eli5: Do supplements really help the advertised body part. i.e. do minerals… in a supplement advertised helping knee and joint pain really go to the joints or are they just digested and expelled? Seems to me they’re just eliminated and don’t go to the joints.
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There’s some evidence that curcumin, avocado-soya bean unsaponifiables, and Boswellia help alleviate pain for the short term. As to whether they have long-term effects, such as actually helping repair joint tissue, there is no evidence of that. There is evidence that Collagen supplements do improve joint function, but not a great deal of evidence, and there’s little understanding of how they work as ingested collagen is broken down into various proteins during digestion. One inexpensive form of collagen is plain old Jello.
Hard data on supplements is difficult to find and decipher; adding NIH at the end of a google search will garner results from the National Institutes of Health at the top of the results page. Not all the data you will find that way is 100% legit; supplement manufacturers can also do medical studies that get included there. But usually at the end of those, there will be some kind of notice of who sponsored/paid for the studies. With just general google searches for supplements, you will get a great deal of “articles” which are actually just paid advertisements, but you’ll have no way of knowing that.
Of course, google has arranged it so that these days, almost all the top results of any search are, more or less, paid advertisements. But the supplements industry is huge; estimates range between $35.6 billion and $151.9 billion per year currently. And supplement search results seem to be particularly heavy in sketchy data. Caveat emptor.
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