Snake Oil? The scientific evidence for health supplements

Sorry we are revising this app with new data at the moment. It’ll back up soon.


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This image is a “balloon race”. The higher a bubble, the greater the evidence for its effectiveness. But the supplements are only effective for the conditions listed inside the bubble.

You might also see multiple bubbles for certain supps. These is because some supps affect a range of conditions, but the evidence quality varies from condition to condition. For example, there’s strong evidence that Green Tea is good for cholesterol levels. But evidence for its anti-cancer effects is conflicting. In these cases, we give a supp another bubble.

This visualisation generates itself from this Google Doc. So when new research comes out, we can quickly update the data and regenerate the image. (How cool is that??)

As ever, we welcome your thoughts, crits, comments, corrections, compliments, tweaks, new evidence, missing supps, and general feedback. Thank you!


source: PubMed, Cochrane,
data: in this Google spreadsheet
research: David McCandless, Pearl Doughty-White, Alexia Wdowski
code: Andy Perkins



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