Vitamin, herb, and nutritional supplement manufacturers have a strong financial interest in making you believe you need their products. But the real question is do you? If you search the web you'll find a wide variety of answers, from supplement companies, professional athletes, doctors, personal trainers, nutritionists, and everyone else who feels like voicing their opinion. You could easily find ten different opinions, and like most people you'd probably be fairly confused. So what's the truth?

I'm going to lay out the real truth, and you probably won't like it very much. First of all, let me preface this by saying that as a very active and athletic guy, I personally take a lot of supplements. So I definitely do my part to support the quality supplement companies out there, and I can tell you for a certainty that some products really do work. But the question wasn't do they work, it was do you need them.

Obviously we all need certain levels of vitamins on a daily basis. Some of those vitamins our bodies can store (fat soluble - A, D, E, & K) and some we cannot (water soluble - B-Complex & C). There are definitive harmful effects of high doses of certain vitamins, especially the fat soluble ones. Large doses of vitamin B-6 (300-500+mg) have also been linked to irreversible nerve damage. You'll find many that contend refined and processed foods lose much of the nutritional content, and in more extreme cases that soil depletion and hybrid farming are creating fruits and vegetables with lower nutrient content. In any case, there are valid arguments for supplementing certain vitamins in normal quantities. It may be that you don't eat certain types of foods that contain the nutrients you need, or there may be other reasons. In any case, I would suggest that basic vitamin supplementation within normal limits is a good thing, but it still doesn't answer the question.

The bottom line is we really don't know if you need more vitamins, or how certain supplements work. In most cases the research is performed with a specific end in mind. This is the desired result by the company paying for the research. Sure, it may be a blind or double blind study, but how many failures did it take before they had marginal success? How were the numbers manipulated to make it sound better than it really is? We just don't know. Let's assume we do know the supplement works well now, but what effect will it have on your body after ten years? How will you kidneys deal with the extra strain? Same answer - in almost every case we really don't know. We must come to grips with the fact that we are lacking a great deal of knowledge on the human body and the many substances we put into it, and that we are very far from having the necessary level of knowledge to really answer this question. It's not a pretty answer, but it is the truth.

So what should you do? My advice is to be selective with the things you put into your body. Make sure they come from a reputable manufacturer, and look into the research. Be skeptical and realize that you are taking a risk. In many cases the risk is just that you're wasting money, but in others it could mean temporary or even long-term damage to your body. Only you can decide if it's worth the risk to increase athletic performance or to get in shape.

Here are some of my specific opinions on certain supplements. Remember, we really don't have hard data on these things, so these are just my opinions, some of which are based on my experiences. First and foremost I would never recommend any sort of stimulant products, especially for weight loss. I would recommend everyone take a good multi-vitamin. There is some very promising research on Omega-3, so I would also highly recommend taking that, as long as it contains no impurities. While I don't know if it's necessary for everyone, I do also think a quality "green drink" made from dark green vegetables is one of my top three supplements.

I believe that competi

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