How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)

Coming up on this episode of the Dr. Hyman Show. Why didn't you take a blue pill.

Or a red pill or have titanium dioxide or have dyes in chemicals? Yeah, these things that are not good.

They don't need to be in your supplements.

Steve Martosi is a serial entrepreneur and tech innovator. Who turned his own health journey into a mission to revolutionize the supplement industry. I wanted to live, but I was deeply unhealthy. I got up to 300 pounds in college.

I found a functional medicine doctor. We started doing lab work, right? And we started experimenting and it worked. At that point, I probably lost 70 pounds. I was trained that vitamins make expensive urine. if that logic was true, you shouldn't drink water because you pee out. Eating nutrient-dense foods daily is essential for maintaining optimal health and vitality. One such superfood is Himalayan Tarteri Buckwheat, or HTB, an ancient, gluten-free seed that's gaining traction for its rich polyphenol content and effects on immunity and metabolism. HTB is packed with quercetin, rutin, and other beneficial compounds that support immune function and overall well-being. Recently, my friends at Big Bold Health have started sprouting HTB to improve digestibility and boost the nutrient content. To make the benefits of HTB more accessible, Big Bold Health has just introduced HTB Immune Energy Chews, a convenient and delicious way to enjoy this ancient superfood. Each chew is packed with 500 mg of sprouted HTB, making it easier than ever to incorporate into your daily routine. I personally love HTB Immune Energy Chews when I'm on the go or traveling and find them to be a tasty daily addition to my health regimen. Each chew is loaded with sprouted HTB along with vitamin C, magnesium, and zinc. To experience the benefits of HTB immune energy choose for yourself, visit BigBoldHealth.com and use code DRMARK25 at checkout to get 25% off your purchase today. At 65, I'm not slowing down. I'm out there conquering the rugged trails of Patagonia, pedaling through 100-mile bike rides and pushing my limits in the gym. Time doesn't have to equal decline. It's proof that with the right fuel, we only get stronger. And here's the secret that powers my every step, every pedal, and every rep. I take MitoPure every single day. this isn't just a supplement; it's the spark that fuels my adventures, the key to keeping my energy high, my body strong, and my spirit unstoppable. It supports my mitochondria, the tiny powerhouses inside my cells that give me the energy I need to keep going. As we get older, our mitochondria can start to falter, leaving us feeling sluggish and worn out. That's where Mitopure comes in. It contains Urolithin A, which helps rejuvenate those vital energy centers, boosting my energy and strength like nothing else I've tried. With solid science behind it, Mitopure is designed to help us keep up with whatever life throws our way, whether it's a steep mountain trail or a challenging workout. If you're ready to unlock your potential and feel your best, head to timeline.com/drhymen for 10% off. Trust me, your cells and muscles will thank you. Now, before we jump into today's episode, I'd like to note that while I wish I could help everyone by my personal practice, there's simply not enough time for me to do this at scale. And that's why I've been busy building several passion projects to help you better understand, well, you. If you're looking for data about your biology, check out Function Health for real-time lab insights. And if you're in need of deepening your knowledge around your health journey, check out my membership community, the Hyman Hive. And if you're looking for curated and trusted supplements and health products for your health journey, visit my website at drhyman.com for my website store for a summary of my favorite and thoroughly tested products. Welcome to the Dr. Mark Hyman Show. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman. This is a place for conversations that matter. and today, if you are someone who's taking supplements, who's confused about supplements, who thinks they create expensive urine or that they're essential, are completely boggled by all the brands out there, all the claims out there, all the people pushing it, you know, what to do for yourself and how to stay healthy without harming yourself. You're gonna love this show because we have Steve Martosi, who's co-founded an incredible company called Subco. And he is a brilliant guy. I mean, he's a good friend of mine. We've traveled the world together, but I was sort of blown away when he took his intelligence that helped launch GroupMe and Splice and Blade, a lot of different companies, and he's taken all of his business know-how, his personal health story, and has created something that is missing in the marketplace, which is a trusted source of navigating what quality is in supplements, what you need, and how to figure out what to do. Because it's a mess out there. And I think you're gonna love this conversation. And we dive into why SUBCO is such a needed service in the marketplace to help you navigate this incredibly messy landscape of supplements and quality and cost and all the things we wanna care about. So I think you're gonna love this conversation. Let's jump right in. Well, Steve, it's so great to have you on the podcast. You know, we've been friends for a while, traveled the world together, done a lot of cool stuff. We're both involved in two companies that I think are gonna change the landscape of health in America. One is Function Health where I'm the co-founder and chief medical officer. Another is Subco, which is something we're gonna talk about today. And it's something that's been desperately needed for decades. Navigate the myriad of supplements out there on the market to find the quality that you want, to know that you're not getting crap in it, to know that it's made in a way that actually meets pharmaceutical grade standards to actually figure out what to do because it's a landscape out there that is fraught with all sorts of problems that I've tried to solve, but you've done a way better job. You see, you've kind of started an exit to many amazing companies like GroupMe and Blade and Splice. And I think there's this interesting personal story that you have about how you have sort of understood your own health challenges and used your own way of navigating it. And this is really coming out struggles to figure shit out. And now, you know, we have the opportunity to share this innovation around how to think about supplementation and whether you need them, why you should take them, what the landscape is out there, what the problems are with it, and how to solve that. So, you know, you've, you're sort of a multiple serial entrepreneur and, you know, you've tackled this problem in a way that I'm just so glad because for me as a practicing doctor, It's so hard for my patients to actually figure out what to take. And that's why I've spent decades researching the market, visiting supplement manufacturers, factories, going in there doing quality control, looking for third party testing, making sure their ingredients were pure, that they had no contaminants or chemicals or additives, which often they do, making sure that they're bioavailable, that they're forms of nutrients that work right, and also that they're digestible. When you eat them, they don't just poop out and that they're actually tested after for both potency and purity. So whatever it says on the label, it's on the label. And I spent decades doing this, and I've created a small group of these supplements that I think work clinically for my patients. And we're going to sort of go into how you solve the problem at a much bigger scale because, you know.

