What supplements should I take? A practical way to narrow it down

It is one of the most searched health questions in the UK, and almost every answer you will find is written by someone with a shop attached. So let us start with the least commercial statement possible: a varied diet supplies most of what most people need, most of the time. Supplements fill specific, identifiable gaps. They are not a parallel food system.

With that established, here is a sequence for working out which gaps are actually yours.

Step one: start with where you live

The UK has one genuinely population-wide recommendation, and it exists because of our latitude.

The NHS advises that everyone should consider taking a daily supplement containing 10 micrograms of vitamin D during autumn and winter, because between roughly October and early March the sunlight in the UK is not strong enough for the skin to make it. Some groups are advised to take it year round: people who are housebound, people who usually cover most of their skin, and people with darker skin tones.

The NHS also sets an upper limit: adults should not take more than 100 micrograms a day.

Vitamin D contributes to the maintenance of normal bones and to normal muscle function. That is the authorised wording, and it is a reasonable reason to bother.

If you take nothing else, this is the one with a national health service behind it.

Step two: look at what you have removed from your diet

Deliberate exclusions create predictable gaps. Not moral failings, just arithmetic.

• No animal products: vitamin B12 is the standard consideration, since it occurs naturally almost only in animal foods.
• No fish: omega-3 intake is worth looking at.
• No dairy: calcium intake is worth looking at.
• Very low calorie intake for a sustained period: gaps become broader and less predictable, and this is the point to speak to a GP or registered dietitian rather than a website.

Step three: look at what you are asking your body to do

Training changes demand. Someone lifting four times a week is not in the same position as someone walking to the bus stop, and a plan that does not know which you are is not personalised in any meaningful sense.

This is also where most supplement marketing goes wrong. The interesting question is not “what should an active person take”: it is “what does your current training load, sleep and diet leave short”. Those three things move week to week. A recommendation made once, in January, is answering a question you are no longer asking by March.

Step four: check whether anything you take already interacts

If you are on prescription medication, this step is not optional and it is not one a website can do for you. Pharmacists will do it free, without an appointment, and they are good at it.

What to ignore

Three things reliably signal that you are reading marketing rather than information.

• Claims phrased as boosting, improving or fixing. In Great Britain, health claims must appear on the GB Nutrition and Health Claims Register and be used in wording that does not strengthen them. “Contributes to the normal function of” is what an authorised claim sounds like.
• Any weight loss angle. CAP 13.6 is explicit that vitamins and minerals do not contribute to weight reduction.
• Packs with a dozen items. Volume is a pricing strategy, not a health strategy.

The uncomfortable bit

Most people who ask this question are not short of information. They are short of a decision. There are several hundred products on any large supplement site and perhaps eighty of them would be perfectly sensible for you, which is precisely why it is impossible to choose. The problem is not that nothing suits you. It is that too much does.

Narrowing that to a defensible two or three, and revisiting it when your training or diet changes, is the entire job. Everything else is packaging.