I pretty much agree with all that you said. I have weeded out most of the ones that talk a half hour to say five minutes worth. Of course that also depends on the person listening because what for one person might be interesting another person wants just the minimal "what to do" and doesn't really want to understand the science or mechanisms.

Another thing is "how much good does it do". Big claims but most of the stuff even if having some science backing the claims are usually only very slight improvements. I think apple cider vinegar fits in that category. It may be helpful for diabetics but the blood sugar change is going to be very minor and any insulin sensitivity gained may be hard to impossible to measure. I personally use some of it as a water flavor enhancer mostly for gut lining health. It is a short chain fatty acid that does for the intestines much what some of the claims of benefit of soluble fiber does. Converts to short chain fatty acids that improve the structure and the tightness of the tight junctions in the gut lining. In other words helps improve or prevent leaky gut syndrome. Have I noticed any big differences or improvements? No. Maybe it helps, maybe it doesn't. However to me it is just "food" that is very unlikely to harm me and might do me some good, especially as I have aged. There is a bunch of stuff as we get older just doesn't work as good as it used to when we were 20.
With the on line influencers..............caveat emptor. For sure. For the prescription drug and food advertising on television, double it.

Another example of very small amount of improvement is also in prescribed drugs. I took metformin for many years. Yet if you actually look up the science behind it the blood sugar improvement for diabetics is only miniscule. Single digits improvement in blood sugar as I recall. I have went back on it a couple times in the last 6 years and can not tell the difference in my blood sugar but it certainly will give me the squirts when I first go on it. Statin drugs only improve the heart health absolute statistics only by a tiny amount. Sure they can tout a 50% improvement. Relative improvement. If you have 10,000 people in the study and one has a heart attack on the drug and two have heart attacks on placebo that is a 50% relative improvement. Yet you had to treat 10,000 people to keep one extra person from having a heart attack. Not nearly as impressive as 50% would seem. That is just an example of how statistics can be misleading when used improperly. That is no specific result from any paper. So the influencers about supplements are not the only ones to exaggerate the positive results.

Yes there are lots of claims. I approach it from a much different perspective than I would have 40 years ago.

1. First, do no harm. My number one concern is that we do not take something that further harms us. If we take some stuff that does not do us any good, meh. But I want to make sure I don't take anything (includes prescription drugs) that makes our life worse overall.

2. I can afford it. 40 years ago I needed to pinch every penny at times and we did. That is no longer an issue. If I spend a few hundred dollars a year on some supplements and 99% of them are worthless but the 1% does something significant for me (likes helping me keep from getting Alzheimer's, just as an example) then the money is worth it for me. It is only my kids inheritance after all. And they will probably do quite all right anyway, even if I do buy some things I do not need.

3. Some thing I have learned through multiple sources is that as we get older some things do not work as well in our bodies as it used to. For example a young to very young person converts protein to muscle very effectively and efficiently. The older we get we simply do not do that conversion as well. We do not digest and process the protein as well and we do not utilize it to build muscle as well as we used to. And it is not just protein. Many things in our body are not the same as it was in younger years. Melatonin is another example. At 70 my pineal gland only produces a fraction of what it did as a teenager or baby and even much much less than even at 40 years old. Is that important? I don't know. But the point I am making is that perhaps, just perhaps, there may be some supplements that might do us old geezers some good at 71 that might do nothing for a 20 or 40 year old. So I look at supplements with more of an open mind that I would have ten or twenty years ago, as I have gotten older and , well, stuff just doesn't work quite as well with my body.

4. I have lost a tremendous amount of trust and respect for the medical monopoly industry. That says nothing bad about the doctors and nurses in the within the industry. I have very good friends in that field and I think they do everything they possibly can to improve their patients lives concerning their expertise. That does not mean there are not incentives within the industry that either do not promote cheap off patent drugs or even discourage science looking into such health improvements. I once was on a board of directors for a company that had a CEO (a very ethical oriented CEO) that made the statement once "be careful what you incent for" when we were discussing employee incentive programs within the management of the company. "Because you will get what you incentivize for". And those incentives can have unintended consequences. I believe there are a lot of unintended consequences within the medical industrial complex that actively work not in favorable ways for peoples overall health. Dietary guidelines at the forefront of that skepticism and closely followed by prescription patented drugs.

But I have said a way more than you wanted to hear. And probably wrong as I often have been in my lifetime. Carry on.

I can guarantee that a lot of what I do is wrong. Describes most of my life. But so far I have managed to avoid the catastrophic mistakes, the ones that get you killed (with one motorcycle/deer accident that came pretty close) or financially or relationship destroy a person (ok, well one divorce that came pretty close). The point is no one should do ANYTHING because John Burns does it. Do your own due diligence. I post things I think are worthy of discussion. They very well could be wrong.