There'S, I don't know how many products are in the market.

We have tracked, tracking about 200, 000. 200, 000 products. So it's kind of, I, I, you know, it's kind of insane to think about how much is out there. and how much noise is out there and where's the signal and what's good and what's bad. So let's just sort of start by diving into your story because you were a very overweight, unhealthy guy when you were in your 20s.

I'm in 20s. I think my journey probably goes back to my childhood. I was always the fat kid. I was the tall fat kid. And I would make all the sports teams because they'd be like, oh, he's 6'5. We can make him good, right? He's gonna get better as time goes on. But honestly, I had nothing I would do playing football. You do two a day practices and all non-stop and I wouldn't lose weight. And it was pretty wild. My mom has hypothyroidism. She took me to an endocrinologist. This is like 1996, 7, something like that. And they did some labs and they just told me I was on the low end of normal and they couldn't do anything. And it was completely disheartening. I thought that medicine completely let me down. Things got worse. Like I got up to 300 pounds in college, 299. I never saw 300 on a scale. I refused to get on a scale once I was 299. Like it just was not, it was not good. And then, you know, I'm a software engineer. I just love building. Code is kind of my canvas. It's just where I can lose days building and it's so much fun for me. Built a successful company called GroupMe. It was kind of pioneering group text messaging. And when we sold that, we sold it quickly to Skype. You know, I was 270 pounds. I had just made some money. I wanted to live, but I was deeply unhealthy. And I found a functional medicine doctor. And this is 2010, so kind of ahead of the curve a bit.

I've been doing it since '96, so that was like- I had a social.

Media curve at least.

That was 14 years later.

Yeah, out of the curve of the biohacker trend that I feel like is now. We started doing lab work, right? And we started experimenting and started with some thyroid medicine. kind of dialed in some hormones and built a supplement stack and it worked. And I committed to diet and exercise again, you know, with these, you know, helping me this time and it worked. And people would ask me, they'd see my transformation and they'd asked, what was I doing?

And no one wanted to hear diet and exercise.

And you lost, it was 100 pounds. Yeah, I mean, at that point I probably lost 70 pounds. You know, they're asking me what I'm doing and this is 10 years before I was epic as a thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is not the easy answer. And so I would share them my stack, which was the list of supplements and medications I was taking and it would be a, ugly, out-of-date Google spreadsheet. And honestly, people didn't really know what to do with it, you know, but a couple of people would be like, cool, I talked to my doctor about this one thing. And, you know, then I went on with my, my life happy. I started, blade and splice and ran splice for 10 years. I was a little burned out leading through COVID and, you know, getting ready to have a kid and kind of wanted to step back and hire a CEO there. You know, it was time to build again. I'm just, the software itch is just always in me and I wanted to.

Do something in health.

