Transcription
When it comes to modern supplements, there's probably no better-marketed supplement right now than AG1. Which, I have to be honest, is one of the biggest scams going in the modern supplement industry. The power of marketing is so powerful that you think, because guys like Huberman and Rogan and Peter Attia are suggesting it, that it must be a good product. But the truth has come out that Andrew Huberman gets between $20,000 and $50,000 per week to talk about it, or about $2 million per year. Joe Rogan gets about $10 million per year to promote AG1. Peter Attia is part owner of the company and gets a dividend from their sales. So, do you think those three guys have a vested interest in your belief that AG1 is a useful supplement for you to be taking?
While researching this video, I went through multiple dieticians, going through their feelings on AG1, and overwhelmingly their response was negative. If I had to sum it up into a single sentence, it would be that it's an expensive multivitamin with not much nutritional value—very low in iron and vitamin D. Does that really seem like it's worth $100 a month to you?
Now, one of the reasons that AG1 is crap, just like a lot of other supplements, is the use of this thing called a proprietary blend. Now, a proprietary blend is the company's own special concoction of things, and the reason it's garbage is because it allows them to circumvent labeling laws. When you look at the way a nutritional label is constructed, it's always constructed the exact same way, and what it'll be, obviously, is all the ingredients. But the ingredient that is the most common in that thing will go first, and then down to all the smallest ingredients. So, if you get something like a protein powder and it maybe says it's got 25 grams of protein in there, then at least three or four other things, and you can see a serve is 50—uh, sorry, 30 grams—you'll see that the vast majority of this thing is a protein. It's got 5 grams of maybe some flavoring, some sweetener, and maybe something to stop it clumping in the pack. But overall, 25 grams of protein from a 30-gram serve—that's a pretty good deal. But proprietary blends will allow them, on the label, instead of saying 25 grams of whey protein, for instance, to say, you know, "proprietary blend Isolex Extreme Plus," or whatever the thing happens to be called. And then they don't actually have to list the components by constituency. So they can list what the components are, but they don't have to list them in order of what the heaviest in the bag is, and they don't have to name how much of each ingredient they put in there. And that's important for a lot of these greens powders because when you look at what their proprietary blend is, it usually is made up of a bunch of grasses. Now, grasses are a very, very highly inflammatory thing. In fact, when you look at the list of things that people are intolerant to and have allergies to, grass allergies are one of the highest ones. And this can create problems because these things can cross-react with things as basic as potatoes, tomatoes, kiwi fruit, citrus fruits, and all of a sudden you think you have an allergy to tomatoes, but it's because you're taking in four different grasses that you've actually got an intolerance to in a proprietary blend of one of these greens powders.
And that gets us to protein powders. They typically will engage in this thing called amino spiking. Now, a good protein powder, again, will say 25 grams of whey protein isolate, and that will be it. Companies will dump in cheap amino acids like beta-alanine, glycine, as well as things like creatine, to bump up the amino acid content and make it look like you've actually got more protein in the bag than what you really do. So that could mean, instead of your 25-gram serve of protein, you might have 12 grams of whey protein isolate, 5 grams of creatine, 5 grams of beta-alanine, and 3 grams of some other cheap amino acid that they chose to put in there. You've only actually got 12 grams of whey protein, though, and all of the things we simply say "proprietary blend," again, with a crazy name that they've come up with. They may list the ingredients, but again, they won't tell you how much of each is really in there. This can be further confused when you see things like milk powder or skim milk powder in there, because that is a cheap way to bump up the protein concentrate in all protein powders. So you'll typically find very cheap protein powders tend to have either milk powder or skim milk powder added to them, again meaning you're getting a very low concentration of actual high-quality protein. One of the ways you can tell is for a low leucine content. Leucine is actually a very important amino acid, but it's quite expensive in general. If the leucine content is below 2.7 grams per 25 grams of protein, it shows you they're engaged in amino acid spiking in your protein powder.
Now, I do need to give a shout-out to some supplements like creatine, which is absolutely not a scam. Creatine is probably the most researched supplement on the planet; it has been shown to have a number of benefits that help all of us trying to get stronger and healthier. At around a 3-gram dosage per day, creatine has been shown to increase lean body mass by 2.2%, with strength gains in the 5 to 8% range. However, for people in my age group, one of the benefits that's given for creatine is usually mental focus. All the meats you eat also have creatine in them. So beef, pork, tuna, and salmon have something like 1 1/2 to 2 grams of creatine per pound, which is about 450 grams. To put this in perspective, to get enough creatine in your diet naturally without needing to supplement it, if you are following the basic recommendations of 1 gram per pound of body weight, a 180-lb guy needs 180 grams of protein, which equates to about 600 grams of meat. So if you hit your basic 1 gram per pound of body weight for protein for the day, you'll be at 130% of what your daily creatine dosage needs to be. And that means that you won't actually need to supplement creatine at all because you've already got adequate dietary creatine within your daily diet.
