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Protein, caffeine, be poen, the raw garlic, eating meal worms, freeze-dried bull testicle powder, his Divine protein shap. What are the best supplements for muscle growth and [Music] health?
Um, well, they should put creatine in the water. Truly, everyone should take creatine. For any particular variety you like, monohydrate, whatever's cheap. Like, the the new monohydrates work as well as anything else. Only exception I would say is that some people still get gastric upset from it, and the micronized creatine can be beneficial. Although I think that's a dose thing, right? So again, I'm old and I was there in the earliest days. The early creatines were terrible. They were this thick, granular powder. The first time I took creatine, I lost like five pounds because I took 20 grams a day and it was coming out of both ends for me. Like, I couldn't eat and I just, it was awful.
The newer creatine monohydrates are cheap and bulk and mix really well. That was not the case. I would only say that you don't have to load like that. Back in the day, we did 20 grams a day for five days. It was brutal. But whether you take 20 grams a day for five days, 10 grams a day for 10 days, or three grams a day for a month, you end up with saturated stores. So what I usually tell most people, there's some number, it's like 15 grams per kilo or some [ __ ] like that. I don't pay any attention to it. Just three grams if you're little and five grams if you're big. Put it in your protein drink. Done. Move on with your life.
And why, why do you rate creatine so highly? Well, it does everything. That's like, not a joke. It increases muscle creatine stores, which gives you increased short-term energy production. So you get, you know, an extra rep or two here and there. It can increase strength, probably by pulling water into the tissue, by improving muscular energetics. Probably helps with general protein synthesis. Don't swear me to that. It's involved in brain metabolism. There's been some preliminary work that it can help with depression by raising brain creatine levels. It's critically important for various women's health issues throughout the lifespan, which I talk about in the women's book, which can be had at my bookstore, bodyrecomposition.com, coupon code Mike has no tan, 10% off of all books.
Creatine is a very sort of ubiquitous energetic compound in the body. Like, yeah, we think of it as being muscular, and it is, but it is involved in energy production all over the body and in the brain. It just does everything. It's cheap as chips. We've got decades of research on it. We know it's safe. Like I said, that they should put it in the water supply.
I've got a friend who won't take it 'cause he's worried that it'll raise his DHT and make him lose hair. Yeah, if you get bored, go to r/trustless. That comes up every few days. Oh, yeah, there was like one study back in the day that DHT went up a little bit. I don't see why that would be the case, but people have used creatine for decades. If there's been an increase in hair loss, I sure haven't heard about it. And, uh, just in case it's unclear to you, DHT stands for dihydrotestosterone, and it's an androgen. Yeah, testosterone converts to DHT in certain tissues, and it's part of hair loss and the androgenic, the masculinizing effects of testosterone. And one of those effects is scalp hair. Yeah, so like balding, facial and body hair growth, pimples, voice deepening, that sort of thing is all like basically DHT. Yeah.
Well, just tell them to take creatine with finasteride, and it'll be fine. Like, that's that's key. You take one thing and you chase down the side effects with another thing. And of course, if you lower DHT too much, then you have erectile dysfunction. So then you got to take another drug, then chase down the side effects of that drug. This is how it's done. Well, you know, I could grow a full beard in my teens and I've been taking creatine for, you know, almost 10 years now. So, knows. It does tend to be very tissue-specific, right? Like, so the enzyme is five-alpha reductase. That's what turns testosterone into DHT. And again, this is not my area of expertise, right? Like, so generally speaking, people become experts in things that apply to them. I've always had hair. I've never cared about hair loss. Industry who are losing their hair, experts on hair loss. I'm not the guy, but they are. Is is the enzyme, and I'm sure levels of that enzyme differ in different tissues of the body depending on the person. You have high five-alpha reductase levels in your scalp, you're probably more likely to get hair loss than if you don't.
Finasteride, dutasteride, and these are five-AR blockers that that prevent that conversion. But you wouldn't write finasteride as a top supplement for muscle growth and health, which is the topic we're discussing. No, we just, we got, I just blathering about hair. Take creatine and then take that would for muscle growth. That's just a joke, by the way. Yeah, yeah.
As far as other supplements for muscle growth, you, I know a lot of people got on some of the pre, you know, with citrulline and beta-alanine and some of those things. Those are mainly buffers. If you're doing high-rep work, they might let you get an extra rep or two. I tend to think of the more performance, you know, for like athletes who need that extra little bit of buffering. For actual muscle growth, I mean, are we going to consider protein powder a supplement? Is that a food? I don't know what you classify it as. I classify it as food. I don't like thinking of it as a supplement, exactly. It's an ultra-processed food, but a food nonetheless. But it's still technically food.
