Advice on Dietary Supplements: A Comparison of Health Food Stores and Pharmacies in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVES: Our first objective was to determine the accuracy of information provided to customers in health food stores (HFS) in Canada. The second objective was to compare the accuracy of this information with that provided to customers in pharmacies. METHODS: Undergraduate students visited 192 HFS and 56 pharmacies, located across Canada. In approximately half of the stores, they asked whether a specific supplement would help to prevent a particular condition or enhance health in a particular way. In the rest of the stores, they asked for advice on particular health concerns. RESULTS: On 88% of times that questions were asked in HFS, the recommendations made were either unscientific (6%) or were poorly supported by the scientific literature (82%). By contrast, this occurred for only 27% of visits to pharmacies (p < 0.01). Conversely, on two thirds of visits to pharmacies, staff gave advice considered to be fairly accurate or accurate, but this seldom occurred in HFS (68% vs. 7%, p < 0.01). CONCLUSIONS: The vast majority of information provided in HFS in response to questions has little scientific support. Pharmacies are a far more reliable source of information, although they still have significant scope for improvement.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".