Vitamin and nutrient supplements reduce health problems and costs

Use of specific dietary supplements in targeted populations not only provides health benefits, but also offers significant cost saving benefits to health care systems, a recent report shows. The report, “Smart Prevention—Health Care Cost Savings Resulting from the Targeted Use of Dietary Supplements,” issued by the economic firm Frost & Sullivan, through a grant from the United States Council for Responsible Nutrition (CRN) Foundation, examined four different chronic diseases - heart disease, age-related eye disease, diabetes, and bone disease - and the potential for health care cost savings when U.S. adults, 55 and older, diagnosed with these diseases, used one of eight different dietary supplement regimens.  It demonstrated that supplementation at preventive intake levels in high-risk populations can reduce the number of disease-associated medical events, representing the potential for hundreds of millions of dollars of savings to the healthcare system. In the U.S., 75 percent of health care dollars go to the treatment of chronic disease, with only 3 percent spent on prevention, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.