Transcription
You want to know my opinion on supplements? Here's my opinion on supplements. I get asked all the time, and these are the seven types of supplements that, quite honestly, I just don't love.
Now, don't get me wrong, I am an integrative, holistic doctor. I love supplements. I have been in the supplement field my entire career. I am very familiar with supplement production, manufacturing, testing, quality, you know, like design. I've used hundreds of companies over the last 20 plus years. Um, I I work intimately with companies. So, I love supplements, but there's some types I just don't love, and I don't love them for you. So, let's talk about it because I would hate for you to spend your money on some of the crap that's out there. Okay.
Number one, rancid fish oil. Now, I know it's weird because you're like, "Yeah, duh." Or, "What do you mean? Doesn't it always smell like fish?" Sort of. So, fish oil, we've of course been taught, is great for heart health. It's anti-inflammatory. It, it, it can thin blood at a at a certain amount, a certain milligram dosage. But fish oil, she's sensitive, and she can oxidize or go rancid if under, you know, a lot of heat in certain circumstances. So, if you've ever had an oil in your cupboard or your pantry for years, or maybe you, you know, like you go back to your parents' house and like you're going through the pantry and you're like, "Mom, this expired like 15 years ago," and you smell it, and it smells horrible. Whatever the oil is, fish oil can be the same, but it can be very quick, unfortunately. And if it's processed poorly and under a lot of heat and very cheap, uh, then it's going to smell bad. It's going to smell like, like a fish market has died, and rancid. That's rancidity. And you don't want that in your body.
When I was in full-time practice, I had a patient who'd brought me a bottle of like a 500 gel cap that she had just bought, of course, at like a big box store. She'd taken about half of them, and she said, "I just needed to know if these are quality." Right away, when we unscrewed the top, it smelled like dead fish. And she's like, "Well, yeah, it's fish oil. Like, shouldn't it smell like dead fish?" And I was like, "No, it should smell like sort of clean fish." Even if you don't like fish. I'll be honest, I don't love fish. I wasn't raised on eating seafood, so I don't love fish, but I can tell the difference between that's nasty and that's decaying and like, okay, that smells like a clean fish, and it's probably okay. Unfortunately, she'd been eating, swallowing about half of them in her body. And I was like, we're throwing the whole thing out. This is terrible.
So, what are you, what are you looking for? Well, we're looking for a company that actually does testing on their fish oil, right? We want third-party independent testing. And when you open the bottle and puncture, first of all, when you just open the bottle, does it smell like bad fish? And then if you, if it doesn't, but if you puncture a gel cap, does that smell like bad fish, or does it just have like a slight fishy oil, uh, odor to it? Now, truly, the company should be testing for oxidation. They, if it's a good fish oil company, they should be able to give you a report. They should have it on their website. They should be proud of the fact that they test for oxidation, rancidity, and their quality. What you don't want, what I don't love, are when people, companies put 500 gel caps in a bottle, sell it for $10, and then you are swallowing poor quality fish oil. That's actually only going to be pro-inflammatory in your body, not necessarily anti-inflammatory. So, that's number one.
I don't love the way that fish oil, unfortunately, is being sold because I feel like a lot of people are probably buying just poor quality. So, hopefully the next time you open your bottle of fish oil, if you have it, and I'm not saying you have to take it, I'm just saying if you've been told to take it, suggested you take it, that's what you should look out for. You want like quality, a quality company. Check the website real quick. Make sure it doesn't smell like fish. And you probably shouldn't buy it from a store that also sells 400 other things if they're not going to focus specifically on the quality of their supplements. Like, it's going to be across the board. So, just keep that in mind. Also, yes, you're getting it at a massive discount, but at what cost to your health?