I mean, it had been a transformative experience for me. And it had become the zeitgeist, you know? Like, your book was just coming out on longevity and Peter Attia's book, it just seemed like the dinner table conversation and the stack sharing on social media, like it was happening. Like, this wasn't just about- I'm taking this, you're taking that. Yeah, it's like, it's like this- what are you taking?

Exactly.

And so that was the core concept was to bring back the stack sharing concept. You know, I saw what you guys were doing with Function and I was so inspired by it. I'm a Function investor. I, you know, I'm happy. about that. But I wanted to tackle this space, which I found to be an incredibly gray area of understanding what to do. And so that's where it formed. I remember the first day I had the idea in my head, some friend of mine came over for dinner and without me saying anything, she said, I spent four hours today going through all my supplements, putting them in a spreadsheet, figuring out how to save money and take less pills.

Yeah.

It's like, oh, this is like a pretty good idea then. And then like, I had another friend in the first week say that their friend, they knew someone who whose mom had taken so much vitamin D, they didn't know. She had dementia, early dementia-like symptoms, and she was totally mis-dosing vitamin D. And.

So I started to really get it. Because it wasn't what it said on the bottle.

I don't even remember. Was it too many pills? I think it was too many pills or not understanding the IU dosing versus milligram dosing. And was like, you know, that was the story I was getting.

And so we're really here to help you make sense of supplements. Let's talk about the landscape of nutrition because I think, you know, most doctors and certainly I was trained that vitamins make expensive urine. Don't waste your money. Right. And your body gets everything it needs from food. Yep. You'll be fine and don't worry about it. You know, there's a big fallacy in that. First of all, if that logic was true, you shouldn't drink water because you pee out what you don't need. Your body takes what you need. So if you drink an excess amount of water, your body will just get rid of it. Right? and that's the way it is for most vitamins, not the fat soluble vitamins. You have to be careful, but it's crazy because you have 37 billion chemical reactions in your body every second. And every single one of those chemical reactions requires a cofactor or helper. And those are facilitated by enzymes. The enzymes need various nutrients to activate that pathway so that one molecule can become another molecule, which is how your body works. And those cofactors are vitamins and minerals. Right. Literally the grease lubricates the wheels of your metabolism and your, when I say metabolism, I mean your, you know, from a medical perspective, which is every chemical reaction in your body. And on top of that, you know, there's other compounds that are phytochemicals that are, are also we're learning are so powerful. And we've consumed, you know, 800 species of plants and foods with all sorts of phytonutrients. There's, you know, probably maybe 100,000 phytochemicals out there. that have effects on the body. You've heard of some of them like sulforaphane from broccoli or resveratrol from grapes or, you know, curcumin from, you know, turmeric. Yeah, turmeric, you know. And so basically we, we've been consuming these things. Now we probably eat three main species of plants, basically corn, wheat and soy, and then maybe another total of 12. Yeah. Tomatoes, lettuce, celery, carrots. Like it's like 12. foods. And you're, you were missing all these important phytochemicals that also help regulate our biology and that we've co-evolved with. I call it symbiotic phytoadaptation. And so whether it's an actual vitamin, you know, that's essential or an omega-3 fat or essential fatty acid, or it's a conditionally essential nutrient, there's many of those that you need more of, depending on your state of health or what's going on, like CoQ10 if you're on a statin. And then there's all the phytochemicals. And, and so there's supplements out there that contain all these things. It's a kind of a morass of of a landscape that's poorly regulated, that is not well controlled. I mean, the Shays legislation in the 90s helped sort of set the stage for a supplement industry that you could, you know, kind of go wild and not make disease-curing claims, which was good, but it kind of created a wild west where the whole supplement industry grew. The question is, you know, do Americans need supplements? Do people in general need nutritional supplements? Because if you listen to most doctors, you don't.

I mean, I think that is the thing that is so hard as a consumer in this space is just the wildly different opinions. And like it's the doctor gap of people who say expensive urine to the ones who are like, this is exactly what to do for this. And it's also like the explosion on social media. You know, there's this whole kind of n equals one world right now where people are raving about, you know, this supplement is just changing my life. It makes me see in 4K. But, you know, then they also have their supplement store right behind it. So it's a, an extremely difficult space to navigate. I mean, there's a lot of snake oil salesmen out there. A lot of snake oil salesmen. Yeah. Or, and look, there might be people who are having actual real great experiences, but they're not aggregating that data in a way that, you know, allows anyone to make sense of it. It's just their individual story. And I think we're going through such a big, you know, battle right now in America around the individual and the institution, right? And like who to trust in this, and that trust is really eroded. Institutional trust is, you know, continuing to go down. And, you know, 51% of Americans say that they have bought a health or wellness product from a social media influencer, from something I saw on social media.