What should you look for in a protein powder? I mean, I guess given the whole amino spiking thing, that it has what it, you know, claims to contain. There was an issue in the 2000s, it might still be called amino spiking, where people were taking cheap protein but throwing specific aminos at it so that on a mass spec, it would give a better rating than it actually was. This is a big issue. I don't know if it still is. But again, stick with, you know, well-known brands that have been around for a while, and you'll probably be okay with that. You see something that is 50% cheaper than everything else, it probably doesn't contain what it contains. You may want to check the amino acid profile to make sure that it contains, for example, leucine in similar quantities to standard whey and casein protein.
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I just buy basic Costco whey protein. I know a lot of people get super twisted about, you know, whey concentrate and whey isolate and this and that and the other. And even though I wrote a book on protein, coupon code Mike has no tan, 10% off of all books. You know, whey is good, it's fast. Casein is good 'cause it's slow. Milk protein isolate is a mix of the two. I take whey protein and just mix it in milk and move on with my life. There's lots of vegetarian proteins for people that want that. Pea and rice and soy and all that sort of stuff. You know, some people can't handle whey 'cause the dairy. Some of them are lactose removed, others aren't. Again, I don't really keep up. You can get the ones with the mixes like True Protein, which is great, super overpriced right now. Whey protein is expensive right now, mainly because of y'all. It's because of most, like all whey protein comes from Australia, and there's something wrecked, idiot, huh? Wrecked. That wrecked and prices went way up a while back and kind of never came back down. Australia is a massive agricultural exporter. Yeah. And education. Now that's our number one export. But let's not get off topic.
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Yeah, you know, as far as other muscle-building supplements that actually do anything, there aren't many. People will ask me, they're like, you know, what's, what's the most anabolic substance you can take? Well, you can't take sleep, but we know that would be number one. Sleep is comparable to tons of anabolic drugs. And I would just say food. I'm like, we know that food is anabolic. It is safe. It is tested. We know that it is effective for muscle growth. Just good, wholesome nutrition. Wholesome is one of those loaded words. It's like, you need sufficient protein, you need sufficient energy, you need sufficient carbohydrates, you need, you know, some dietary fat. Eat enough to support muscle growth without eating so much that you just get get sloppy. Yeah. And you don't want micronutrient deficiencies either. Yeah, exactly. Those are pretty damn hard to get. I mean, you, you have to have some pretty screwy diets in the modern era. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Sure, it can be done, but it would be generally difficult. Yeah, like if you've got ARFID, which stands for Avoidant Restrictive Food Intake Disorder, that's basically what it takes, right? Yeah, exactly. Veganism. Leave me alone. Ah, oh. If you don't do it right, that can be a headache and a half. Even some bodybuilding diets that become so limited around so few foods. When you get into like full-blown orthorexia and things like that, many bodybuilders actually show up with nutrient deficiencies during prep diets because they eliminate so many nutrient-dense foods. For: just before I train, I'll have fish and a rice cake. I'll train. I'll have me fish. You see that in orthorexia too, where people become so obsessed about the healthiness of the foods that they actually end up making it worse. Like red meat, which is a critical source of iron, zinc, B12. They get more and more and more limited. Iron is common, especially in winter, who already have difficulty getting enough just because of the C. But when they strip out red meat and chicken and, you know, start living on to lot, it becomes extremely difficult without animal source proteins. B12 is a problem. Magnesium deficiency is real common. They strip dairy out of their contest prep diet. Now calcium becomes a problem. Contest prep diets are really, really unhealthy unless you know how to do it. By which I mean protein bars and tortillas.
