Most dietary supplements don't help your heart and some may be harmful

Every day, about half of American adults take a vitamin, mineral, herb, amino acid, or other dietary supplement. Most do this because they seek to improve or maintain their health. Others do it in hopes of staving off heart disease. Yet only a handful of supplements offer possible—though limited—help against heart disease. Some popular ones have no benefit, and others contain dangerous contaminants, reports the August 2014 Harvard Heart Letter. "A lot of people want to add something natural and alternative to the conventional medications they're taking, and they assume that dietary supplements might help and can't hurt," says Dr. Pieter Cohen, a dietary supplement safety researcher and assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. But that's not the case. Unlike pharmaceuticals, which undergo extensive testing to prove they're effective and safe before they can be sold, dietary supplements can be sold without proof of effectiveness or safety. Moreover, supplement makers can claim their products improve health, even when there's little or no evidence to support such claims. Multivitamins are one of the most popular supplements taken by people trying to prevent heart disease. But large, "gold standard" trials have shown that taking a daily multivitamin does not ward off heart disease. Small studies suggest that some dietary supplements, such as red yeast rice, lowers cholesterol, a risk factor for heart disease. Yet the amount of the active ingredient i...
Source: New Harvard Health Information - Category: Consumer Health News Source Type: news