Supplements & functional ingredients
In the US alone, so-called ‘drowsy driving’ is responsible for over 6,000 lethal accidents each year. Across the Atlantic, meanwhile, Germans apparently lose 209,000 days of productive work a year thanks to a lack of sleep.
Given all this, at any rate, it should come as no surprise that punters are eager to find ways to sleep better – with supplements, ranging from melatonin to lavender, an increasingly popular solution. Yet if the sector is obviously booming, questions remain around their efficacy. The placebo effect, after all, probably drives the reputed success of some products, even as the usefulness of others remain unclear. Then there are educational challenges around what ‘supplements’ actually are. If some envisage them as a kind of sleep-inducing aspirin, they’re sure to be disappointed. Sleep is too innate, too complex a process for that, and arguably requires more fundamental lifestyle changes to truly see improvements.
Give it a rest There’s no doubt that sleep supplements are having a moment. According to work by Precedence Research, for instance, the global sleep aids market was already worth $78bn in 2022 – a figure expected to explode to $131bn a decade later. That’s echoed by the rise of particular supplements. To give one example from research performed by Mayo Clinic in 2000, 0.4% of Americans said they artificially used the hormone. By 2018, that figure had increased to 2.1%. To an extent, argues Dr Michael Grandner, this enthusiasm can be understood in terms of the problem supplements claim to remedy. As the director of the Sleep and Health Research Programme at the University of Arizona puts it: “A lot of people identify that their sleep is deficient in some way – and they want to fix that.” As far as supplements in particular are concerned, moreover, Grandner argues that many users may view them as gentler alternatives to proper medications, such as sedatives like Valium that simply knock you out.
Fair enough: one 2019 poll found that 86% of Americans take a supplement, a figure far higher than those that pop proper pharmaceuticals. In practice, however, the actual helpfulness of such products is disputed. Valerian is a good example here. As a popular plant-based sleeping supplement, some studies have indeed shown that it beats a placebo at calming part of the brain and could ultimately help fight insomnia. On the other hand, and as Grandner points out, those successful tests have tended to be “smaller and uncontrolled”. In
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part, this lack of clarity stems from the industry itself. With competition so fierce and potentially lacking either legal or scientific knowledge – or simply sufficient scruples – Grandner suggests that especially smaller manufacturers sometimes over- egg their claims. Doctors, for their part, may know little better, relying mainly on vague memories of what supplements do from medical school. More generally, though, you get the sense that the real misunderstandings around sleeping supplements are formed by users themselves. For if they clearly imagine them as safer and less habit-forming than pharmaceuticals, surveys also point to the fact that many view them as ersatz drugs, offering a clear and notable effect once taken.
Melatonin, the most popular sleep aid, is naturally produced by the brain, but supplementing can trigger tiredness.
“A lot of people identify that their sleep is deficient in some way – and they want to fix that.”
Yet as the name implies, ‘supplements’ are simply there to bolster what the body should naturally be doing already. In other words, supplements are not like paracetamol and a headache, where taking one will immediately start alleviating the other. “Sleep isn’t one thing,” is how Grandner summarises the situation: “It’s lots of these systems – that are built over thousands of generations of evolution.”
Bitter pills With these subtleties in mind, how can we begin re-evaluating what sleep supplements can do in
6,400
The number of lethal accidents in the US each year caused by ‘drowsy driving’.
National Sleep Foundation 31
T.B. photo/
Shutterstock.com
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