Like I am a general believer in like, just take a basic multivitamin. I don't think it's magic. I don't think it's anything special. It's just nutritional insurance. It's one of those, won't hurt, might help. Buy cheap, take two. If it bothers you, like that's kind of it. Fish oils, omega-3s. You got to find a source of them that is absolutely like that's another one. They ought to put in the water supply because I've been watching that data develop for 20 years. If 20 years ago, if I'd seen the list of supposed benefits and hadn't read the research, I would have been convinced it was BS. Officials just do everything. I mean, they may improve fat loss slightly, they decrease fat synthesis, they're involved in heart health, they're involved in brain health, they improve cell membrane permeability, which improves insulin sensitivity over time. Because when you eat a high saturated fat or trans fat diet, cell membranes become extra stiff. That's a big thing. In the 2000s, they get incorporated into the membrane. Red blood cells. I mean, they're an essential nutrient. They just like do everything. They're signaling molecules through the PPAR, the prolifer alpha, I don't know, the receptor. There's an alpha, beta, and a gamma in the fat cells. They activate the good ones. At a molecular level, like they're not just energetic like most fats, they are actually a signaling nutrient and they just do everything. And you like 1.8 grams of EPA and DHA combined per day? Between 1.8 to 3. 1.8 to, yeah, 30 grams once every 10 days rather than three grams every day, would that yield the same benefits? Yeah, I don't think, I don't think so. I don't have an answer to that, but that wouldn't be my preference. I'd be afraid that they might get burned off for energy. So I don't know. You can do that with vitamin D, but I don't think you. Fish oils. And what's interesting, again, me being a smug prick, uh, I came up with that value like 2003, the 1.8 to 3 grams based on something I had read. And now, if you start to look at all the research on like the major health benefits, start above like the minor deficiency avoidance, it's all about two to four grams. Literally, where it all falls. I'm like, yeah, I kind of got lucky on that one. It should be noted though, that they do contain calories. So if you're having them in quantities like that, you know, you you want to account for them. Back in the 2000s, because again, there's this always happens, something is good and then people roll off the rails, right? Because at the time, fish oils may cause a slight fat loss and I'm like, people literally were saying, the more fish oils you take, the more fat you will lose. Okay, then that official calories don't count. I kid you not, right? You cannot make this up. It's like, well, if intervals twice a week are good, well, you should do intervals seven days a week for fat loss. Like, this is just how this industry runs. And so fish oils, everybody went completely off the rails. It's like, no more isn't better. Actually, too much can impair immune system function, can cause issues with clotting. Like, and I know people that have taken very high dose fish oils to actually, like with autoimmune and AR, like, uh, rheumatoid arthritis, deliberately to tamp down immune system function, like to try to to modulate it. So like more is not better. And actually, the better way to do it, which is not really practical, they talk about something called the omega-3 index. This is basically the percentage of omega-3 incorporation in the cell membranes. And there's some optimal number, it's like 5 to 10% or something like that. And how much you actually technically need depends on your baseline diet. Like if you're starting with a higher omega-3 index, you don't need as much. Like America, we tend to have an average lower omega-3 index because fatty fish is not a part of our our life. Short of paying for an expensive blood test, you can't determine your omega-3 index. So I just, 1.8 to 3, it's good enough for government [Music] work. It's involved in colon cancer and probably brain health, and they do everything. People put this stuff up in my group. I'm like, is there anything vitamin D can't do? I mean, it can't get Mike tan. Vitamin D is, you know, the endemic deficiency for a number of reasons, probably due to an overreaction to tanning in the A. Again, remember I was there, right? Everyone baked until they were leather in the sun, and then we saw this increase incidence in skin cancer, and everyone kind of overcompensated. And you put SPF a million anytime you went outside, and we the big sun hats. And then suddenly people went from getting too much sun to none. On top of the modern environment and job, people work inside. They're at home all day. We don't, you know, unless you're a laborer, unless you work outside, realistically, you don't get the 30 minutes of direct sun exposure that you need to generate 10,000 IU of vitamin D. And it is truly an epidemic of deficiency. That people will be like, I'm worried about it. And some, we get a blood test. Why? If you don't go outside consistently for 30 minutes in the sun, you don't need a blood test to know you're deficient. It is an unnecessarily expensive step. Just start taking it. I don't see any purpose to that. I've known like one person in my life in recent years who had even remotely decent levels of vitamin D, and they didn't have a car, so they had to walk to work in the hot Austin sun. The majority of people don't do that, and you can pretty much just assume that you're deficient, and you'll probably be right. Yeah, I had a blood test done when I was 15, and I was hideously vitamin D deficient, as you can probably imagine. And so I've been supplementing ever since, and I've been in the healthy range at the top end of it for quite some time. But but I think that's because I've been, you know, I've been consistent in my [Music] supplementation.
I'm curious, before I continue, how much would you recommend taking? The standard recommendations are like 400 to 800 IU or something, and that won't do anything. Yeah, it's nowhere near as much as I've ever been taking. There's research decades ago that that will not raise levels at all to any significant degree. Now, if you get 30 minutes of direct sun exposure, the body will generate about 10,000 IU, which is 250 micrograms. In common units, conservative recommendations are like two to 3,000. I tend to just go take five for most people, 5,000 IU a day, which is 125 micrograms. If the body makes 10,000 with sun exposure, I find it difficult logically, and you can tell me which logical fallacy this is. I find it difficult to see why taking that much would be problematic. All right, which one is it? 'Cause I'm sure there's one. It's not an appeal to nature, but it's got to be something like that. Uh, I'm pretty well-versed in my fallacies and I can't identify one. That can, in a sense, I can see where there like the logic is, well, if the body already makes that much, it must be safe to take that much. And that's probably not quite. But I, I don't see why that would be a problem any more than the body making it, unless it's somehow being processed or utilized differently. So it takes 100 IU to raise blood levels by one nanogram per deciliter. 30 or less is considered deficient. Above 30 is considered adequate, whatever the hell that means. There's a consensus on what is optimal. I've seen 50 thrown around, 50 nanograms per deciliter. 3,000 to 5,000 IU should be 30 to 50 nanograms per deciliter. Boom. Take 5,000. Move on with your [Music] life.
