I got an email from a PR agent for a vitamin company criticizing other vitamin companies for doing a questionnaire for visitors to their website and then recommending up to 8 vitamins based on their health goals and current self-reported state in this material plane. Others got it down to 2 pills a day. Still too many, they said!
The two doctors behind this company did the exact same thing, except the big news was they got it down to 1 pill. In other words, they paid someone to promote the big breakthrough that they created a multivitamin. Multivitamins have existed since 1943. Even during World War II, with sugar and meat rationed, someone found a way to be a grifter and call it science.
They helped on one except marketing executives get bigger houses. They were once so successful in marketing that parents convinced their kids would suffer poor health otherwise kept them on the kitchen table.
Not much progress has been made since then. A vitamin company is still required by federal law to plainly state that taking their pill is like taking a 23andMe genetic test to know why you don't like cilantro - for entertainment purposes only. Yes, a small fraction of people have a vitamin D issue, that is a clinical diagnosis, and some have low iron, but that is not a $120 billion business.
Vitalized Minerals was the original name for this supplement. Obviously, in a world where people buy alkaline water, organic food, and that electric cars don't create emissions, someone would be gullible enough to buy "vitalized minerals." It wouldn't sell a lot.
Yet the marketing for the portmanteau, "vitamins", has been so successful that the Clinton administration declared them essentially equivalent to medicine and exempted the entire supplement industry from real FDA oversight. All they need to do is put a disclaimer that there is no science behind their claims, FDA has not signed off on any supernatural effect you may be gullible enough to believe, and it is open season on the public.
You can't take a survey and then have any result lead to the same unsubstantiated placebo and think that is wise. It is magic rock thinking.(1)