Number two, hard tablet multivitamins. This came up because a family friend, who I absolutely just adore, sent a picture and said, "I'm taking this multivitamin for the over 50 crowd. What do you think?" And I was like, "H, now I don't necessarily have a problem with multivitamins." Like, I understand it's, it's, it's one and done or dep, you know, three and done, depending on what the dose is. Six and done. However, the really hard tablet ones, if you've ever put them, put them in a little bit of like water and lemon juice, and if they don't dissolve, they're not going to necessarily dissolve very well in your body either. Like, when you swallow that, your your acid in your stomach should break it down. But if you've ever thought like, "Man, I could, you know, break a diamond in half with this tablet," it's so freaking hard. It's probably not going to break apart in your body either. So, what's the point?
But this family friend sent the label, and on the label there, a lot of things were like really lowly listed. It was like a milligram, 10 milligrams of magnesium. It was, you know, 200 IU of vitamin D. And unfortunately, there was also synthetic vitamin E. I am not a fan of synthetic vitamin E, which we will get into in just a second. So, if you are doing a multivitamin, just be very careful, one of the marketing of like, "Oh, this is a good one for over 50," this is all you need because you're probably understandably not as educated, you know, in in the field of multivitamins. So, you're trusting them like, "All right, over over 40 or over 50 or like, like or the fertility crowd or whatever it is, right? Like a prenatal," you're trusting them to have the appropriate things in there. But the problem is, because they're mass marketing it and they're trying to make as most bang for their buck, selling it to you for cheap is like, "Just take this one hard tablet." You may not actually be getting all that much benefit out of it.
Also, a one a day can be really hard depending on your needs because if you need, for example, like, I don't know, 250 milligrams of magnesium. Let's say your healthcare practitioner says, "You know what? You could, you could use more magnesium." And you look in your multivitamin, and there is magnesium, but it's only 10 milligrams. You're just not going to get some of your daily needs out of a multivitamin. It's very baseline, which is fine. That's what they're, that's what they're there for. It's cover the baseline for the days that you you're not eating those types of foods or, you know, when you you just can't get that in, or maybe you don't, you're not absorbing that well, and you just want the multivitamin as a backup. But make sure, at the very least, some of your multivitamins you're probably going to be need to take a couple a day, like, you know, like in the three to six range capsules, I mean, um, you probably want a capsule, not necessarily a hard tablet, or you want a company that can show you, prove to you, the tablet is going to dissolve, you are going to absorb it, and you want quality.
The other thing on this label that my family friend sent me were a lot of food dyes. So, as you read the whole label, and you may not understand a lot of it, I understand. You'll see like words that look familiar. Vitamin, you know, A, calcium, vitamin B1, B2, B6. You're like, "Cool, cool, cool." There's all my vitamins. Look right below that at the filler. What does all the filler say? It really should just be like a little bit of hydroxy cellulose, you know, maybe something else. These are just the filler that goes with it in a tablet, which I don't love, but let's say you do it anyway, that like helps press it. It'll, that it'll, the wax and the filler to press it together so it makes a tablet. But if you start reading off like, "Oh my gosh, there's like four food dyes here. There's like blue and there's yellow and there's green." Like, "What the heck? What's with all this food dye?" Again, quality. I'm just saying supplements I don't love for quality. That leads me to number three, which is synthetic vitamin E.
Now, what is a synthetic vitamin E? How can you tell? Will it say synthetic? It will not. What it will say, though, are the initials. D as in dog, L as in llama, DL, alpha tcopherol. If you see DL, dog llama, that's synthetic. You don't want it. Not well absorbed, not good for the body, not ideal, less effective. What you want to see with your vitamin E is just plain old D. Dog. You want D alpha tcopherol, not DL, just plain old D. You can also see mixed tcopherols because there's like delta, that's what D, alpha, gamma. So, they'll be like mixed, which is great. You might see toot trienols. That's another form of vitamin E. That's okay, too. But you just want a D. You want to see L's. No llamas, right? No llamas. No DL. Don't want to see that.
And unfortunately, the label that my friend sent said DL alpha tcopherol. I was like, "Well, that's synthetic," and if synthetic vitamin E is what that company chose, I know the other options in the other forms of everything else was not ideal either. For example, like calcium carbonate. Calcium carbonate is a calcium that's like not the best quality, hard to absorb. Don't love it. Same for magnesium oxide, which we're going to get into in just, um, a little bit. So, not a big fan of that. Okay, brings me to number four.
