The BRUTAL Truth About Supplements No One Tells You

0:00 But what do you take every day? >> You got another 3 hours? >> Oh, really? Is that a lot? >> No, not really. >> What do you like if you had to pick five if they said to you and you can only do five for the rest of your life? What five supplements would it be? >> Well, if somebody's sleeping terrifically well, I'd say nothing for sleep. If they're not sleeping terrifically well, I would suggest they they try magnesium 3 and 8 or magnesium bis glycinate. They're interchangeable for sleep. Okay, that's one. I'm a big believer in getting at least 1 g per day of EPA omega-3. >> Okay. >> I suggest getting it because it's now available generic and cheap, but prescription form Lovaza. >> EPA would sound >> That form of omega-3 that's that you want for brain health, probably also for cardiovascular health and reduced inflammation.

0:45 >> if that's the omega-3 that I have? >> You need a prescription. >> Oh, you need a prescription. >> what's awesome about it. It's very high concentration EPA and it's cleared of all heavy metals. >> Okay. >> And it's very, very inexpensive. So, the challenge is getting a doctor to prescribe it for you. Just tell them you want Lovaza or else you're going to take a bunch of stuff over the counter you might get mercury poisoning. There you go. >> Right. >> Don't threaten your doctor, but you get the idea. So, that's for mental health, physical health. Big believer in boosting omega-3s. Also, I don't eat fatty fish. I don't like salmon unless it's sushi and like I'm just not good at eating seafood. Um so, that's two. Vitamin D. >> Vitamin D. >> 5,000 to 10,000 IU per day. People will be like, "Oh, you don't know that you need to blood test. You don't want to over" Okay, don't take 25,000, but

1:30 most people are under-dosing vitamin D and also, I'm not I know it pisses people off and I'm not trying to like hit the RDA. Okay? Just like I >> The recommended daily allowance. >> Yeah, I'm not just trying to hit the RDA. I'm also not trying to like blow a gasket by taking too much. Like let's be rational here, right? I'm trying to get to a point where I can derive safety but additional benefits. And it's clear that dosing of 5,000 IU per day has some additional benefits that go way beyond the conventional benefits of vitamin D that are discussed. For instance, hormone health. Like I can see my blood's getting better when I take 5,000 as opposed to 3,000 IU of vitamin D and I'm not changing anything else. So, vitamin D and I get sunlight.

2:15 Maybe 10,000 was a little high, but I take 5 to 10. Um so, that's three. And then the other two would be if you're going to exercise or work intensely late in the day or if you're going to if you really want a stimulant to go with your caffeine. By the way, 90% of the world consumes caffeine every day. So, that's a foregone conclusion that they're already taking it. I am a big fan of Alpha GPC. I am. 600 mg or 900 mg of of it >> What's that? >> It increases choline, which increases acetylcholine. >> Oh, I thought I had acetylcholine in the cupboard. >> Yeah, which can increase your ability to focus. I'm a big believer in this in not for everyone, but rather than going straight to a a prescription stimulant. And I'll tell you why. There are very very few things that can increase focus

3:00 and energy that don't damage your sleep. But even better, Alpha GPC gives you more REM sleep. Nobody wants to hear this, but it's absolutely true. But the other thing, the important caveat is that it can increase something called TMAO, which can increase cardiovascular risk. So, a simple way to mitigate that is you take 600 mg of of of a garlic capsule and it doesn't smell like garlic. So, I kind of tuck that in with it. You can take it anytime same day. >> Is that five? >> That's five cuz I threw garlic in there. No, cuz we said it was um magnesium bisglycinate or 38. We said um omega 3. We said vitamin D. And then I said Alpha GPC would be my preferable thing to nicotine or prescription stimulants. And I'm but caffeine is great. Great data on

