In case you have never heard of it before: Customized vitamins are promoted as the opposite of what you purchase when you usually put a box of vitamins into your shopping cart. They are supposed to be well-adjusted to your personal lifestyle and eating patterns and are meant only to provide the amounts of vitamins you really need to reach the requirements. In this light, the incentives for potential customers are clear: you get what you need and you stop wasting money on what you actually don't need. Most of these corporations established themselves only a few years ago and are often led by young enthusiastic entrepreneurs with high affinity to social media. From what we have heard about it so far, nothing seems to warrant a reference on my blog until you ask yourself the question, how do they know what YOU need? That's when my skeptic's alarm clock went off. Loyal readers of my blog will notice. BEWARE, NOT AGAIN!
So I stumbled upon this webpage of vitame.com recently that shares resemblance to so many webpages of startups popping up these days. Considerable emphasis on visual stimuli, a maximum reduction of the complexity of necessary information to understand the product and an inuitive, well-guided and easy to walk through multistep purchasing process. Why is this? Well, it turns out as long as you use phrases like these, nobody seriously doubts your intentions AND capabilities.
"[...] instantly cross-checks thousands of peer-reviewed articles and clinical studies to recommend your optimal nutrition plan."
"Our free, professional health quiz was developed by a team of doctors and nutritionists who wanted to help anyone live a better, healthier life."
"We are a team of nutrition experts, health-care professionals, and professional problem-solvers [...]"
As someone who knows how darn hard it is to even estimate individual food intake anything else but a team of super heroes could solve this quest for an accurate measure of nutrients. Well it turns out after squeezing out all brain matter vitaME ended up creating the ultimate tool for their purpose. One health quiz to asssess them all - comprised of nineteen (19) questions. What!? Nineteen questions only!? Are you kidding me?
To make a long story short. Of course this health quiz is hopelessly underpowered, even incapable of the most remote estimation of true food intake (let alone specific nutrients!). It is most likely a method that has not been validated which means that vitaME cannot show that their proposed health quiz is actually capable of measuring what it intends to measure. To illustrate how flawed this whole thing is, here are some questions they ask:
How much exercise do you get each week? (None, 1-2 h, 2-5 h, over 5 h)
Apparently what sort of exercise/sports you do doesn't play any role? Do they really think that 5 hours of endurance training is not different to 5 hours of weightlifting or yoga with regards to nutritional requirements? FAIL!
How do you sleep? ( I sleep well, trouble falling asleep, trouble staying asleep, I am so busy it keeps me from getting to bed)
Apart from the justified question what kind of zombies fall into the last category, I have difficulties seeing how this question relates to the amounts of individually required nutrients. There may well be an effect of sleep quality to the way our metabolism works, but what vitaME pretends to do is that this question is important to determine the exact amounts of, let's say, Vitamin C, Niacin, Vitamin A or Zinc that you need to supply your body with. It is safe to say that there is no data available on how "sleeping well" translates to your exact nutritional demands compared to "I have trouble falling asleep". FAIL!
In general, how is your energy? (Good, Moderate or up and down, low)
I highly doubt that even the "experts" from vitaME themselves know what they really meant with "good or low energy". Unquantifiable. FAIL!
On average how many servings of fruit do you eat per week (None, 1-6, 7-13, more than 14)
Really? Is there nobody in vitaME's team of self-proclaimed nutrition experts that may have a problem with this one? Then apparently no differences exist between fruits with regards to their nutritional content. And I thought vitaME claims to find out about the exact nutrient requirements of individuals. It's getting more and more obscure. Same picture with questions dealing with whole grain, vegetable and eggs, nuts, seeds and soy product servings a week. EPIC FAIL!
Taken together, vitaME's health quiz is a failure of epic proportions and as far from personalized vitamins as their expert's knowledge is from real science. What takes the cake is that when the analysis is presented vitaME gives individual suggestions under "The Vitamins You Need". The vitamins listed are given with the exact amounts you supposedly need, sometimes even within the microgram range ( a millionth of a million of a gram!). Wow, they sure know how to measure with such precision! Nineteen questions all the way! If these amounts are not calculated on the basis of the health quiz than they just represent population-based nutrient requirements which would be everything but personalized.
There are plenty of other things vitaME can be citicized for, for example the fact that they use their nutrition experts as a way of letting customers know their method is "certified", in realitity it is not. Results of the quiz are presented with alarmingly low scores of health measures such as stress resistance, skin health, diet balance and fitness level, even if the health quiz is answered in the most favourable way. In conclusion, vitaME is far from being a business that has the optimal health of their customers in their best interest as they claim. Rather they created an absurdly pseudo-scientific health quiz to sell multivitamins people do not need.
Check it out for yourself <<vitaME>>
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