collagen, and dedicated formulas for sleep or joints.
Individually, every single product might make perfect sense. The problem arises when nobody steps back to look at the big picture. Collectively, these products can lead to overlapping ingredients, unexpectedly high nutrient levels, or combinations that were never actually evaluated as a complete system.
As engineers, that gap is particularly striking: you would never design a complex machine by picking individual components one by one without considering how the entire system functions together.
Which brings us to a simple challenge: open your supplement cupboard. For each product, ask yourself:
- What does it contain?
- Why do I take it?
- Does another product already contain the same ingredients?
- Would I choose it again today if I were starting from scratch?
You might be surprised by what you find.
Ultimately, the question is not whether supplements are good or bad—the question is whether we are taking them thoughtfully.
(The BBC article is well worth a read if you'd like to explore the topic further.)