Magnesium oxide, also a cheap form of magnesium. Now, I love magnesium. Magnesium is probably my personal favorite nutrient. For me, I find that my body needs a lot of magnesium. If I was stuck on a island somewhere and I had to pick one supplement, I would choose magnesium. I would not choose vitamin D because I'm assuming I'm on an island and I'll get, I'll get exposure. Magnesium oxide is poorly absorbed and often results in diarrhea. If you have constipation, you may love magnesium oxide, but don't think you're getting this great dose of magnesium into your body at the same time. You're swallowing the magnesium oxide. It's literally going through you quite quickly most of the time, and you're not getting much magnesium oxide or magnesium in general.
Now, magnesium, there are other forms. There's magnesium glycinate or bis, bis, bis glycinate. The glycine part in there is calming. You will see like people love magnesium glycinate because it's better absorbed, generally good, calming for stressful, anxious, can't sleep type of days. There's L3enate. That's for the brain. So, the magnesium helps cross up into the brain better. So, might help support brain function, brain fog, focus, things like that. There's malate, magnesium malate. You will see that in research for things like energy, muscle energy, mitochondrial energy. There's magnesium citrate. Magnesium citrate can also result in loose stools, but magnesium citrate is better absorbed. So, if you're like, "Oo, but I am in the constipation class. I would love magnesium to help move things along, but I would like to absorb some of my magnesium," citrate is probably your friend. You often see blends where you might see a glycinate with a citrate or a malate with a glycinate with a citrate. You'll see like, you know, and that's totally fine. People ask me, "Can I take more than one magnesium?" You can. I absolutely pe know people who take the, um, L3enate like in the morning for their brain, and they'll do glycinate at night before bed if if that's indicated for them. So, you do have magnesium options. Just be careful if you read the label and it says magnesium oxide. Poor quality, not that well absorbed, will probably move through you very quickly. But if that's what you're looking for, mission accomplished. All right, number five, vitamin D by itself.
Vitamin D needs a community. Vitamin D does well with its friends. Its friends are its two main friends: magnesium and vitamin K2. Think of magnesium as like an activator. So, when you get vitamin D in the body, like especially from the sun, or you take it as a supplement, etc., every pathway you see on in the research on vitamin D, there's a little MG next to all of it, it seems like, which means magnesium is a very important co-actor and helping vitamin D do its thing. Vitamin K2, we often say, helps direct vitamin D and then calcium where it needs to go. So, when you swallow vitamin D, it helps you absorb calcium better. Now, you have to direct calcium where to go, and that's where the K2 comes in because vitamin K2 activates osteocalin to help you direct where it needs to go. We don't want just calcium going any old place. We want to direct it into the bones and, you know, into your teeth and like the important parts of of where it needs to be. All right, that brings me to the next one.
High-dose biotin. High-dose biotin. Now, you're going to be thinking like you don't like biotin. Isn't biotin for like hair, skin, and nails? It's not biotin itself that I don't, I have a problem with. It's the high-dose biotin. So, according to the National Institutes of Health, it's, it's hard to determine at what dose, but really anything over 10,000 micrograms (mcg) can interfere with testing. If you're going to get your thyroid tested, certain heart tests such as troponin, which you're probably only getting that test if you they suspect you've had a heart attack or you've had a heart attack, um, uh, vitamin D testing. So, if these are run on something called an imuninoassay, when we do lab testing, there's a couple different ways we can test. IO is common. It's less expensive. The more, let's call it, sensitive and specific, but more expensive, is called a mass spec. Biotin can interfere with lab tests done on an aminoassay. So, if you're taking a lot of biotin for the hair, skin, and nail thing, and then you go get a thyroid test and you get TSH, free T4, and free T3, it can interfere. It can interfere with vitamin D. God forbid if you have a heart issue and they do a tropponent, it can interfere with that. It can interfere with a few things.
