Have a play around with this pretty graphic visualising the scientific evidence for popular health suplements on Information is Beautiful.
It’s hard to know what’s good and what’s guff, should you be taking vitamin supplements? Will my anti-oxident rosehip cranberry echinacia lavender infusion cure my indecision or should I plump for a green tea? Will that weight loss suppliment advertised on Facebook actually work? Afterall, it is on Facebook, so it must be true?! There’s so much confusing and conflicting information what we really need is someone to take all the evidence and put it into some sort of pretty picture.
If there’s one thing the people behind Information is Beatiful have proved that interactive graphics definately improve my attention span.
The creators have this to say about the image and information they used: “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. We only considered large, human, randomized placebo-controlled trials in our data scrape – wherever possible. No animal trials. No cell studies..”
This visualisation generates itself from this Google Doc. So when new research comes out, they should be able to quickly update the data and regenerate the image. The spreadsheet also references the source of the research; if you’re interested in that sort of thing.
