Snake-oil supplements?

Good god, I wish there was a visualization like this for everything. Especially if you could input your own parameters and get your own personalized "worth it" line.

It's a cool visualization, but their cutoff line is labeled "worth it." To really justify that, they need more information. Thankfully the bubbles are broken down by specific health claim (so that some supplements have several bubbles for their effect on different conditions), but to determine "worth it," they need to include:

1. Some sort of way to account for type and frequency of side effects. For example if everyone who takes the supplement gets an intolerably bad taste in their mouth, that's a mild but prevalent side effect. If one person in 100,000 who takes the supplement dies, that's a comparatively rare but very serious side effect. This factors heavily into the "worth it" determination, because risk is a consideration.

2. Cost. If a supplement has a mild beneficial effect but costs $1,000 a month, I'm not sure most people would say it's "worth it."

3. Strength of effect. A statistically significant improvement is not necessarily clinically significant. For example, with a large sample a 1% decrease in LDL cholesterol may be statistically significant, but it is not clinically significant.

Those factors would help a person determine the pros and cons effectively. What is "worth it" varies considerably from person to person.

Anyone know how they are generating the visualization automatically from that google doc? Is there a tool for doing this?

I think negative ones aren't even worth including and would confuse it. Also, when they prove really negative like ephedra, don't they usually get banned?

Hmm, first thing I notice looking at their data is that they put red yeast rice on top for blood pressure and cholesterol based on two studies, one of which did not assess red yeast rice, and neither of which assessed blood pressure.

The study that did not assess red yeast rice did assess lovastatin, which is assumed to be the active ingredient in red yeast rice, but if you're going to assume that they are equivalents, red yeast rice is definitely not "worth it" because you can buy a month's supply of the active ingredient for $4 at most any pharmacy, less than you would spend on the rice, and get a more precisely controlled dose.

Still a neat site design.