Supplements and the people who take them.
Americans spend almost as much money on vitamins and other dietary supplements — $41 billion, according to Nutrition Business Journal — as on organic food. What are these pills and powders doing for us? We’re still finding out.
A lot of published research indicates that multivitamins and individual supplements don’t offer much benefit. But what exactly it is that people are taking is changing all the time. A recent study of trends in supplement usage found that people have been popping less of vitamins C and E and selenium than they did in the 1990s and more vitamin D (and now we might be overdoing D). And vitamin D isn’t even growing nearly as fast as probiotics, whose sales were expected to jump 17 percent in 2016, according to Nutrition Business Journal says.
All the while, the overall supplement business has been growing more than 5 percent a year. Watch this market closely — more and more people who want to be healthier are simply not going to stop experimenting.
