Nutritional Supplements

For 25 years, Jeffrey Roberts, a technology consultant in Toronto, battled frequent diarrhea and abdominal pain. Roberts, who suffers from irritable bowel syndrome, was unable to attend his children's soccer games and often had to cancel or postpone family vacations. "I'd hold my family back because I'd have a lot of discomfort," he says. But three years ago, he started taking a powdered drink mix that contains eight strains of probiotic bacteria. "It dramatically changed my symptoms," he says.

The products: At weight rooms, jogging tracks and football fields across the country, the path to athletic success is often littered with protein bar wrappers and empty protein powder canisters.

They were some of the most promising medicines of the 1990s -- wonder pills that appeared to fight cancer, heart disease, stroke and other ailments. Laboratory tests and initial studies in people suggested that lowly vitamins could play a crucial role in preventing some of the most intractable illnesses, especially in an aging population.

I've heard that ionized water can cure whatever ails you. Sounds like snake oil to me. MIKE \o7Los Angeles\f7 --- The product: Ionized water isn't exactly snake oil. (These days, very few beverages are snake-based.) But because water ionizers can cost several thousand dollars, consumers are right to wonder what they're getting. Water ionizers attach directly to your kitchen faucet. The devices will filter water, infuse it with minerals and zap it with an electric current.

Several family members are urging me to take noni juice. Should I listen? ZACHARY A., \o7Altadena \f7The product: If taste were everything, noni juice would be about as popular as bottled plague. The extract of the Polynesian noni fruit (scientific name \o7Morinda citri\f7\o7folia\f7) tastes like fermented death with strong undertones of stomach acid. But flavor has never been noni's real selling point.

Adding to a growing scientific consensus, a large Danish study released Tuesday found that vitamin E and other antioxidant supplements provided no health benefits and might even produce a small increase in the incidence of death. The report in the Journal of the American Medical Assn.

My acupuncturist sold me a product called Vitalzym. I haven't noticed any obvious benefits. What can you tell me about it? JEFF W. \o7San Diego\f7 The product: A body without enzymes would be like a computer without silicon. You just can't run without them. These, after all, are the special proteins that help drive just about every chemical reaction in the body. They let us breathe, think, fight infections, digest food -- things you want to do on a daily basis.

Extra vitamin supplements can reduce the risk of having an underweight or undersized baby, researchers reported Thursday in the New England Journal of Medicine. The supplements did not, however, lower the likelihood of premature birth or losing the fetus before birth. The study, conducted in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, involved 8,468 pregnant women who received iron and folic acid supplements, both proven prenatal treatments.

Chondroitin, a dietary supplement widely used for treating arthritic joints, is no better than a placebo for reducing pain, researchers reported Monday. The study, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, looked at data from 20 clinical trials encompassing 3,846 patients. "People had the idea that this could be the magic bullet for osteoarthritis, but it cannot be," said Dr. Peter Juni, a medical epidemiologist at the University of Bern in Switzerland and one of the authors of the study.