From Information Is Beautiful:

The picture is interesting. Let me add a few comments:

1). This picture should reinforce the differences between health supplements and drugs. Drugs are specifically designed to target specific pathways in the body. Many supplements and compounds do do that, but in a more indirect way that’s very dependent on external circumstances.

2). I take this picture to map the implicit relationship between a particular substance and a specific health condition. From this perspective many beneficial foods and compounds appear less helpful than they actually are. For example, there’s plenty of evidence to believe that acai is very good for you because of its nutrition content. However, it wouldn’t perform well according to this graph because of its novelty and lack of evidence that links it to a particular disease.

3). Does this table take into account different types of supplements? Different types of studies? For a lot of organisms and roots there’s simply not a lot of formal evidence that maps a particular food to a particular condition. I’ve written before how difficult it is to reproduce results in scientific research. This is not limited to merely supplements and is probably more true for drugs.