Supplements Don’t “Boost” Your Immune System

Should you take a supplement for COVID-19?

Gideon M-K; Health Nerd
7 min readNov 24, 2020
Pictured: Mostly a waste of time. Source: Pexels

Note: because not everyone reads to the end, I’d like to say right up here that the best advice I can give you is to go and talk to your doctor. Taking a supplement or not is a medical decision, and those are best made in consultation with experts who know more about your health than articles you find on the internet.

There’s something quite magical about the supplement aisle. You walk down a row of brightly-coloured bottles, each one trying to outdo the others on its wonderful benefit to your body. They can, apparently, boost your brain, make you stronger, and even make improve your immune system to levels heretofore unseen in the biological world.

Pictured: The results of just ONE fish oil tablet, presumably. Source: Pexels

And in a year of uncertainty and viral infection, the idea that we can boost or support our immune system with supplements is stronger than ever. Supplement sales have gone through the roof throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, because if there’s one thing that’s universally true it’s that fear sells and we have all spent much of this year being really quite scared.

--

--