Well, I bought shorts and shoes. Fair, fair. All right, see, we'll kind of dive a little bit deeper for us into what is Subco and how it works and why it's so important.

You know, we like to say that we're helping users make sense of supplements through our website and app. We're helping you figure out what supplements are right for your health, what products and brands you can trust, how you can save the most money and get results. To do this, we've cataloged over 200,000 supplement products that you can search in our app or by scanning the barcode. And we've built an in-depth trust score rating from 29 different attributes that let you understand the manufacturing standards and quality of your supplements. For those looking to figure out what they want to take, we have 80 expert protocols that you can go in to find guidance on different health topics like brain fog or heart health and women's hormones. To get starting, it's pretty easy. You enter a little bit of information, start scanning your supplements to kind of catalog what you're already taking. We give you an analysis of your stack so that you can kind of get a score that's easy to understand how you can improve quality, how you can improve trust, and make changes to kind of improve that. You also then can share your stack with your doctor, your friends, kind of get feedback from different people, create a conversation around it. That helps you understand if you're taking too much or too little of something. which happens to a lot of people. And then we have a smart scheduler that lets you make sure you're taking your products correctly. Are you taking them with food? Are you taking them at the right time? Which will then also start tracking to see whether or not you're getting results. We launched a beta in early October. The response has been amazing. We're getting nearly 1000 users a day right now. October 24. October 24, yeah. And we're getting 1000 users a day without even having your protocols. So we're excited to get your protocols in stack on the platform soon. And I think for us people to know, Right now, everything on Sephco is free, and we'll launch a premium membership later this year, which will have some premium features and eventually help people save money on their supplements as well. We don't sell any of your data. There's no advertisement on Sephco either. And yeah, we want people to come in and be aligned with them so that we're just as excited when they stop taking something that doesn't work as when they start taking something.

So you're not selling something.

We're not selling supplements. And if we do, we will never profit from them. We want to take the best product. We're guiding people on how to take the best product.

For them that are the cleanest that are actually matching their goals and needs. And you're just providing this incredible service, which I think is such an important gap in the marketplace that you're filling. So what is the problem of nutritional deficiencies today in America? What do we know about the level of insufficiency or deficiency of nutrients? Is it widespread? Is it rare?

I mean, look, I think this is your world. I think this is the one that you particularly would talk best about. I know my own individual struggles, but Honestly, like you've got this data. This is your world.

I mean, the data is so impressive. You know, when you look at the, and I'll just sort of share a little bit, to kind of set the stage, but, you know, N Hanes is called the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, and it's conducted by the government. And every year they drive around, they get blood on a whole bunch of people, they test their levels, and they see what's going on of all sorts of things, and nutrient levels. And what they found is, you know, 90 plus percent of Americans are deficient in one or more nutrient. at the minimum level to prevent deficiency. And this is really an important concept for nutrients because if you look at, for example, vitamin D, you need maybe 30 units so you don't get rickets. But you might need 3,000 units so you don't get osteoporosis or cancer or dementia or heart disease or autoimmune diseases or a whole bunch of things that we call long latency deficiency and diseases. There's a guy named Robert Heaney who professors and brilliant scientists who wrote a paper called Long Latency Deficiency Diseases. What Asencion was talking about was like, yeah, there's nobody walking around really in America with rickets anymore or scurvy or berry berry or pellagra or xerophthalmia. These are these severe deficiency diseases that we actually found in the turn of the century when we started refining our diet and taking white flour and white rice. That's actually how they found it was in prisoners. They gave them white rice and they all became deficient, had these horrible diseases that were cured in a second, essentially with miniscule amounts of nutrients. When you look at the amount of deficiencies, whether it's, you know, 90 plus percent deficient Omega-3, 80 plus insufficient or deficient vitamin D, and some people say even more, magnesium is about 45%, zinc's about 40%, iron, you know, we have a lot of deficiencies. And with function, you know, we now have 150,000 members at Function Health, and now By the way, there's no waiting list, so you can just join, go to functionalhealth.com/mark, you can get in and go ahead and check your levels. But we found that in looking at all the data, almost 70% of our members have a deficiency in a nutrient that is at the minimum reference range of the lab. So in other words, for iron, this is an example, your ferritin level, which is your iron source, should be 45 or more to feel good. to not have fatigue, to not have hair loss, to not have insomnia. There's a whole bunch of things that come with low iron. The reference range goes 16 or lower, but it should be 45.

