Vitamins & Supplements

No matter the color of your pepper, the macronutrient (protein, fat, carbohydrate) and fiber content wont differ much. Red, yellow and orange bell peppers are simply the ripe forms of different green peppers, which is why they tend to cost more.

Products sold as "dietary supplements" lead to about 23,000 emergency-room visits and more than 2,100 hospital admissions every year, a new government report estimates.

Older adults whove been loading up on calcium - either in their diets or in supplement form - to protect their bones recently got a shock on the nightly news: Extra calcium, according to two new headline-making reviews published in BMJ, was not associated with meaningful benefits for improving bone density or reducing fracture risk.

As a regular reader of this newsletter, you know to pay attention when a five-year clinical trial with more than 3,000 participants reports no benefits from omega-3 supplements against cognitive decline. Such a study - one of the largest and longest of its kind - would seem to slam the door on hopes for brain benefits of fish-oil pills. But before you go searching for the receipt on the last batch of omega-3 supplements you bought, Tufts experts have a couple of caveats.

Q. Is it possible to get too much potassium? Are there some drugs that cause you to retain potassium?

Q. I keep seeing ads during the nightly news for a supplement containing a protein originally found in jellyfish thats supposed to protect your memory. Could this really work?

Vitamin D, which some reports have credited with near-magical powers against everything from cardiovascular disease to dementia, increasingly seems to be just another nutrient-important to get enough, but offering little advantage from extra. Now a new study suggests that even where vitamin Ds benefits are clearly established-as a partner to calcium in building strong bones-its effects are limited: More vitamin D, beyond recommended intakes, is not necessarily better for your bones.

Heres another reason to make sure youre getting enough vitamin D: A recent Tufts study suggests that vitamin D deficiency may be associated with greater risk of osteoarthritis (OA) of the knee. Compared to those with adequate blood levels of vitamin D, participants low in the sunshine vitamin were twice as likely to experience worsening of knee osteoarthritis. Those deficient in vitamin D as well as a hormone involved in metabolizing the vitamin were at triple the risk.

Q. I understand that it is healthier to get calcium from food rather than supplements. Does the calcium added to almond milk count as a food or a supplement? Is there any risk of getting too much in this form?

Since the early 1940s, when multivitamin/mineral supplements first became available, Americans have popped countless such pills in hopes of nutritional insurance and making up for any dietary shortfalls. Today, more than one-third of all Americans take a multivitamin, and multivitamins alone account for more than 40% of all vitamin and mineral supplement sales-an estimated $5.4 billion annually. Yet the scientific evidence for the benefits of multivitamins is mixed at best, with large recent studies reporting no association between usage and better cardiovascular or cognitive health and only modest cancer protection.