Information is Beautiful has a very slick interactive bubble chart of all the dietary supplements out there sorted by both size (indicating how popular the supplement is) and position (the higher up in the chart, the more scientific proof confirms it works).
You can click on each bubble to see what treatment the supplement represents at that particular placement.
For example, you take green tea for cholesterol? Good for you, there is a lot of scientific papers out there to support the claim that it helps with cholesterol.
You also take green tea to help against cancer and boost weight loss? Not so good, there is barely any scientific data to support those claims (position in graph) even though there is a lot of discussions and written text about it online (size of node in chart).
BoingBoing reports that David reviewed around 1000 scientific studies to compile the data necessary to build this visualization. That’s an incredible amount of work to create such a valuable resource.
As someone that comes from a family of vitamin-believers and natural-health folk, this story is already making the rounds in my Outbox.