Is there a toxicity risk in those doses? At 5,000? Absolutely not. You have to mega-dose to such ungodly levels for such a long period of time. And vitamin D is actually interesting. You can take it all at once. Like, you can just take 35,000 IU once a week, and it works. So what they do in Antarctica, like the explorers and researchers, in retirement homes, they actually take it even further, and they'll inject like 150,000 IU once a month, and that will maintain levels for about 30 days. Gez, that's amazing. Yeah, like not much longer than that. But we've got a situation where for folks that aren't gonna take a daily pill consistently, they just go, give him a big shot in the butt. I know, I've seen one paper, they gave like 400,000 IU at once, and it raised serum levels by like 20 overnight. It was some just absolutely stupid. It's weird. It's the only vitamin that the body can make, right? Like, it is an essential nutrient, and a human body can't make vitamins, but it can make vitamin D in the skin. Very strange. And it's the only one that's like that. Someone in my Facebook group actually just posted something really interesting. He's got vitiligo, I think I'm pronouncing that right. The, uh, the skin white. Oh, Rigo? Huh? You heard of Rigo? Shoot. Well, I got Rigo. Found that high-dose vitamin D is helping with the repigmentation.
There's some epidemiological data that show that fish oil supplementation has no health benefits. And I know you have a problem with epidemiology. What would you say? Because no doubt you know about this research. Okay, that is one variable of 50 that ties into health. The problem with epidemiology, among all of its other problems, is you cannot distill it into one thing. It is a cluster of lifestyle that includes calorie intake, protein, carbs, total fats, fish oils, exercise, smoking, drinking, environment, job, stress, socioeconomic status. You cannot ever isolate a single thing out. And in a longitudinal study, like what these epidemiological studies often are, I mean, how do you know that these folks are taking fish oil in the quantities that yield benefits? And how do you know that they're taking the fish oil on a consistent basis? You know what I mean? There are so many variables that you, you just can't control for. It's shoddy science at best. I reported on an article or video about this. The most recent egg study. And here's how they did it. Here we go. Took 30 years ago, they said, how many eggs do you eat? And they gave them a number. And 30 years later, they saw how many have been dropped dead. They didn't even ask them how many eggs they were eating 30 years later. They asked them one time, and they just assumed that that value must be the number of eggs that they ate for the next 30 years. Self-reported food data is terrible. It gives values that are inconsistent with life. People underestimate certain things, overestimate other things. Their calorie intakes are skewed. Now, you, okay, what did you eat last Wednesday? Do you want me to tell you? I've written it down. I don't care. I'm making a point. You know, I know because psycho athletes do. Know. Average person couldn't tell you what they ate yesterday, much less what they've eaten on a day-to-day basis for the last week or month or two months. The whole field is absurd. Yeah, especially in the modern era. They are going to find a way to co-opt phone cameras and they are doing that, I think now, where they're like, this self-reporting. People are terrible at it. Take a picture of everything you eat, and we're going to let an app do it for you. That may generate better data. But even then, this idea that people are going to eat exactly the same over 10, 20, 30 years, and this is going to give you any indication. Because you also see this cluster of behaviors. We see all this epidemiological data. Oh, meat causes this. Well, number one, meat covers a lot of ground. Yeah, right. When we say you have a meat-based diet, well, what does that mean? Are we talking about fatty, charred steak? Are we talking about deep-fried white fish? Are we talking about lean chicken breast, tuna fish in water, lean red meat, lightly grilled shrimp, which is very low fat? What is, what is it? What does a meat-based diet actually mean? And the answer is nothing without further qualification. Because I've seen it. I've seen this in like vegan propaganda. They will equate fat and meat as if there are no low-fat meats in existence. Is it an egg white? Is it an egg yolk? I can have lean chicken breast that's leaner than cheese or tofu, right? What you see in Gen Pop, right? We're not talking about athletes. See in the general population, when you see a high meat intake, that typically means lots of fatty meat, cooked to char, and or processed meat, which are their own. That is a totally separate thing. A frequently a lack of fruits and vegetables, no exercise, stress, obesity, overweight, smoking, drinking, pollution. And they go, oh, meat's bad for you. No, no, no, no, no, no. There is this cluster of behaviors that tend to go together. People who engage in certain