Being Willing to Change Our Minds May Be One of the Healthiest Habits We Can Develop

There is something rather uncomfortable about science:

It changes.

Something we were once told was good for us may eventually turn out to be unnecessary. Something routinely recommended by physicians may later fall out of favor. Something that makes perfect biological sense may fail when researchers finally ask the harder question:

But does it actually make people healthier?

And perhaps that isn’t a weakness of science.

Perhaps it is one of its greatest strengths.

For years, there was a commercial that drove me a little crazy. I haven’t seen it in a while, and I can’t say I miss it. 😊

It was for Balance of Nature, a line of fruit and vegetable supplements that seemed to offer an extraordinarily appealing shortcut: take a few capsules and get the goodness of fruits and vegetables without actually having to eat very many fruits and vegetables.

Perhaps it bothered me because food is so much more complicated—and so much more wonderful—than that.

We have this incredibly complex digestive system and an entire ecosystem of microorganisms living within us. When we eat an apple, a handful of berries, lentils, leafy greens or broccoli, we aren’t simply extracting a vitamin from it. We are eating fiber, water, micronutrients, phytochemicals and countless compounds interacting with one another and with our own biology.

And I couldn’t help thinking about people spending a small fortune on capsules while believing they might somehow compensate for a diet dominated by ultra-processed food.

Nature has already given us fruits and vegetables.

Gifted them to us, really.

Still, supplements aren’t inherently bad. Some have a meaningful and important place in our lives. Deficiencies are real. Certain medical conditions create very specific nutritional needs. Age, pregnancy, medications, diet, malabsorption and other circumstances can change what an individual needs.

And yes, sometimes even supplements that once seemed broadly beneficial are later shown to be less helpful, less necessary—or occasionally more harmful—than we once believed.

Whether you have a medicine cabinet filled with supplements promising some version of better health, a special shelf beside your blender holding powders you’ve spent a small fortune on, or—like me—a basket tucked away for filling pill boxes each month, plus the creatine and a few special powders sitting in their pretty little jars waiting to be added to coffee, water or a smoothie, many of us have some version of the same thing:

A collection of little hopes.

Take this and perhaps my mind will stay sharper.

Take that and perhaps my body will stay stronger.

Maybe this one will protect my heart.

Maybe that one will help me age a little better.

And over the past several decades, those shelves and medicine cabinets may have contained things such as multivitamins, vitamin C, vitamin E, calcium, fish oil, niacin, glucosamine and chondroitin, antioxidants, B vitamins, selenium, collagen, turmeric or cinnamon.

Many of these weren’t ridiculous ideas.

Quite the opposite.

There were plausible scientific reasons to believe many of them might help.

Antioxidants combat oxidative stress.

Niacin raises HDL and lowers LDL and triglycerides.

Calcium is necessary for healthy bones.

Homocysteine is associated with cardiovascular disease, and B vitamins lower homocysteine.

Glucosamine is involved in cartilage.

Vitamin C supports essential biological processes.

If A affects B, and B is associated with C, it is very tempting to conclude that changing A will prevent C.

But biology isn’t always that simple.

And that is where clinical research becomes so important.

Changing a Number Is Not the Same as Improving Health

We can prove that something changes a laboratory value without proving that it changes the outcome we actually care about.

Niacin is a beautiful example.

For years, the reasoning seemed logical:

Niacin can raise HDL and lower LDL and triglycerides.

Better cholesterol numbers should mean fewer heart attacks.

Therefore, niacin should help prevent cardiovascular disease.

Except when large modern trials tested that final assumption, adding niacin to contemporary treatment did not reduce cardiovascular events or mortality—and it produced meaningful adverse effects.

I remember trying niacin years ago. I couldn’t tolerate the flushing at all. But flushing is hardly its only potential side effect.

More importantly, if taking something changes the number we are measuring but doesn’t meaningfully improve the health outcome we were trying to change, we have to be willing to ask:

Why are we still taking it simply because a decade or two ago it offered us hope?

Sometimes science doesn’t discover that the original fact was wrong.

It discovers that the story we built around that fact was incomplete.

The Antioxidant Story

Some ideas are almost irresistible biologically.

Oxidative stress damages cells.

Antioxidants counter oxidation.

Therefore, taking concentrated antioxidants should protect us from cancer and cardiovascular disease.

It sounds beautifully logical.

And yet randomized trials changed the picture.

Vitamin E was once widely promoted for cardiovascular protection. Supplementation, however, has not demonstrated the hoped-for reductions in cardiovascular disease, cancer or mortality, and research has raised concern about hemorrhagic stroke.

