Human Effect Matrix

Monday, April 29th, 2013

Examine.com has compiled a database of research papers on nutritional supplements and produced a Human Effect Matrix:

For every supplement in our database, a handy table will tell you what effect each supplement has and how noticeable that effect is.

Does Supplement X help with Y? Now you’ll know.

Creatine? It has a minor effect in increasing your testosterone, but a strong effect in increasing your power output. What about fish oil? It has actually has a notable effect in decreasing depression!

Best of all, the Human Effect Matrix isn’t on the supplement pages only. They are also on the effect pages themselves. Want to know which supplements impact inflammation? Done! Do any supplements help you add muscle? Now you know. (Spoiler: they all have, at most, a minor effect).

What we’ve done is removed all the mysticism, hyperbole, and marketing-speak used to talk about supplements. It’s all tabulated and organized for your perusal, and it’s all backed with citations with human-studies.

To get you going, here are a few popular and a few interesting supplements:

Comments

  1. Gwern says:

    Unfortunately, the matrix is not a meta-analysis. (I suggested it, but they rejected it as too much work.)

  2. Sol Orwell says:

    One day hopefully, Gwern.

    We still haven’t even hit the obvious ones like calcium or vitamin C, amongst many others. We need to address those before we get to that level.

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