After col­lat­ing the results of over 1,500 stud­ies and meta-studies (only “large, human, ran­dom­ized placebo-controlled tri­als” were included), Infor­ma­tion is Beautiful’s David McCan­d­less col­lab­o­rated with Andy Perkins to pro­duce a com­pre­hen­sive data visu­al­i­sa­tion map­ping the the effec­tive­ness (or not) of a wide range of health sup­ple­ments (there’s a sta­tic image and inter­ac­tive Flash ver­sion available).

Some of the findings:

  • Green tea has been shown to lower cho­les­terol in a large num­ber of stud­ies, but there’s no sign of can­cer pre­ven­tion properties.
  • There’s strong evi­dence show­ing Omega 3’s cholesterol-lowering abil­i­ties and good evi­dence indi­cat­ing it can help improve some ADHD behav­iour and lower blood pres­sure. In terms of pre­vent­ing arthri­tis and can­cer, and in reliev­ing depres­sion, the evi­dence is conflicting.
  • Fish oil has been shown to help lower blood pres­sure and the risk of sec­ondary heart dis­ease, but the evi­dence for it improv­ing gen­eral health isn’t strong (but is promising).
  • Vit­a­min D is fan­tas­tic: great for all-round gen­eral health and can­cer prevention.
  • Vit­a­mins A and E aren’t ben­e­fi­cial for much at all, while Vit­a­min C stud­ies are some­what conflicting.
  • Beta carotene’s posi­tion sur­prised me: there is little-to-no evi­dence of any health ben­e­fits. The same goes for acai and goji berries, ginkgo biloba and cop­per.

The raw data used to gen­er­ate the visu­al­i­sa­tion is available–along with citations–in a Google doc­u­ment that is occa­sion­ally being updated.