Beta-carotene offers an even more striking example. High-dose beta-carotene supplementation actually increased lung cancer risk in certain high-risk populations rather than decreasing it.

But here’s the fascinating part:

That didn’t suddenly make carrots unhealthy.

The food and the isolated, high-dose nutrient are not necessarily biologically interchangeable.

When we obtain nutrients through food, we consume them within a complicated package of fiber, water, micronutrients, phytochemicals, proteins, fats and carbohydrates. Digestion and metabolism then determine how those substances are absorbed and used.

A concentrated supplement is something different.

Our first goal, whenever reasonably possible, should be obtaining nutrients through a diverse diet rich in real, minimally processed foods—fruits, vegetables, herbs, spices, whole grains, beans, lentils, legumes, nuts, seeds and appropriate protein sources, including fish and, for those who choose them, meat and poultry.

Food First: Perhaps We Underestimated the Package

One fascinating pattern running through nutrition research is that nutrients consumed as part of healthy foods can be associated with better health while isolating those nutrients and putting them into pills often fails to reproduce the same benefit.

Maybe we spent decades trying to identify the thing in healthy food:

The antioxidant.

The vitamin.

The mineral.

The flavanol.

The fatty acid.

Then we extracted it.

Concentrated it.

And put it into a capsule.

But perhaps part of what makes healthy food beneficial is precisely that it isn’t one isolated ingredient.

Food is extraordinarily complicated.

And so are we.

The emerging philosophy is much more nuanced than “supplements are good” or “supplements are bad.”

It is closer to:

Food first. Supplement a genuine gap or a specific need.

Calcium: More Isn’t Automatically Better

We know calcium matters for bones.

So the hypothesis seemed perfectly reasonable:

Calcium is important → everyone should take calcium supplements.

But those are two different statements.

Routine supplementation in people who don’t need additional calcium hasn’t produced the simple benefit once imagined, and supplementation can carry downsides, including an increased risk of kidney stones in some circumstances.

Calcium still has an important role when dietary intake is inadequate and in appropriate osteoporosis management.

The recommendation has simply become more individualized.

And perhaps that is one of the most encouraging directions in modern medicine: moving away from treating every person as though the same intervention should produce the same result and toward asking what this particular human being actually needs.

A treatment can be beneficial for one person, unnecessary for another and potentially harmful for someone else.

Science becoming more precise can look from the outside as though science “changed its mind.”

Sometimes what actually happened is much more interesting:

We learned who benefits.

The Multivitamin as “Insurance”

For years, many people have thought of a daily multivitamin as inexpensive nutritional insurance.

It probably helps, and surely it can’t hurt.

But evidence hasn’t supported the broad promise that taking a multivitamin prevents cardiovascular disease or reduces mortality in otherwise well-nourished adults.

Yet even here, the answer isn’t:

Multivitamins are bad.

There are legitimate situations in which supplementation can be important, including certain malabsorptive conditions, bariatric surgery, pregnancy, nutritional deficiencies and undernutrition.

The modern question becomes less:

“Is this supplement healthy?”

and more:

“Does this particular person have a reason to take it?”

That is a far more sophisticated question.

For some of us, perhaps the only meaningful beneficiary of that multivitamin we’ve swallowed every morning for decades is the company selling it to us.

And multivitamins certainly aren’t the only example.

Some readers may remember ephedra. Or the enthusiasm for high-dose vitamin A. Go back far enough and you’ll find medical practices that make today’s questionable supplement cabinet look positively tame.

Paregoric on a teething baby’s gums, anyone?

Yikes.

Sometimes the New Science Doesn’t Say “Stop.” It Says “It’s Complicated.”

And this may be my favorite part of science.

It doesn’t always give us the satisfying answer of yes or no.

Take some of the supplements that remain popular today.

Cinnamon

Research suggests cinnamon may modestly improve some glucose measures in people with type 2 diabetes, but results are inconsistent, and cinnamon certainly isn’t a substitute for established diabetes treatment.

There is another wrinkle: cassia cinnamon contains coumarin, which can become a concern at higher habitual doses.

So perhaps instead of swallowing concentrated cinnamon capsules, enjoy cinnamon as food.

Sprinkle it into coffee.

Mix it into cottage cheese or Greek yogurt.

Add it to oatmeal.

Let food be food.

Turmeric

Turmeric is another interesting example.

Curcumin and turmeric supplements have produced intriguing results in studies of various biomarkers and symptoms, but the research is limited by differences in formulations, study quality and duration. Concentrated supplements have also been associated with rare cases of liver injury.

Meanwhile, turmeric has been used as a culinary spice for centuries.

