Can an online quiz give good recommendations for taking supplements? Stuff today published an article about two New Zealand companies that launched recently, Vitally and Wondermins, which each use online quizzes to sell “personalised vitamins”.
Unfortunately, Stuff chose to focus on the question “What’s the point?” rather than “What’s the evidence?”. I thought it would be an interesting experiment to run through each of these quizzes to discover what supplements they would each recommend to me if I told them I had no health problems.
Both quizzes also included a bunch of questions about my current relationship to vitamins. Questions such as whether or not I already take any, how knowledgeable I am about them, were accompanied by questions about my health such as whether or not I took a long time to recover from infections.
For each health question, I gave the answer that would indicate better health. Do I often get colds or the flu? No. Do I have allergies, or sore joints? No, no. There were also diet questions, to which I attempted to give the healthiest answers based on what I thought they would be expecting.
Each quiz also asked me for a few areas of interest, though they didn’t phrase this as a health question. For example, Vitally asked “Which of these categories should we explore?” and gave me options such as “Immunity”, “Heart”, and “Inflammation”. The categories were pretty similar for both quizzes, so for both I selected immunity, bones/joints, and heart.
Vitally recommended I take four supplements for my 0 health problems and healthy lifestyle, which would cost $57 per month. Their supplements had “Find out why” tooltips with very useful information such as “Alpha-Lipoic Acid is recommended for healthy skin & inflammation and” (yes that’s the whole tooltip).
Wondermins’ loading screen after the quiz told me it was “Referencing research…”, and each of the supplements they suggested had a “View Research” link. However, these links all went to a page about Vitamin D deficiency. This didn’t do much for my peace of mind, especially since they didn’t even recommend I take Vitamin D (though Vitally did).
Wondermins recommended I take three supplements, none of which were the same as those recommended by Vitally. Their pack would cost me $68 per month.
If two quizzes for the same thing can give such different results for essentially the same answers, I don’t think that says very much about their reliability. They were both very lacklustre in terms of making evidence available to me if I wanted to make an actual informed decision about what they were suggesting I purchase.
If you’ve got money to burn and you think your urine isn’t expensive enough, then these services might interest you. Otherwise, do the sensible thing and talk to your GP if you have any heath issues.
Honest Universe 