Welcome to Too Good to Be True, an investigative podcast about exposing the scams, schemes, and financial cults trying to separate you from your money.

Hello, and welcome back to Too Good to Be True.

I am your co-host, Ryan Huland, a journalist and drag artist in New York City.

And I am Julia Lorenz Olson.

I create and create two cents with PBS, and I'm an accredited financial counselor.

So guess what we're here to talk about today? What? What? What? I'm so ready. Supplements, vitamins, and essential oils. Oh my gosh.

We're going to find out just how essential any of these oils really are. Or honestly, how essential any of this stuff is, we should probably

note that we're going to be leaning particularly hard on the interviews we did for this and

primary sources, because let's be clear right now, we are not medical doctors. This is not

medical advice. This is us investigating a topic and then

talking about it. Yeah, right. We're just kind of looking at the landscape of what the research

looks like from like a 10,000 foot view. Yes. The point of this episode is that you should be

suspicious of any influencer or media trying to tell you something. Speaking of, before we get into all the scams and the snake oil and the over-promising in

this space, let's first talk a little bit about what vitamins and minerals actually are

and how our bodies really need them.

So, for these terms we need to find, we turn to NIH.gov. Quote, vitamins and minerals are

essential substances that our bodies need to develop and function normally. The known

vitamins include A, the B vitamins, C, D, E, and K. There's also biotin and folate folic

acid. A number of minerals are essential for health, calcium,

calcium, potassium, sodium, magnesium, iron, zinc, iodine, sulfur, cobalt, copper,

fluoride, manganese, and selenium. Multivitamins, multi-minerals are the most frequently used

dietary supplements, with close to half of American adults taking them.

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