Add it to soups, vegetables, grains or whatever else tastes lovely with it.

The question isn’t necessarily whether turmeric is “good” or “bad.”

It may simply be whether we need to turn everything potentially beneficial in food into a pill.

Cocoa and Dark Chocolate

There are interesting cardiovascular signals surrounding cocoa flavanols, but the evidence isn’t strong enough to turn dark chocolate into medicine.

Fortunately, I don’t need much convincing to occasionally enjoy a little dark chocolate without pretending it is a prescription. 😊

Collagen

Collagen is another wonderfully gray area.

It may offer modest symptomatic benefit for osteoarthritis, while some of the more glamorous claims about skin and anti-aging become considerably less convincing when researchers focus on higher-quality, non-industry-funded studies.

Again:

Maybe.

A little.

For some people.

We need more information.

There is wisdom in becoming comfortable with that answer.

Why Science “Changes”

Scientific understanding is built in layers.

An observation leads to a hypothesis.

A biological mechanism makes that hypothesis plausible.

Small studies test it.

Larger studies test it more rigorously.

Randomized controlled trials attempt to separate true effects from coincidence, bias and confounding.

Long-term outcome data reveal things short studies cannot.

Systematic reviews and meta-analyses bring multiple studies together.

Guidelines change as the totality of evidence changes.

Each step can reveal something the previous step couldn’t.

An observational study might tell us:

People who eat more foods containing X tend to live longer.

That does not necessarily mean:

Taking X in a capsule will make people live longer.

A laboratory study might show:

X changes this biological pathway.

That doesn’t necessarily establish:

Changing this pathway prevents heart attacks.

Science becomes stronger because researchers keep testing the assumptions.

Science Is Supposed to Be Correctable

We sometimes hear:

“First they told us one thing. Now they’re telling us something completely different.”

And I understand why that can erode confidence.

But imagine the alternative.

Imagine discovering better evidence and refusing to change because changing would require admitting that our previous understanding was incomplete.

That wouldn’t be science.

Science isn’t a collection of facts carved into stone.

It is a method for getting progressively closer to the truth.

New information should be allowed to change old conclusions.

And Maybe We Should Be Willing to Do the Same

Old habits die hard.

So do old beliefs.

We become attached to what we eat, how we exercise, which supplements we take, how we sleep, what we were taught—and sometimes even what we have spent years telling other people.

Changing our minds can feel strangely threatening because we sometimes mistake consistency for wisdom.

But perhaps wisdom isn’t saying:

“This is what I’ve always believed.”

Perhaps wisdom sounds more like:

“This is what I believed based on what I knew then. Now I know something I didn’t know before.”

There is no shame in that.

There is curiosity.

There is growth.

And there may even be better health.

Yesterday’s Medicine Wasn’t Necessarily Foolish

It is easy to look backward with today’s knowledge and wonder:

How could anyone have believed that?

But that isn’t entirely fair.

Many previous recommendations were reasonable conclusions based on the evidence available at the time.

The healthcare professionals making those recommendations weren’t necessarily practicing bad medicine.

They were practicing medicine with the information they had.

Our responsibility isn’t to ridicule yesterday’s understanding.

It is to be willing to update it.

And someday, undoubtedly, healthcare professionals will look back at some of the things we confidently believe in 2026 and realize that our conclusions were incomplete, too.

We simply don’t know which ones yet.

I find that humbling.

But I also find it incredibly exciting.

Because the lesson isn’t:

Don’t trust science because science changes.

It is almost exactly the opposite.

Trust the process enough to let better evidence change what you believe.

Eat the foods we consistently know nourish us.

Move our bodies.

Build and preserve muscle.

Sleep.

Don’t smoke.

Pay attention to blood pressure, blood sugar and cholesterol.

Use medications when their benefits outweigh their risks.

Supplement genuine deficiencies and specific needs rather than swallowing handfuls of pills simply because someone once told us they were “good for us.”

And remain curious.

Because twenty years from now, we will undoubtedly understand things about the human body that we don’t understand today.

Old habits really do die hard.

But they are allowed to die.

We don’t owe lifelong loyalty to something simply because we once believed it was good for us.

Not a supplement.

Not a diet.

Not a medical recommendation.

Not even an idea.

Science gives us permission to say:

We learned something new. So we’re going to do something differently.

Perhaps we should give ourselves that same permission.

Because changing your mind when the evidence changes isn’t inconsistency.

It is growth.

And there is something wonderfully hopeful about knowing that even after centuries of studying the human body, there is still so much left for us to discover.

Perhaps growth is simply this: honoring what we believed then without asking it to survive what we know now.

🍯 Honey