Sunday, January 29, 2012

Snake Oil? The scientific evidence for health supplements, courtesy of InformationIsBeautiful

Snake oil? Scientific evidence for health supplements

play with the interactive version | find out more about this image | post a comment | see the data | look at the previous version (Jan 2010)

UPDATE 2 – 1st October 2010 -Top to bottom revise of the data. See the change log for details.
UPDATE 1 – 21st March 2010 - We’ve updated our data thanks to excellent visitor feedback and new evidence. See the change log for details.

details

This image is a “balloon race”. The higher a bubble, the greater the evidence for its effectiveness. But the supplements are only effective for the conditions listed inside the bubble.

You might also see multiple bubbles for certain supps. These is because some supps affect a range of conditions, but the evidence quality varies from condition to condition. For example, there’s strong evidence that Green Tea is good for cholesterol levels. But evidence for its anti-cancer effects is conflicting. In these cases, we give a supp another bubble.

This visualisation generates itself from this Google Doc. So when new research comes out, we can quickly update the data and regenerate the image. (How cool is that??)

As ever, we welcome your thoughts, crits, comments, corrections, compliments, tweaks, new evidence, missing supps, and general feedback. Thank you!


SOURCE: PUBMED, COCHRANE | DATA: IN THIS GOOGLE SPREADSHEET | RESEARCH: DAVID MCCANDLESS, PEARL DOUGHTY-WHITE, ALEXIA WDOWSKI | CODE: ANDY PERKINS

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Snake Oil? The scientific evidence for health supplements

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