Next week is the oddly named National Health Education Week. Like calling a law that will dump poison into rivers the National Clean Rivers Act, the Health Education name is odd because the year it was created, 1995, by the Clinton administration's appointees in the National Institutes of Health, was the year after he exempted supplements and alternatives to medicine from FDA oversight. The $35 billion industry populated by grifters who get away with lying as long as they put “This statement has not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease" in small print and don't adulterate their placebos with real medicine.



Since then, government "Health Education" has done nothing but cause confusion and undermine legitimate medicine.

The problem if you care about getting value for the money you spend on health is that this stuff is an epidemiology-created fad. It has no evidence of working outside companies asking people who bought it if they think it worked. And the epidemiology that set off the fad is not much better. 

Correlation is trivial to create; get enough rows of benefits or diseases and enough columns of food and there is a 100% chance I can find something with statistical significance. It is such a meaningless metric that it can't be a surprise the Miracle Food and Scary Chemical fringes of epidemiology, like International Agency for Research on Cancer or Harvard School of Public Health, or plenty of others, embrace it.

There is no evidence these supplements help anyone. They may even be rancid.