What's Going On With Supplements?

The wellness industry's new flagships are dubious

There is a particular kind of optimism required to believe your body image issues will be resolved by something Kourtney Kardashian is selling as Lemme Burn, Lemme Curb, or Lemme Tone. 

The modern supplement aisle is arranged to be a chapel: soothing labels and soft colours mixed with words that imply both science and behavioural absolution. Cleanse. Burn. Detox. Reset. The promises are vague enough to evade scrutiny and specific enough to feel personal. In the United States of America, supplements are not regulated by the same regulations that food, medicine, and confectionery are subject to. Your supplement can legally contain almost anything.

These bottles want to show you a reality where the consumer is not tired because they are overworked, underslept, and mentally oversaturated; they are tired because they are deficient in something that comes in capsule form. 

Amongst the most popular of these ‘somethings’ is green tea extract, sold as a metabolism booster, a fat burner. Tea conjures images of restraint, ritual; steam rising in a calm kitchen. But the encapsulated extract is not a cup of tea; it is a concentrated chemical distillation, sometimes delivering in a single dose what would take over 25 cups to consume. In that concentration lies a fact that sits awkwardly beside the branding: green tea extract supplements have been linked to cases of acute liver injury. Some people recover after stopping the product; yet a significant number of people suffer from acute liver failure, and require transplants — failure to get one can lead to death. 

This is not the story sold in the lobbies of upscale gyms and spas, and in health and wellness stores. Herbal medicine’s knowledge has been lazily co-opted by capitalism; the centuries of study that back up natural remedies are disregarded in the name of a faster, easier, and cheaper product. 

The pastel label tells a more flattering story — one in which nature has been captured, intensified, and made convenient — where our bodies are uncorrected by Western medicine, ignorant of ibuprofen, and the natural world interacts with every single person in the exact same way. The packaged language hovers just shy of a medical claim: supports fat metabolism, promotes detoxification. Recently, I came across a TikTok promising that their (TikTok shop) Magnesium supplements (only £7.95!) would slow the ageing process in my body by a complete reprogramming of microbial biology, genomic stability, and revitalising exhausted stem cells. All in 200mg of magnesium! But these supplements in the United States are not regulated like drugs: they do not need to prove they work before being sold; they do not undergo the kind of large, rigorous trials we expect for medications that promise to completely change my molecular structure. Instead, the burden of proof drifts to the consumer, who is already tired, already worried, already primed to believe that their body is a problem waiting to be solved.

Weight-loss culture is the atmosphere that makes all of this feel reasonable. It teaches, relentlessly, that shaping your body is a moral obligation and that failing to do so is a kind of negligence. Under that pressure, a capsule marketed as “natural” does not feel like a risk, but an easy solution to a Sisyphean insecurity.

The celebrity endorsement is the final, sinister reassurance of ‘success.’ A wealthy person, who has access to private chefs, personal trainers, and plastic surgeons, tells you they love whatever supplement, powder, gummy, drink: we are meant to feel that we are sharing in their secrets. What you are not meant to ask is why someone whose life is buffered by wealth, staff, and elite medical care would have your medical interests in mind.

Influence has replaced evidence; a familiar face stands in for a clinical trial; feed becomes a proxy for safety data. We are encouraged to believe that a celebrity’s endorsement is a form of intimacy rather than a marketing strategy.

The real seduction of supplement culture is not that it promises dramatic transformation, it is that this transmutation comes with minimal disruption to your current schedule. You do not have to confront your schedule, your time management, your sleep deprivation, or your relationship with food. You can keep everything exactly as it is and add a capsule; if one supplement doesn’t work, maybe try taking it in gummy form? 

When harm comes, it comes fast and quietly. The liver does not send out a weekly newsletter; it fails gradually, then all at once, often in people trying to improve their health. There is absolutely nothing foolish about wanting to feel better in your body. The want is deeply human. The danger is confusing what is natural and what is harmless, celebrity and credibility. 

Capital is gained in many ways by making people feel insecure about their bodies; capital does not weigh risk against reward. It does not care if you live or die, it does not know your medical history; my OBGYN does not recommend Lemme Purr — my very expensive psychiatrist promises that Lemme Smooth isn’t going to smooth my self-criticism. The body is not a trend, and it will not respond to branding. It keeps its own records, it tallies excess, strain, and injury without regard for testimonials or aesthetics. By the time your body settles score, and it always will, the marketing has long since moved on to the next miracle.

A capsule cannot know you. Real health is slow and unglamorous. Don’t mistake this argument for one licking the boot of Western medicine — it has its own failings and shortcomings.  Rather, I aim to alert readers to a tragedy: this tragedy is not only that some supplements can harm us. It is that we have been convinced that salvation lies within a bottle while the conditions making us unwell remain perfectly intact. 

Illustration by Sandra Palazuelos Garcia