3:46 caffeine. Um in fact, 200 to 400 mg of caffeine per day has been shown to offset dementia in meaningful ways. Meaningful ways. It's not causal, it's correlative, but those data are covered in there as well. So, I'm I'm going to continue drinking my yerba mate and my coffee. And then the So, I suppose the last one You know, that's kind of like you get Oh, it creatine. Yeah, so I was going to say dealer's choice, but creatine seems to work best for cognitive enhancement when you're a bit sleep deprived or stressed, this kind of thing. I don't know. I've been taking creatine since I was 17 or 18, somewhere in there. 5 to 10 g per day. I like it cuz it I mean, I'm trying to maintain or build strength and it puts water in your muscles. It makes you stronger. And it feels good to be strong. And you

4:33 got you got to train, but that's why I take it. >> Okay, the last thing I wanted to ask you about is I saw a clip, I think it was one of your most viral clips of all time, where you just talked about how going for a walk after you eat can have a really big impact on your body. >> Yes. >> That most people don't realize. >> Most people don't realize there's a section I think walking is necessary, but not sufficient for health. You know, I don't think you need to count 10,000 steps per day, but I I think 7,000 to 8,000 steps per day should be the goal. You can do it all pace while I'm on calls. I take every When I finish a podcast with my team, we take a walk. I I'm always trying to take stairs. When I travel, I take stairs, not the escalator. You arrive a little sweatier to your plane, but you're also rocking your bags and this kind of thing. So, walking is

5:20 is incredible because those low-level repeated muscle contractions really help buffer blood glucose, especially after a meal. But, there's this wild study where the soleus muscle, the one that gives the calf width width, you know, when you do seated calf raises, right? You're It's this muscle underneath the gastrocnemius right? That muscle is about 1% of your total musculature, but it has an outsized and significant glucose utilization. Interesting. So, in the study, we which is not practical, they had people do what they called soleus push-ups, which are basically non-weighted seated calf raises while sitting. And they have them do it repeatedly. And they looked at blood glucose regulation, and that powerfully regulated blood glucose increases. It

6:05 buffered the peaks, and it turns out that this is related to walking. So, I'm not suggesting, unless perhaps you're stuck on a plane or while while in an office that you, you know, if you're a knee bouncer, rejoice, you know, you're doing yourself good. Um but this movement really seems to help blood glucose management. Now, some people say, "Oh, yeah, this is all silly. They're talking about all day you're going to do this." Yeah, some people probably accuse us of this. No, what I'm saying is walk. Because when you walk, you're getting that low-level repeated muscle contraction. It's a slow-twitch muscle, and it seems to be I don't want to call it a sink, but it seems to be an unsuspected um furnace for glucose utilization. >> And why does that matter? >> You don't want big peaks in glucose. You can manage them. I mean, you get more insulin will be secreted if you have a big peak in in glucose. That's why

6:51 insulin's there, to make sure that um glucose is managed. You don't want it too high. You don't want to be hyperglycemic. In fact, that can be deadly. You don't want to be hypoglycemic. But when people eat, they experience an increase in blood glucose. And while the peaks are manageable, if you're buffering them, say you're you're you're sort of flattening out those peaks with, you know, 5 to 10 minutes of walking after a meal, you will have fewer energy crashes. In theory, over time, your metabolic health can be better, at least can not get worse. And you know, there's Dr. Rhonda Patrick has has pointed out there's a sort of a comparison study where people either walked after meals or for 30 minutes or or so on per day, or they did, you know, 10 air squats every 45 minutes or so. Just stand up

7:37 and do air And it looks like they were comparable. Maybe the air squats were better. I don't know about you, but I'm not going to stand up and do air squats in a restaurant or when I get out into the street of New York if I have the great, you know, experience of having dinner with you and James Sexton again. That's the last time we had a shared meal. Like I'm not going to do air squats. We're going to walk. So, I think I'm not being disparaging of of of Ronda. I think she was pointing out a mechanistic feature, not not a not a protocol, but necessarily. But if you're stuck on a plane and you do some air squats, you could you could you know, bounce your knee. And you know, non-exercise induced thermogenesis is a massive calorie burn. You know, people who move a lot tend to be rather thin. They tend to be lean. It The studies on those I I go back to my undergraduate days when we worked on metabolism and physiology