health habits often engage in a number of other health habits, or as I pointed out in that podcast, may be in a position socioeconomically to have better healthcare or live in certain environments, right? Like if you have the ability and the time and the energy, like to exercise regularly and eat healthy foods or organic, whatever it is, that means by definition, you have a job and socioeconomic lifestyle ability to do certain things. And I know they're like, well, statistically we attributed for this confound and that confound and that's just statistical meander. Doesn't change the fact of what's going on. Oh, well, a vegetarian diet, we compared that to a typical Western meat-based diet, and the vegetarian diet was healthier. Well, I do not doubt that, but only by comparison. Yeah, like the vegetarians would be likely to be more educated, healthier body weight, more like exercise. It's not because they're eating vegetarian, it's because they're not eating, because they're not eating jerk in the wing. But yes, but it may also be that people who adopt vegetarianism are probably more likely to be active or educated or exercise. I think that's why you see population-wide benefits in red wine consumers compared to consumers of other alcoholic beverages, like a proxy for education and stat and lifestyle, all sorts of things. Any number of things. Like, yeah, vegetarians are like, oh, they're frequently lighter in body weight than, yeah, because they eat less. Because it's harder to eat more when you're eating lots and lots and lots of vegetables. Then I say, well, two things. One is, okay, so they do all that epidemiological data and they're like, oh, red meat is bad. But then they do intervention studies and they're like, we gave people lean red meat for eight weeks, and their health parameters got better. Blood pressure goes down, blood lipids improve. Lean red meat is an incredible source of micronutrients, right? It's like, okay, well, we've got the epidemiology, but we've got a direct intervention study, and frequently the intervention study directly contradicts the epidemiology because the epidemiology is including a zillion and one confound. And realize, also, vegetarian covers a lot of ground. That can mean a lot of different. It could be lacto-ovo, it could be chicken, eat fish, depends on where they want to draw that line in the sand. And I go, fine, compare both of these to a typical athletic diet. Plenty of lean protein, plenty of fruits and vegetables, healthy fat, exercise. I guarantee you that beats both of them, period. Unless it's an elite athletic population. Well, yes, I'm speaking just in general. Yeah, yeah. That diet will beat them both.
Far as other muscle-building supplements, there's just, I mean, I've seen it all over 30 years. I've seen it all come and go. And really, nothing, nothing has maintained. You can always tell that something is kind of effective 'cause 20 years later, they'll still be around. And 20, 30 years later, 99.9% of what has ever been released, what fell by the way, aside. Early supplements are brilliant. Oh my God, the stuff they used to sell. And one of them was royal jelly, which is the stuff that the queen bee makes. And I kid you not, the ads were basically like, this jelly is what makes the queen bee grow to her enormous size. A go, it will help you grow. Kid you not. That's phenomenal. We had phosic acid, frac. Boron was the thing because some study showed that boron raised testosterone in postmenopausal women. So boron was a testosterone booster for a little while. Probably still in some of this product. Hong at Ali and all those products. And you know that maybe raise testosterone a little bit. Oh, yeah. It's, it's. I've watched it all. Dione was the stuff that founded when makes bugs molt. The Russians were big into that. Uh, velvet deer antler, because that's the stuff that makes deer antlers grow big and strong. Like, you can't make this up. This is the n, this is the supplement industry. I always wanted to do a, a mother's milk protein. I got great ideas that I never act on. Like all kinds of crazy stuff. And one of them was mother's milk protein. And the ad copy was going to be, have you ever seen how fast babies grow? Wow, baby. Look, babies double their body weight in a matter of weeks. Clearly, mother's milk is anabolic. Well, you know, there are some bodybuilders who drink it. Like Sadik Hadzovic. Oh, no. I'm like, I said this was me 15, 20 years ago, being stupid without realizing that I could have made a lot of money. So here's how I tell my mother's milk protein. It was going to come in a container. It was going to be shaped like a boob with a with a nipple. And dudes would go into the store and unconsciously be like, I must have. Like, they wouldn't know why deep down, but there'd be that part of their brain, they'd just be like, must have it. That about reps everything up. So it, it's basically just creatine, citrulline malate, maybe. I mean, whey, casein. Yeah, maybe to citrulline malate and fish oil, vitamin D. That's about it.
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