So, if you're on anything with biotin—so, like a multivitamin is not usually high enough—but most labs, most practitioners who know, will tell you, "Hey, like a couple days before your blood test, don't take your biotin." So, if you are doing some sort of hair, skin, and nails, some sort of aesthetic type supplement, if you are on biotin for something, you may want to stop it before you go get your blood test or at least tell your practitioner, tell the lab like, you know, "I take biotin regularly. Is this going to interfere?" If your practitioner or if the lab only uses mass spec—I didn't name the machines, that's just what they're called, mass spectrometry—if the mass spec it, biotin will not interfere with it. So, if you're doing a lab company and they go, "Don't even worry, we don't use aminoassay; we use mass spec," biotin won't matter. Fantastic. Perfect. But if they do use aminoaya, it might unfortunately get in the way. That leads me to number seven.
Herbs not from an herb company or from companies that don't have a certificate of analysis and don't do third-party independent testing. Oh my gosh, this is so controversial because obviously, in the supplement world, there's next to no oversight unless a supplement company makes a very dramatic or drastic claim such as it will cure something, it will fix something, it, it like stakes a claim as if it's a pharmaceutical; that's when they, you know, the government swoops in and shuts them down. Otherwise, there's not a lot of oversight on it, which means it's up to the ethics of the company to do the oversight. One of the first layers of oversight is called a certificate of analysis.
And I have, I've worked in the herbal field, gosh, I think my first herbal company I work for was in 2000. And in 2000, we would get reports that said when herbs would come into the warehouse, and it would say what it was, and then that company would, would do third-party independent testing. So, before they would actually accept the herb fully, they would test it to make sure that like what says on the piece of paper, like they would, they would test it. And so, which was a long, slow, drawn-out process. I'm aware it also costs more money, but the number of times that this company back in 2000 would get random dried sticks and leaves and berries and things, and it would be called one thing, and when they would accept it in the warehouse and then they would sample it and test it, that's not what it was. Like, for example, they would get a pallet in of quote-unquote echynatia; it would say on the paper echynatia. The order form says echynatia. They would test it. It wasn't echynatia; it was something else.
Sometimes some herbs look really similar, and so it would be hard to tell if you're getting, you know, a pallet in of something where you're like, "Uh, is, is that? I'm not quite sure. Like, thank goodness we test." And others, as you know, herbs can look super different. Like, like if you, you can definitely tell the difference between like rosemary and, let's say, you know, colundula. Like, these are very different looking. You like you could pick rosemary out in in anything. You could probably pick it out. You probably cook with rosemary. You see it out all the time for Thanksgiving to like put all over the turkey and everything. You may have it in your yard, somebody's yard. You may have a little herb planter with rosemary. You can't really mistake rosemary. Rosemary is are in product. Sometimes rosemary can be used is for different things. So, you're not going to confuse rosemary as an example with like echanatia or colundula or rose, like, like rose, lavender. Like, you'd be like, "I can tell the difference." So, sometimes it would be that blatant. This is why it's really important the company you're buying herbs from—I mean, really anything, honestly, anything—but in the herbal world, it is crazy how wild it can get that not only is there a certificate of analysis.
A certificate of analysis says it's been, it's been tested, and it says like what's in the capsule. So, let's say in the capsule should should be rosemary, like, let's say, you know, rosemary is part of the ingredient, and let's say there's 50 milligrams of rosemary, then on the certificate it should say roughly around 50 milligrams. They're like, "For real testing it." So, it might say 48.2 milligrams of rosemary, and you're like, "Great, close enough. Fantastic." That's what it is. That's what the manufacturer should provide. The company, if they don't do their own manufacturing in house, should then send certain lots samples out for third-party to make sure it's actually rosemary, and they should have that third-party independent testing as well.
