It’s turned out recently that the same is true of certain supplements. Most food supplements are given in vastly increased doses to anything you’d get through normal consumption. Though there are a lot of benefits to getting the right amount of certain minerals and vitamins, it can be just as damaging to get too much. Like all medicine, like everything we put into our bodies, excessive amounts can kill.
In this case nobody died. A food supplement called selenium, which has long been thought to protect at risk patients from heart disease, has been shown to be ineffective. What’s so shocking about this isn’t its lack of effectiveness but rather, there are worries that taking this product over long periods of time could well increase your risk of getting type two diabetes.
There’s only been one study into this so far and though the number of patients tested was relatively high, enough to show the lack of potential of selenium as a curative agent for heart disease, it wasn’t enough to show the correlation with diabetes. The concern is that the supplement may have raised the levels of insulin resistance in the patient’s bodies and pushed them towards the ‘at risk’ group for type two diabetes. Though this is very dangerous for people who’re already in this group it’s probably harmless to those who’re not at much risk of contracting diabetes at all.