I think a lot of people on this thread are guilty of cognitive laziness. Either all supplements are bad at any dose or they're all good at any dose. Nobody wants to talk about science because reading medical studies is hard.
Reading this article reminds me of trying to have technical bio-medical conversations with doctors. They blow me off and give me the same baby talk they give all their other patients. That's the way the author of this article writes, broad baby talk generalizations. It's the reaction I'd imagine I'd get if I tried to have a conversation about digital signal encoding with my cable TV installer. They don't care, it's not their job, it's not important and they just do their job the way they do it for everybody and get paid either way.
Yeah, that phenomenon plagues everything diet/nutrition/fitness these days.
Doctors themselves aren't necessarily scientists nor researchers, and in practicality it's hard to have that kind of wide depth of knowledge when you're supposed to be a 'general' physician anyway. The problem arises from our culture which turns everything doctors say into a holy tautology that dominates public discourse (without actually understanding the matter), to the point where it doesn't even matter what scientific research comes up with, because "those scientists never make up their minds anyway"... sigh.
It's when you realize that even a rudimentary understanding of the scientific process would avoid that kind of misunderstanding, that it puts into perspective how sad our situation is. This is largely thanks to the media and not individual people themselves, but it's still quite annoying to say the least.
But even without that, if people subsequently understood the role and limitations of doctors, such critical self-research wouldn't be so rare anymore anyway. A doctor's role is like that of a consulting company with you as the client: you're always going to be better suited to understand your problem domain, a doctor will just serve as a guide to make sure everything makes sense and will then help you implement a solution. Or well, that would be the ideal case anyway. I know I've had my fair share of poor doctors too.
Reading this article reminds me of trying to have technical bio-medical conversations with doctors. They blow me off and give me the same baby talk they give all their other patients. That's the way the author of this article writes, broad baby talk generalizations. It's the reaction I'd imagine I'd get if I tried to have a conversation about digital signal encoding with my cable TV installer. They don't care, it's not their job, it's not important and they just do their job the way they do it for everybody and get paid either way.