With health becoming a priority for most people around the world, some turn to taking dietary supplements as a potential means to make up for their otherwise unhealthy eating habits and lifestyles.

However, supplements are by no means a substitute for a balanced meal or physical activity as there are absolutely no shortcuts to health, according to Amway-based Nutrilite Health Institute’s technology strategist.

“Supplements are not magic bullets. They are not miracles. They are merely products meant to go alongside a healthy lifestyle and diet,” said Keith Randolph, who holds a Ph.D. in cardiovascular diseases, in an interview with The Korea Herald.

“There is a lot of demand around the world for magic bullets,” he said. “Some people want to have careless lifestyles and make poor diet decisions, and then be able to do something to offset bad choices or the absence of disciplines.”

And this is not something that Nutrilite, the world’s No. 1 dietary supplements brand established under Amway, is able to or willing to offer to consumers, according to the Nutrilite strategist.

“We are not appealing to customers who are looking for (magic bullets to health). There are other companies which do that, but that is not what we’re going for,” said Randolph.

Rather, Nutrilite, which specializes in producing multivitamins and supplements using all-organic plants grown on its self-established farms in the U.S., Mexico and Brazil, strives to be a “credible partner” to health-smart consumers who want to take responsibility for their health.

The company, which prides itself on making products backed by scientific evidence, is continuously making efforts to create “silver bullets” that can better synergize with key factors that contribute to an individual’s wellness.

For one, Amway gave a $10 million unrestricted grant to Stanford University’s Prevention Research Center in 2014 to conduct the world’s first ever longitudinal study to identify lifestyle and environmental factors that may help people maintain their health and wellness as they age. The study began last year and is set to continue on for decades.

Amway’s move was driven by the vision that the new findings will be “critical to developing (Nutrilite’s) next-generation products” a well as a view that investment into slowing aging will “have a greater impact on society than investment in chronic disease treatments,” Randolph said.

The findings from studies like Stanford’s would stand in importance to South Korea as well, a country whose population is aging at the fastest rate in the world, according to the “An Aging World: 2015” report by the U.S. Census Bureau.

The institution projects Korea will become the world’s No. 2 “oldest” country by 2050, with roughly 35.9 percent of the Korean population aged 65 and above by then, hinting at a host of new challenges including age-related disease, weakening productivity at workplaces and soaring health costs.

“Wellness is obviously going to be influenced by a lot of things,” including balanced diets, active lifestyles and a healthy social life, said Randolph. “What we don’t know is what the strong levers are across all of those things that really make the biggest, lasting differences. That’s what the research will get at.”

Reflecting a global shift toward preventive care, the global wellness market was valued at $3.4 trillion as of 2014, nearly three times larger than the $1 trillion worldwide pharmaceutical industry, according to most recent statistics from U.S.-based think tank The Global Wellness Institute.

While experts work to decipher the intricacies of “wellness” in the decades ahead, the 63-year-old Nutrilite expert meanwhile urged individuals to take on, from an early age, healthy lifestyles that have been proven to contribute to healthy longevity.

“Investment in health in the first half of your life have the biggest payoffs in the last part of your life,” he said, comparing the adoption of healthy habits to investing in a retirement plan.

Compared to the rest of the world, South Koreans are on the upper end of the spectrum in terms of their attitudes toward health, Randolph said.

“People take a high level of responsibility for their own health in Korea. And that means knowing about it and doing something about it,” he said.

“I think that’s at the heart of why Amway’s products and Nutrilite’s products sell so well in the Korean market.”

By Sohn Ji-young (jys@heraldcorp.com)