8:24 like Rothwell and Stock and some other folks, these scientists who figured out that there were people who could eat a lot more than you would think they needed, but they always stayed lean. Turns out they're moving a lot during the day, burning up to 1,800 calories a day. Now, that's extreme, but some people who just move a bit more are at 1,000 calories per day. And there's this paper published in the journal Science, which is a great journal, not as great as Nature, but the Brits get the cake there. And people will argue, but it's true, that the decline in metabolism that we all associate with aging, like oh, your metabolism slows as you age, turns out that's not true. Turns out that if people maintain muscle mass, that doesn't happen. And you say, okay, well, then aging is muscle mass loss is reduction in metabolism. Actually, no. People are moving less.

9:09 And I've been as everyone else has been absorbed with this longevity thing, I look at older people, and and particular people in their 80s, and you know what I see a lot of? A lot less spontaneous movement and a lot of mouth breathing, >> [sighs and gasps] >> which at rest is not good. We know this. It deprives the brain of oxygen. It's not good. You can mouth breathe during exercise, physiological size, etc., but you don't want to be a mouth breather in sleep or in wakefulness. And then you host people like James Hollis or Twyla Tharp, who's I don't know her exact age, I think she's in her early 80s, but choreographer, world-class dancer, who deadlifts a lot and works out for 2 hours a day at 5:00 in the morning, who boxes, who choreographs. They're so mentally sharp,

9:56 they're physically lean. There are other examples I could rattle off and you go, "What is happening?" Mike Snyder, my colleague at Stanford, who's not that old, but he's in his 70s. You look at him, you go, "What's going on?" And they're moving all the time. They're moving, they're mentally active, they have posture like you. They're exercising, sure, but they are moving, moving, moving. The spontaneous movement is burning calories, that's one piece, but it's also the glucose regulation. It's the fact that they're not sitting stagnant in their own It It You know, there's Lane Norton has pointed out quite beautifully, actually, that what's the problem with caloric excess? Okay, there's the fat aesthetic piece, right? Body fat aesthetic piece, but that aside, it's that you have a toxicity of over of of energy. The world's expert in

10:41 mitochondria came on my podcast recently, Jared Ryder. I mean, he's phenom in the the biochemistry and the the genetics of mitochondria, and he will tell you. He's like, "When you overload a system and therefore a cell with calories, the mitochondria that the whole system gets sick. The energy management system of a cell gets sick. And your metabolism, this thing that you call your metabolism, is the collective makeup of all these trillions of cells. So, you jam too much fuel in there, like they don't work as well. And caloric restriction at times might be beneficial, caloric maintenance maybe a little bit more at times, a little bit less. This is good. So, movement, movement, movement, because it's obviously calories in, calories out. You know this is, right? Are you telling me I need to stop?

11:27 >> No, no, no, no, no. This is not a clock. This is a >> [laughter] >> This is a This is a CO2 monitor. >> I thought it was a lux meter. Okay. Okay, how high Oh, we have a lot of CO2 in here. >> Yeah. It's something that we always have in the studio because I I think I learned over time that the higher this got, the more sort of tired I felt. >> Mhm. >> And obviously because there's not great ventilation in this studio here, we started at 600 and we're now at 1,700. >> Yeah. >> And we're under short wavelength light, but before we came in here, what did we do? We went outside and we got a blast of full spectrum sunlight. >> Sunlight. Yeah, I always Yeah, I think about this a lot now when I'm trying to do good cognitive work. I've read some studies that if this gets above 1,000 parts per million, cognitive performance starts to go down. >> Well, if your cognitive performance gets any better, we're all host cuz you're >> You're very kind. >> If you love The Diary Of A CEO brand and you watch this channel, please do me a

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