Taking supplements can be different for women – and what’s in the bottle isn’t always accurate.

The quantity of supplements offered in local pharmacies and supermarkets is often enough to give them their own aisle, filled with brightly colored bottles, of all shapes and sizes, promoting the well-being of hair and nails, the heart, sleep or bones. There are options for men and women, children and “over 50” in pill, powder or gummy formulations. Decades of research show that adequate intake of certain vitamins and minerals in the diet can prevent disease, and dietary guidelines are the most accurate estimate we have of what the body needs to stay healthy. health.

But some say more research is needed to fully understand gender differences in how female and male bodies need and use these nutrients throughout the life cycle. As a result, some are calling for improved recommendations that take a closer look at the role that gender, hormonal changes and body composition play in these nutritional needs.

“Women are living longer, they’re experiencing different things like pregnancy and breastfeeding, menstruation and menopause, and they’re at different disease risks,” said Dr. McKale Montgomery, a nutritionist at the state university. from Oklahoma. “But very often the difference between men’s and women’s (supplements) is the color of the bottle and not what’s in it.”

Although people have used medicinal plants to supplement their diet for centuries, Polish biochemist Casimer Funk is credited with coining the term “vitamins” in 1920, referring to substances not produced in the body that we supplement with. food. (“Vita” means “life” in Latin and “amine” is a nitrogenous substance necessary for biological life.) Funk’s research also showed that lack of certain vitamins would cause illness, including a disease called pellagra when the body lacked vitamin B3 and scurvy when it lacked vitamin C.

This work resulted in nutritional guidelines in the United States called Dietary Reference Intake Values ​​(DRIs), published at the turn of the 21st century, which identify the amount of dozens of vitamins, macronutrients, and minerals the body needs .

Several gender differences have been extensively researched and are reflected in the guidelines. Women of childbearing age are recommended to take more iron at certain ages, and women, especially in the postmenopausal period, are recommended to take more calcium for bone health. On the other hand, men are recommended to consume more magnesium and zinc. In general, men are recommended to take a greater amount of many vitamins simply based on differences in body composition.

However, some have called for more research on women, particularly in the area of ​​dietary supplements, said Dr. Abbie Smith-Ryan, professor of exercise physiology at UNC Chapel HIll. Although women consume more supplements than men, their use has not been as well studied in women, she explained.

“The majority of the data, if there is any data, is on young men for many reasons,” Smith-Ryan told Salon in a phone interview. “That doesn’t mean everything has to be at different doses, but at a minimum we need to understand: should they be recommended at a different dose or with different ingredients to improve absorption, or some of those things.”

The National Institutes of Health recognized the need for more nutritional research for women in its 2020-2030 strategic plan, which lists nutritional differences in women, as well as differences in nutritional needs during pregnancy and breastfeeding and throughout a woman’s life cycle. priorities.

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“Nutrition plays an important role in many diseases and conditions that primarily affect women or that affect women differently than men,” he says. “This plan and its implementation include research approaches and activities that address the roles of sex and gender in health and disease; promote the participation of women in clinical nutrition research; and integrate sex as a biological variable in basic, preclinical and translational nutritional research.

Instead of comparing men and women to understand differences in nutritional needs, it might be more useful to study how nutritional needs vary over the course of a woman’s life cycle, Smith-Ryan added.

“No two women have the same menstrual cycle or hormonal profile…so standardization is much more difficult and requires more time and money,” she said.

One particular population where nutritional differences are more pronounced is athletes, in whom getting the right nutrients can also reduce the risk of injury. Although female athletes are less likely to not receive enough nutrients, they are also more likely to suffer consequences, Smith-Ryan said.

“Anytime you add that extra stress and those extra caloric needs from exercise, you see a bigger impact, which means if you’re deficient in vitamin D or iron, you’ll feel it,” Smith said- Ryan. “Whereas if you’re more of a sedentary person, you might not feel them as much because you’re not stressing your body in the same way.”

There is also little research available on supplements that might help women during perimenopause in particular. Some evidence suggests that B12 may be helpful to the nervous system and that vitamin D is helpful in promoting bone growth. Magnesium could help with sleep problems, although the research behind many of these links is thin and recommendations for these supplements currently do not differ by gender for this age group.

“Refining our recommendations for this decade would be really helpful,” Smith-Ryan said.

Vitamin D and calcium have been recommended in older adults to support brain and bone health, particularly in women who suffer from osteoporosis four times more than men.

However, a draft recommendation from the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force released last month actually recommended against taking these two supplements at this age for both sexes in an effort to reduce fractures. Although the agency clarified that vitamin D and calcium supplementation might still be important for this age group for other reasons, some disagreed with the recommendation, noting that it does not did not take into account individual differences in vitamin D deficiency.

“Dismissing supplementation as unnecessary for the general population undermines its value for those who need it most,” said Dr. Andrea Wong, senior vice president of scientific and regulatory affairs at the Council for Responsible Nutrition, a professional organization that represents many supplement manufacturers. in a statement.

In general, nutritional changes aimed at promoting menopause would work best if they started well before menopause anyway, said Dr. Mary Scourboutakos, a nutritionist at Eastern Virginia Medical School. For example, peak bone mass is determined during adolescence, meaning that vitamin D and calcium intake several years before menopause is what is important for bone health at that time, a she declared.

“We tell 60-year-old women that their bone mass is low and try to give them calcium and vitamin D,” Scourboutakos told Salon in a telephone interview. “But the reality is that it’s the calcium and vitamin D that they didn’t have as teenagers that gets them there in their 60s.”

Even though medications are used to treat disease, the goal of nutrition is usually to prevent it, Scourboutakos explained. However, this is part of a different research paradigm than demonstrating the effectiveness of drugs. While drug research looks at sick people to determine if a drug is effective, supplement research often takes healthy people and sees if supplements can prevent disease.

“It’s easier to prove that you treated something than if you prevented it, and nutrition often works over years and decades. So it’s difficult to get research to fund such a study,” he said. declared Scourboutakos. “Everything about our scientific method makes it difficult to prove this stuff.”

Supplements are regulated for safety, but not effectiveness, by the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994, which is enforced by the Food and Drug Administration. The FDA and Federal Trade Commission monitor companies to make sure they are actually selling what is advertised, said Steve Mister, president and CEO of the Council for Responsible Nutrition.

“We have our own requirements that I would classify between those for food and those for medications,” Mister told Salon during a video call.

The way the current regulations work provides the industry with greater flexibility so it can respond more quickly to changes in research, Mister said.

“It’s up to the market to create the variability in formulations,” Mister said. “That’s the beauty of the law that allows us to have some flexibility in how we develop product formulas.”

Yet others have called for more regulation on supplements as the number of people taking them has exploded in recent years – with as many as 4 in 5 people reporting using them at some point in their lives.

During pregnancy, women are recommended to take prenatal vitamins to ensure that the body receives the right amount of folate, omega-3 oils, and choline, among other vitamins like iron, vitamin D, and calcium. Although this population has been studied to determine the benefits of these supplements, recent research has shown that many of these essential nutrients are missing from some products on shelves.

One study found that none of the nearly 50 samples of commercially available prenatal vitamins contained all of the supplements recommended for pregnant women, and up to 27 percent of them contained less than the recommended amount of folate, which protects against congenital malformations.

Ultimately, it is largely up to the individual to stay informed of their nutritional needs and ensure that they check nutritional labels to ensure that they are getting what they need from the supplements that he decides to purchase or not.

“Often women don’t get this support or our health care providers don’t know the data,” Smith-Ryan said. “We need to encourage women to take care of themselves and stand up for themselves. »