Now, sometimes it's just spot tested. So, like every quarter they'll go through and like pick bottles and send it out. Sometimes they'll do it once a month, depending on a whole bunch of factors, actually, like, you know, like what does it look like, the feedback, what does it taste like, you know, there there's a lot of reasons somebody's if somebody if you're suspicious. Now, they should be doing all this is is part of their, you know, good faith and good ethics and integrity, but it doesn't always happen. And so, I know this sounds like a soap box, and I know you're like probably rolling your eyes going, "This is a lot. I just want to go to the grocery store, order online, you know, get it in 24 hours, and I can start taking it." I'm like, "Right, but and you spent money on something I don't actually know was quality." And then you might say something like, "Well, herbs don't work. I tried that, and it didn't work." And I'm like, "Well, because you bought it from a company that could care less." They could care less. Like, they're just, you know, randomly buying some herbs, slapping a label on it, charging $12, $11.99, and of course, it's not going to work. We don't even know what it is, quite honestly.
Now, hopefully it is exactly what it is. Hopefully, it is. The other interesting thing about herbs is that we use different parts of an herb or a plant, depending. So, we might use the leaf, the berry, the flower, the root. And so, I know this is not your area of expertise, but it also should be their area of expertise. So, if you're if it's a mixed versus if it's just the leaf or the root, like all of that should be on the label. I'm so passionate about herbs that I don't love companies that are just doing it to make a quick buck. Like, if you're not sending it, if you're not getting a certificate of analysis, you're not proudly posting that online, and you don't do third-party independent testing, I don't have a lot of faith in you. Quite honestly, for as long as I have been in the herbal world, a lot of companies are just trying to start up, pay a lot of influencers, pay a lot of Facebook ads, meta ads, get it out there, sell as much as possible, sell the company in five years, and move on. I'm like, "That's not doing people any good." So, before you just jump on the next bandwagon, if I had a magic herb that would fix everything, I would give it to you. I don't. Before you get on that bandwagon, you're going to have to do a little bit of due diligence. You probably wouldn't give your dog something you didn't know something about. You probably wouldn't just randomly give your child something you wouldn't know anything about. The same applies to you. You're have to do a little bit of research.
Okay. Woo. On a soap box, but I think it's important that you understand these seven supplements I don't love. Number one, rancid fish oil. I do love fish oil. Don't love rancid fish oil. Smell your fish oil. Make sure they're doing the company you're buying from like actually says, "We do third-party independent testing," and look for it. Look for it on the website. Number two, hard tablet multivitamins that have like low levels, that have a lot of like filler and food dye in there, that use synthetic ingredients. Which leads into number three. Synthetic vitamin E. If there's a llama in there, if it's DL, right? Dog llama. Alpha tcopherel. DL. If you see that L, run, drop it. Don't pay for it. Uh-uh. We don't use synthetic around here. That leads me to cheap magnesium oxide. Magnesium oxide. If you need to poop, magnesium oxide will help. But honestly, I would talk to your practitioner about magnesium citrate. Better absorbed, still helps move things along. Vitamin D plays with others. You want to make sure it has at least magnesium and vitamin, uh, K2 in there. Also, high-dose biotin if you're on a biotin supplement and going to go get lab work done. If you're getting an imuninoassay, the lab you are at or mailing your labs to, if imuninoassay is what they use, then you might want to stop your biotin a couple days before. I'm not opposed to biotin. It's not biotin itself I have an issue with it. Just FYI, I don't love that it interferes with aminoassay, and I don't, and therefore you're going to get false results on the lab, and that's a waste of money. I don't want to do that for you. And lastly, herbs. Herbs from companies that don't test. They don't send it out. They don't do third-party. They don't have a certificate of analysis. That's honestly not a really great herbal company. Um, so be very careful. They should proudly post their certificate of analysis on the websites because why wouldn't you want to? Why wouldn't you want to just give it to people of like, "Yeah, like what's in our capsule and in our bottle, like we've had tested, and we are proud of that," and you can request that as the consumer.
So, I hope this helps. I hope you know, understand my the seven supplements that I don't love because I want you to be a very educated consumer when it comes to this since, you know, it's overwhelming. Supplements are overwhelming. When you look online, when you walk into a supplement store or the supplement aisle of a grocery store, it's hard to decide what's good, what's bad, what's worth it, what's crap. And I don't want you to waste money on the crap part because honestly, I mean, this all feels like hurting cats. And that's where I'm here to...