And that brings me to glutamine. Glutamine is often held up as being awesome for tissue repair and recovery. What the research does say about glutamine is that, if you have a normal, healthy diet, glutamine will have basically no effect. It can have some effect on recovery for people who have impacted gut health or maybe in a multi-day endurance event like the Tour de France. So for people who are maybe engaged in ultra-endurance events or multi-day events where digestion and gut health is really important, or maybe you have something like IBS, glutamine may be of some use to you. But for the rest of us who are following a normal, healthy athletic diet, exercising regularly and have no other health issues, save you money—glutamine is just not worth it.
Now I have to talk about pre-workouts. Pre-workouts are probably the biggest, most expensive scam on the supplement market right now. If you look at the active ingredients in most pre-workouts, it's just caffeine. There usually will be a bunch of other things for neurochemicals and for focus and things. You'll see them talk about theanine and theacrine, which are again meant to help you with focus, but you dig into the research on theanine and theacrine, and they do absolutely nothing. What really helps you focus is caffeine. Caffeine, somewhere in the 100 to 200 milligram per dose range, will really set your house on fire in terms of how focused you are. So when you're looking at some of these pre-workouts, most of them start at about 175 mg, as high as 300–100 mg per serve. To put that in perspective, that's three coffees, or it's a, you know, one and a half double espressos. It's no wonder you feel like you're having a great workout when you've had caffeine in a single shot that's stronger than you've probably drunk for the entire day. That's what's in a pre-workout—save your money, go buy some coffee.
So what does work? There are certainly supplements that work. I've found some recently to be very beneficial for tissue healing for myself. I'm going to run through the very short list of things that actually work, outside of creatine, which, as I said, definitely does work, and a high-quality, low-ingredient protein powder. There are definitely some things that can be quite helpful for you, like vitamin D. Vitamin D is essential, even for those of us who live in Australia and have got a blazing hot summer to get through every year. People are still low in vitamin D. Basically, what I'm saying is everyone should be supplementing vitamin D and making sure their levels are within the normal range. It aids with mood, it helps with hormone production, and these are all important things for us just to have a nice balanced lifestyle. I will say that the amount you need to supplement is probably much higher than what you think. I take 5,000 IU a day. I'm not telling you to take the same thing. I get my blood levels checked every 6 months to make sure my levels are normal, but you probably need a lot more than what you think, just to get you into a normal range. Even when I was training for an Ironman Triathlon and I was swimming outside 4 days a week through the middle of Aussie summer, my vitamin D levels were still at the bottom of the normal range, despite all the outdoor activity that I had at the time, which is about 20 hours of training a week. So if I could be outside training 20 hours a week and still have low vitamin D levels, it just shows you how deficient we really are in vitamin D. You're going to need to supplement it.
Fish oil—absolutely essential for everybody. There are two components within fish oil: EPA and DHA, which are fatty acids contained within the fish oil capsules. You're looking for 2 milligrams or 2 grams per day of those combined. If you buy cheap, supermarket-quality ones, you'll probably need to take 10 or 11 a day. If you go and buy a high-quality one, like Nordic Naturals, for instance, you'll only need two capsules a day. It probably works out better from an economic sense to buy the more expensive one that you take less of rather than the cheaper one that you have to take more of. And who wants to swallow 10 capsules a day, anyway?
Next is magnesium. Magnesium is involved in over 300 chemical actions in the human body. Most importantly, it's involved in glycolysis, which means carb burning for fuel. So if you're active, it's really easy to run low on this when you're excreting some of it from sweat but needing it to burn carbohydrate for activity. So if you're active, and particularly if you're active in hot weather, you definitely need to supplement magnesium.
For me, I also take collagen. I don't take it for skin or for my joints; I actually take it for my hair. Due to the tumor that I had, I've had some hair problems that went with it—was all caused by the stress on my body. You can find collagen, though, in natural sources like the skin on chicken, for instance. You can find it in pork and other meats that are on the bone, like a T-bone steak. So there are definitely other ways to get collagen. You can find it in eggshells as well, if you wanted to eat eggshells. But if you're not satisfied with that, you can get extra collagen simply by supplementing it.
And then, when to use protein powders is probably the last thing we need to cover. To be honest, all of my customers up to about 100 kilos or 220 lbs find no trouble getting adequate protein from actual food sources. Once you get above that—above that 220-gram of protein requirement per day—it does start to get very difficult to eat that much protein because the portion sizes simply become too big to be easily manageable. And that becomes a point where supplementing protein can be quite helpful. Outside of that, none of my customers usually use protein powder; it's just not necessary during normal circumstances. I don't use it either, so I'm using it at the moment simply because my tissue repair needs a very high post-surgery, but in general, you don't need a protein powder to get all the protein you need for regular activity throughout your day.
You can supplement this stuff quite a lot if you want to. Like with anything, though, the goal is to take the least amount of supplements, the least amount of drugs, and eat the most quality food you can. I get my bloods tested every 6 months. I recommend all my customers do it, and your blood work will show you if you're deficient in vitamin D or iron or quite a few other levels of minerals and nutrients as well. In general, I only take three supplements on a daily basis: I take vitamin D, I take fish oil, and I take magnesium, and that's it. I don't need any other supplements, and all my levels are as good as they can be because I rely on a whole-food diet to make sure I'm getting all the nutrients I need. Remember, the food you eat is either going to be the strongest medicine or the worst poison that you put in your body. Before you reach for a pill bottle or a supplement or a drug, make sure you reach for food first.