People from various backgrounds who value different things will view and think about supplements in dissimilar ways. An elderly person may supplement with calcium to help them protect their bone mineral density, an athlete may supplement with an ergogenic aid to boost performance and a student studying for a test may take a Nootropic.
All of the above are very different products with very different aims but they still fall under the umbrella term of supplements which can be split into two different categories, food and non-food supplements.
These are self-evidently not precise descriptions because a supplement is by definition not a food, and all non-food supplements are derived from foods, food extracts or manufactured versions of food extracts. You will see soon enough why this distinction still has utility. Let’s look at what they both mean.
A food supplement for our purposes of discussion is one which provides a macro or micronutrient which you could in theory get from the consumption of foods in a normal diet. Food supplements typically do not make any grand claims and are somewhat non-controversial provided their usage is decided upon for objective reasons. If your diet is lacking in a certain nutrient then food supplements can bridge the gap.
Examples include vitamin supplements, mineral supplements, protein powders and Omega-3 oils.
Non-food supplements, by contrast, are things which are not traditionally thought of to be provided by food, or things which are in foods but for which the effective dose is exceedingly high. Generally, a non-food supplement would be taken to improve some aspect of health, sporting performance or recovery beyond the level which could be achieved through a normal diet – supplemental creatine for example, falls within this bracket, as do stimulants like caffeine, as both of these improve athletic performance, but the effective dose would not be provided by what could reasonably be considered normal dietary intake of foods. Caffeine could theoretically come from large amounts of strong coffee, but for the purpose of description it falls in this category.
Now we will look in depth at some examples of each. This list is not exhaustive, but extensive, and will encompass most if not all supplements likely to be used under normal circumstances.