With more and more magical cures for weight loss showing up on grocery store and pharmacy shelves, people are buying dietary supplements now more than ever. These “magical” products may not work by themselves, but they can still be beneficial to your health. However, just ingesting the pill will not be very beneficial to your well-being. There are various pros and cons to taking these dietary supplements that need to be factored into the decision-making process when buying these pills.

Many dietary supplements use different natural and synthetic ingredients in the pill itself to achieve certain effects. These ingredients are what help you lose weight or just increase your overall well-being and can also be very beneficial to your health. But, they can also cause some very harmful side effects to your body. Vitamin A is one of the key vitamins that helps your vision and can help increase the quality of your eyesight in dimly-lit areas, however, too much Vitamin A, which can happen from taking dietary supplements, can result in headaches, liver damage, and even reduced bone strength. Another vitamin that has some very dangerous side effects if you have too much of is Vitamin D. An overdose of vitamin D, also called Vitamin D toxicity, causes the victim to have nausea and vomiting, weakness, and kidney problems. Nearly all of the vitamins in your body, if overdosed on, can cause some seriously harmful side effects. Another dangerous ingredient is colloidal silver which can permanently turn your skin bluish-gray. The moral of this story is: regulate what vitamins and ingredients you are putting in your body to make sure you don’t have too much or too little of one.

When choosing the supplement that you wish to take, realize that not all of the supplements you see on the shelf are FDA approved and could be harmful to your body. In fact, during a study in 2008, the FDA released a list of over 69 different supplements on United States’ shelves that were not approved by the FDA yet were still sold. These items were most likely tested and made in other countries and then imported into the United States for sale. These unapproved supplements were found to have laxatives, diuretics (promote the passing of urine), and even prescription drugs that could be very dangerous to take without the approval of a doctor. Not all of the supplements, or any items for that matter, are exactly what they make out to be when on the shelves of your local grocery store.

Essentially, when dealing with any kind of dietary supplement, you just need to be aware of the risks you are taking. One way of narrowing these risks is by using only supplements that are approved by the FDA. Or, another way is just by looking up the name of the supplement itself on the internet and check for negative side effects and if it actually does what it is supposed to in your body. Either way, supplements, with a healthy diet, can be very helpful in maintaining your health, that is if you monitor how much you get and if it is a safe pill to ingest. But, just remember, one pill is not going to change who you are completely. There is no such thing as a magic pill and the only way to change is by changing yourself.

Sources: http://www.health.com/health/gallery/0,,20307273_6,00.html

http://ods.od.nih.gov/HealthInformation/DS_WhatYouNeedToKnow.aspx

http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/2012/05/dangerous-supplements/index.htm