I have reduced my own supplements more than once, and each time the reason was the same: something I was taking had stopped being a nutrient and had started being a habit I could justify with the words “it makes me feel good.” I want to walk through why that sentence stopped counting as evidence for me, because the reasoning comes from the two men whose work my whole practice is built on, and it is not what most people expect a practitioner to say.
“Feeling good is not a valid reason”
The line is from a 1988 Lafayette Institute report on Dr. Paul Eck’s work, The Secret of Youth, and it is about calcium: “feeling good” is not a valid reason for taking it. The mechanism the report lays out is specific. Roughly one percent of ingested calcium becomes immediately usable, and that one percent can genuinely relieve headaches, backaches and sleeplessness in the short term. The rest goes where the body is already storing calcium it cannot use. So a person feels better on the supplement, keeps taking it for the feeling, and quietly adds to a load that the feeling was hiding. Eck’s own words in the same report were that he never gave calcium to raise a calcium level. He corrected ratios to balance the levels, not levels to balance the ratios.
That was the first thing that made me look at my own shelf differently. Feeling good on a product tells you the product is doing something. It does not tell you the something is what you wanted, and it certainly does not tell you the dose is right.
“Nutritional roulette”
The second piece of reasoning is Dr. David Watts’s, in a 1990 paper in the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine, and it is the one I now quote most. He calls single-nutrient megadosing “nutritional roulette,” and his argument is that a mega-dose is a pharmacological act, not a nutritional one: past a point it interferes with the use of another nutrient and becomes, in his words, an antivitamin or antimineral.
His worked example is the one that convinced me. A calcium-deficient patient does not respond to 800 to 1,000 milligrams a day. The reflex is to double it. Symptoms may improve, but reducing the dose brings an immediate relapse, and the dosage requirement usually increases with time rather than decreasing. If instead the calcium’s partners are addressed, adding vitamin D, magnesium and copper, reducing the vitamin E, vitamin A, potassium and the phytate and oxalate foods that work against it, the same patient may respond to 400 milligrams a day. Less than half the dose, working, because the gears around it were turning. Watts’s own metaphor for mineral relationships is a set of intermeshing gears, and it is the right one: you cannot spin one gear harder without moving all the others.
He closes with R. K. Chandra’s finding that overnutrition, not only undernutrition, alters immune responsiveness. “Too much of an element can be as detrimental as too little.”
What I actually took off the shelf
I am not going to list products, because the whole point is that the list would be mine and not yours. What I can describe is the test I applied, and it had three parts.
- Was the dose climbing? Anything I had increased because the first dose “stopped working” went on the review pile immediately. That is Watts’s relapse pattern, and it is the surest sign a supplement is being used pharmacologically.
- Was “I feel good on it” the only reason left? If I could not name a reading on my own hair chart, a ratio or a level, that the product was there to move, it had become a habit. Eck’s line applied.
- Was it fighting something else I was taking? Watts’s vitamin E example is the model: excess E produces signs that look like a vitamin A deficiency, supplementing A then produces a vitamin D deficiency, and the fix was never to add more; it was to reduce the E. I found that shape on my own shelf more than once.
The result each time was a shorter list, taken for reasons I could point to on a chart, with doses that did not need to climb. Eck had a saying, in his 1987 Healthview interview, that I keep in mind: everyone taking the same supplement is as absurd as everyone taking the same shoe size. The corollary is that the same person taking the same supplement forever is nearly as absurd, because the chart it was chosen from is not the chart they have now.
How I decide now
I test, I change the smallest number of things I can, and I retest three to five months later. A hair tissue mineral analysis is a screening test for nutritional and toxic-element patterns, not a diagnosis, and it will not tell anyone whether to take a particular product. What it gives me is a reading of the ratios the supplement was supposed to move, so that the question “is this still doing its job” has an answer that is not “I feel fine on it.”
Anyone on prescribed medication, or with a medical condition, should make changes to supplements with their own licensed provider. For everyone else, the question I would put to the shelf is the one I put to mine: can you say what each bottle is for in terms of a number you have measured? If not, the feeling it gives you is not the evidence it appears to be.
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This article is for educational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Do not change prescribed medication or supplements without your own licensed provider.
