Consumers and their supplements, part one

vitamin Europeans eat nutritious food. Americans pop pills. Or, that’s what some of my industry friends on the continent like to think. Are we really that bad? A quick fix for a bad diet?

I’ve been a supplement taker on and off for years, albeit randomly. Someone sneezes on the train, grab some Vitamin C. Have leg cramps, reach for the Calcium. I’m not sure what prompted a month of sipping noni juice – maybe I was feeling exotic.

I’ll be speaking this year at Focus on the Future , and wanted to “supplement” my company’s consumer food behavior survey with one on vitamins/minerals/herbals. What do people look for? Are they loyal to a brand? Are they faddists or do they swear by particular nutrients? And does anything worry them about taking supplements?

According to the Archives of Internal Medicine, half of all Americans take some sort of nutritional supplement which is why the industry has grown to somewhere north of $25 billion. Yet recent scrutiny by multiple organizations would indicate that we may be right to have some concerns. Poor efficacy is one thing; increased risk of mortality is quite another.

We know from our own company research – supported by industry analysis – that consumers are figuring out the food thing. Need evidence? Look at the plunging sales of high fructose corn syrup. Last week, there were 1,377 blog postings on hfcs; the top 20 (I didn’t go beyond that) were negative. In the same timeframe, there were 9,574 blog postings on sodium, largely attributed to New York’s new mandates. Also last week, 4,894 blog postings about dietary supplements. I expected many of them to be endorsements, blog ads, etc., so I was quite surprised that the first 20 or so were actually precautionary. Seems there was another muscle-building recall this week. But there were also postings citing reasons to avoid sleep-aid supplements and those promising instant weight loss … and, most unsettling, several discussions regarding possible connections to cancer from taking certain antioxidants (one from Memorial Sloan Kettering, by the way).

My sense is that the dietary supplement industry will be dramatically impacted by an emerging savvy consumer the same way food companies are being vetted. Yet, “what’s in your supplement” is harder to figure out than “what’s in your food.” But how and where ingredients are sourced, whether they’re natural or synthetic, and what other additives might be in a bottle that simply says “Vitamin E” are on the radar screens of consumer groups right now, and will reach the cerebral cortex of individual consumers pretty soon.