How important are dietary supplements for your health?
Are dietary supplements pure money-making schemes, or do they actually benefit your health? On this topic, you’ll often find nothing but black-and-white opinions. Not too long ago, I was a strong opponent of so-called supplements myself. I believed that with a healthy and varied diet, there was no need for protein shakes, multivitamin tablets, and so on. Over the past several years, I’ve looked into this topic more deeply and had to revise some of my views.
Below you’ll find a non-exhaustive overview of the pros and cons of supplements, as well as recommendations — based on over 10 years of experience and the current state of the science.
conS
1. a money-making scheme
The dietary supplement industry is a billion-dollar business. This attracts many shady, profit-driven people who see quick money in the industry by telling false stories or making promises they can’t keep. I’ve experienced this myself: in various continuing education courses, I repeatedly met trainers who could barely make a living from personal training alone and therefore relied on selling products. All of this makes it difficult to distinguish between useful supplements and pointless products.
2. trainer commissions
I receive offers from companies almost every week promising me commissions. Especially on social media like Instagram, I keep getting requests to take on ambassador roles. The commissions offered become attractive mainly when sales volumes are higher. There are also quite a few that operate with pyramid schemes. Personal Trainer , however, should primarily focus on their job as a coach and earn their money that way. Otherwise, they should change jobs — at least in my opinion.
3. Paid and poorly conducted studies
First problem: Studies are often funded by companies that want to publish results that support their interests or beliefs. In psychology, this is also called “confirmation bias”.
Second problem: methodology. Carefully conducted studies with a sufficiently large sample and a double-blind design that are reliable and valid are still relatively rare. For that reason, study results without detailed methodological information should always be treated with caution.
Example: You examine the effect of a supplement on training. Are the participants beginners, or do they already have training experience? How old are they? Men or women? Which exercises and loads are used, and how many repetitions? Are other influencing factors considered as well — for example diet, sleep, or the use of other supplements or stimulants? How is the outcome verified? Number of reps? Weight lifted? A biopsy to measure muscle mass? Question after question — not easy to answer, and leaving plenty of room for interpretation.
Pros
1. Food has changed
Instead of home-grown vegetables, we get tomatoes from Spain and asparagus from France. So they don’t spoil on the way, they’re harvested unripe, treated, or even genetically modified (e.g., in the USA).
Soil composition has changed due to more intensive use; fields are fertilized and sprayed, and foods are harvested, processed, and handled by machines.
Packaging is often highly problematic plastic that contains BPA — more on that in this post «why you should drink from glass bottles» — and products sometimes sit on shelves for days. Salad is washed and pre-packaged — all to save our precious time. Animals are stuffed with hormones or concentrated feed they wouldn’t naturally eat — outdoor access? Forget it.
It makes sense that, for the reasons mentioned above, foods can end up with different nutrient profiles, and this has been shown repeatedly. Fruits and vegetables have lost 5–40% of their minerals. Oranges contain only 1/8 of the vitamin A, tomatoes have 3/4 less calcium, and broccoli has 80% less copper. In 1960, cod still had 70% protein!
It has also been shown that these conditions can disrupt our natural hormone balance, which can show up as digestive problems, weight gain, and other issues.
2. Diet has changed
Surveys repeatedly show just how little vegetables people eat. It becomes even more striking when you look at what’s being eaten, for example, in a Migros restaurant: schnitzel with fries, currywurst, pizza, and kebab with two or three packets of ketchup or mayo — plus a cola — is not uncommon. The arguments in sections 1 and 2 make it clear that dietary supplements (alongside a healthier diet) can help provide the body with missing vitamins, minerals, and trace elements.
3. People’s lifestyles have changeD
Many people sit in an office all day. Not a hint of sunshine. Yet the sun is so important for vitamin D production — you can read more about that in this post on vitamin D.
On top of that, as already mentioned above, eating habits have changed: breakfast gets skipped with the help of excuses — no time, or “I’m doing intermittent fasting.” If there’s anything at all, it’s a coffee and a croissant “to go” at the train station. Lunch breaks, if they happen at all, are kept as short as possible. Ideally a sandwich or Bircher muesli, maybe even eaten in front of the computer. Dinner: When I get home at 20:00, you expect me to cook? Give me a break. A few slices of bread with salami or jam is about all you can manage.
After that, maybe a bit of TV or scrolling on your phone or computer — where the blue light from screens throws our sleep-wake rhythm off.
Of course, this is a bit exaggerated — but that’s often how it goes, and more is being demanded of us than ever. And that takes its toll.
4. Science has changed
By now, we can produce things that couldn’t be made years or decades ago. This also opens up new possibilities in the production of dietary supplements, leading, for example, to higher-quality, more natural, and more easily absorbed products. These criteria influence the supplements we use, which we’ll discuss in the next section.
Which supplements make sense
If you read the pros and cons above for and against using dietary supplements, you may already be able to decide for yourself whether — and where — buying supplements makes sense.
At Personalworkout, we believe supplements can make sense after an individual analysis of your goals, lifestyle, and diet. We mainly use the following ones, with the order reflecting necessity (Marc’s opinion) and the selection based on naturalness and bioavailability.
- Magnesium, to improverecovery and sleep, since sleep is absolutely central for fat loss and muscle gain. There are different forms of magnesium, and magnesium also fulfills many other important functions.
- Grass-fed beef liver contains a lot of vitamin A as well as the B vitamins B2, B3, B5, B6, B7, B9, and B12, high amounts of copper and iron, as well as zinc and selenium. Of course, you can also simply eat beef liver.
- Cod liver oil for healthy omega-3s in a good ratio, as well as natural vitamin A and D.
- Creatine and carnitine, for anyone who doesn’t eat red meat. Chicken contains only one tenth of the creatine and one twentieth of the carnitine. The body needs carnitine to transport fatty acids into the mitochondria and generate energy from fat there. You can learn myths and facts about creatine here.
- Glutamine — the most important amino acid for addressing leaky-gut symptoms in the gut, and found in larger amounts in (in descending order): beef, chicken, fish, eggs. One egg has 1 g, which is about one fifth of what 100 g of beef contains.
- Vitamin C — which, in principle, you can get in sufficient amounts if you eat fruits and vegetables daily.
- Protein shakes to lower cortisol levels after training and to supply the necessary amount of daily protein for muscle building. How much protein you need and which type you should choose is explained here.
Vegetarians and vegans can’t supplement important nutrients like B12 and vitamin D from natural sources and usually have to rely on artificial products. Learn everything vegetarians and vegans should eat and supplement here. I only know of one exception that obtains all ingredients naturally — except folic acid — and that is LaVita, a micronutrient concentrate made from fruits, vegetables, herbs, and plant oils. B12, for example, is obtained and extracted with the help of bacteria. A good all-in-one solution, not just for vegetarians.
Beyond that, there are various dietary supplements that can help with hormonal imbalance (e.g., women in perimenopause), stress, acute inflammation, gut issues, and more. All of these problems can prevent optimal fat loss and/or muscle gain.
For optimal success, you therefore need a holistic approach and different perspectives. Personalworkout clients benefit from exactly that.
You can get more free information on nutrition in our nutrition guide (German only). In our Kitchen Workout cookbook (German only) you’ll also find plenty of tasty and healthy recipes you can easily cook at home.
Sources
- Ernährung und körperliche Degeneration – Weston A. Price
- Aragon, A. A., & Schoenfeld, B. J. (2013). Nutrient timing revisited: is there a post-exercise anabolic window?. Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition.
- Chat GPT 5.2
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