What Dietary Supplements Matter {Brangover / Million-Dollar-Idea Project}

For Alphawave, I need to decide what universe of supplements I care about. I also need to decide what health objectives I care about. We then need to decide how to connect the two.

As with any project, we need to start with a reasonable dataset. Examine.com is my favorite resource when it comes to learning about nutritional supplements. Not only do they boil everything down to a consistent and digestible format, they do so based on cited research.

The most interesting component of it all is the Human Effect Matrix, which boils everything down to a simple multi-dimensional table of outcomes. This only captures a small segment of the complex human interactions of nutraceuticals, but is a good starting point.

Writing an examine.com scraper is straightforward, using Scrapy, so I won’t even go into how that’s done, but from it, we can extract the following data:

• Supplement name
• Outcome dimension
• Magnitude of Effect (-4–4)
• Grade of Research (A-D)
• Consistency of Research (0–100)

Overall, there are 254 distinct supplements that have HEMs, and 563 different outcomes. Some outcomes are very specific, such as “Treatment of Hepatopulmonary Syndrom” which only has 1 applicable supplement.

We’re interested in the more broad-spectrum outcomes, so we can order these by the number of supplements, and scan through the list to see which ones we care about, and then we can group them into over-arching categories:

• Weight (Weight-Loss, Negative)
• Subjective Well-Being (Mood, Positive)
• Power Output (Fitness, Positive)
• Fatigue (Energy, Negative)
• Depression (Mood, Negative)
• Lean Mass (Fitness, Positive)
• Anaerobic Running Capacity (Fitness, Positive)
• Memory (Cognitive, Positive)
• Anxiety (Mood, Negative)
• Cognition (Cognitive, Positive)
• Appetite (Weight-Loss, Negative)
• Attention (Cognitive, Positive)
• Metabolic Rate (Weight-Loss, Positive)
• Rate of Perceived Exertion (Fitness, Negative)
• Reaction Time (Cognitive, Positive)
• Aerobic Exercise (Fitness, Positive)
• Pain (Physical, Negative)
• Cognitive Decline (Cognition, Negative)
• Sleep Quality (Sleep, Positive)
• Food Intake (Weight-Loss, Negative)
• Muscle Damage (Fitness, Negative)
• Muscle Soreness (Fitness, Negative)
• Symptoms of Osteoarthritis (Joint, Negative)
• Bone Mineral Density (Joint, Positive)
• Stress (Mood, Negative)
• Immunity (Immunity, Positive)
• Working Memory (Cognitive, Positive)
• Erections (Sexual, Male, Positive)
• Sperm Quality (Sexual, Male, Positive)
• Libido (Sexual, Positive)
• Natural Killer Cell Content (Immunity, Positive)
• Processing Accuracy (Cognitive, Positive)
• Seminal Motility (Sexual, Male, Positive)
• Symptoms of Rheumatoid Arthritis (Joint, Negative)
• Symptoms of Schizophrenia (Cognitive, Negative)
• Exercise Capacity (with Heart Conditions) (Fitness, Positive)
• Processing Speed (Cognitive, Positive)
• Sperm Count (Sexual, Male, Positive)
• Symptoms of Alzheimer’s (Cognitive, Negative)
• Alertness (Energy, Positive)
• Fertility (Sexual, Female, Positive)
• Insomnia (Sleep, Negative)
• Sedation (Sleep, Positive)
• Visual Acuity (Cognition, Positve)
• Length of Sickness (Immunity, Negative)
• Sexual Function (Sexual, Positive)
• Symptoms of Bipolar Disorder (Mood, Negative)
• Verbal Fluency (Cognitive, Positive)

Which brings us to the following target categories:

• Cognition
• Mood
• Sexual (Male, Female, Both)
• Immunity
• Sleep
• Energy
• Fitness
• Joint
• Weight-Loss (If we assume weight-loss is a positive outcome)
• Digestive

From this, we can create a metric to score each supplement against each category, and create an effect matrix. There’s a lot of ways to do this, and our product will certainly be powered by a more robust metric, but to get a baseline, let’s just choose the maximum value in the given category for the given supplement.

This gives us a quick way to sort the supplements by their effect on the given dimension. From this, finding our list of the supplements we want to stock is more art than science, and will certainly evolve over time. For now, here’s our choices:

• Ashwagandha (Mood, Male Sexual, Immunity, Sleep, Energy, Fitness, Weight-Loss)
• Blueberry (Cognitive, Mood, Immunity, Fitness)
• Curcumin (Cognitive, Mood, Sexual, Energy, Fitness, Joint)
• Echinacea (Immunity)
• Elderberry (Immunity)
• Fish Oil (Cognitive, Mood)
• Flaxseed Oil (Cognitive, Mood)
• Garlic (Immunity, Fitness)
• Ginger (Cognitive, Male Sexual, Fitness, Joint, Weight-Loss)
• Ginseng (Cogntive, Mood, Sexual, Sleep, Fitness)
• Ginkgo biloba (Cognitive, Mood, Sleep)
• Iron (Energy)
• Maca (Mood, Sexual)
• Magnesium (Mood, Sleep, Fitness, Joint)
• Milk Thistle
• Rhodiola Rosea (Cognitive, Mood, Energy, Fitness)
• S. Boulardii (Digestive)
• Saw Palmetto (Male Sexual)
• Turmeric (Joint)
• Vitamin B12 (Energy)
• Vitamin C (Mood, Energy, Fitness, Joint, Immunity)
• Vitamin D3 (Joint)
• Vitamin E (Cognitive, Immunity, Fitness)
• Vitamin K (Joint)
• Zinc (Cognitive, Mood, Sexual, Weight-Loss)