Vitamins and Minerals - Are you Wasting Money? Are they actually Dangerous?

Why is the number of people purchasing vitamins and minerals increasing daily? Is it because they feel that they are not getting adequate nutrition from the food they eat? If there are so many of these people using supplements why are degenerative diseases such as cancer, arthritis, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, fibromyalgia etc. still on the rise? It appears that we are not getting adequate nutrition from our food and even the vitamins and minerals that we faithfully buy and down daily don't appear to help. What is wrong???? Why are people wasting money on something that doesn't appear to work? Are people really getting the benefit from what they are buying? Is it possible that taking supplements can cause us harm? Commercial grade vitamin and mineral concentrates are often synthesized by the big pharmaceutical and chemical industries in a lab from the same starting material that drugs are made from. Some of these are coal tar, petroleum products, animal by-products / waste and fecal matter, ground rocks, stones, shells and metal. Many nutrient manufactures then purchase these raw materials and formulate their vitamin and mineral formulas with them. The United States Pharmacopoeia (U.S.P.) states that if a product looks similar under a microscope, or in analysis, that it is the same regardless of what it is made out of.