Sure. Right.

Or homocysteine, which is like the levels 14, which should be more 6 to 8, right? Which detects B vitamin deficiencies. Or vitamin D should be probably 45 to 60, not 30 or 20, which some lab reference changes are. and at the minimum level, which is, you know, how much you need to not get rickets or scurvy or any diseases. Not, this is what the RDA is. It's not the amount you should be taking. It's the minimum amount you need to be taking. So you don't get some of these horrible diseases. We're seeing almost 70 of people are deficient in these nutrients in a cohort of 150, 000 people, which is a massive amount of data that we've collected at function Health. And we're learning about, you know, the, the, the kinds of things we're seeing in the population. So it's a real issue where people are not getting the nutrients they need, and they don't know. why they feel bad. They don't know why they have these low grade symptoms. I had one patient, she came in, she was a radiation oncology resident at Mayo, and she had the most severe migraines. She was on narcotics, she was on major anti-vomiting medication, and she could barely function. And she came in and she said, oh, I have terrible migraines. And I started taking her history. I said, oh, you other symptoms like constipation or do you have, you know, muscle spasms or do you have anxiety or irritability or palpitations or constipation? And she's like, yeah, I got all those things. I'm like, well, that's a magnesium deficiency. And it was so easy. And I gave her, she needed like a thousand or more milligrams of magnesium to get her going and to clear everything out. And then cured her migraines. Wow. And you hear someone who was at Mayo Clinic, saw their best migraine doctors, did everything she could, they couldn't even diagnose this deficiency. And by the way, Magnesium deficiency, so we test magnesium with function and we get your red cell magnesium, which is a better indicator. But to do a real magnesium loading test where you give people IV magnesium and you see what they keep and what they dump out is the best way to actually really tell. But even so, just by history, I could tell. And after doing functional medicine for 30 years, I can tell you without a doubt, and doing nutrition testing on tens of thousands of people and deep analysis of minerals and vitamins and oxygen levels and oxidative stress and coq10, all the things that people normally don't look at, it's so widespread. Nutrient deficiency is so widespread in America. So that kind of then leads into the question of, well, if that's true, then, you know, why is that true?

By the way, what's shocking about that is 75% of Americans take a dietary supplement. 55% are regular users, yet 70% are still getting those lab results from it. So they're definitely taking the wrong things or not enough of the right things. So I think that just speaks to a lot of the, stuff we're trying to sort out, SUBCO is giving people the ability to actually know what they're putting in their body. One of the big features of being able to kind of enter everything that you're currently taking is you'll actually see your nutrient totals across all the different products. Vitamin D is coming from six of the products I take, you know? And like actually having a conversation with a doctor about what's actually going in your body doesn't really happen. I remember talking to a nutritionist in the beginning, they're like, she was like very good. She said, yeah, I've spent four hours actually going over the nutrients that people were getting from the products they told me. But most people don't ever do that. I don't know who has a conversation with their doctor who knows actually what.

They'Re putting in their body. I think this is really important. So, SEPTECH CO is your company that you started to help solve this problem of what to take, quality, of how.

Can you trust what you're taking.

What's the total amount of nutrients you're taking? So, people might be taking 10 different supplements and like I said, they all might have selenium in them. Correct. And then you're getting toxic dose of selenium. 100%. And you don't know that because you're not adding it all up, you're not putting a spreadsheet, you're not doing the math, and you've created a product that does this. Now, I believe in this so much because it's what I tried to solve when I started my own store for my patients, which was essentially trying to curate a small group of products that I personally had investigated, that I visited the factories, that I did the analysis, that I looked at the third party testing. Oh my God. I curated basically 300-400 products for functional medicine applications, for basically helping people with cardiometabolic issues, for hormonal issues, for gut issues, and so on, so forth. that was a lot of work. And I've been confident that I can recommend these things to my patients or people who follow me, but I don't think it really solves a bigger problem of like, how do you figure out everything all together? And I know personally that I don't have enough time to do this for myself even.

Totally.

I'm buying different things, I'm using things. How do I know? So that's really why I become an advisor to SEP Co. and then sort of helping you because I think this is such an important gap in the marketplace and it's such a need. When you look at the landscape today, tell us some of the problems in the supplement industry. Why is this needed? Because people are just buying stuff and they don't know where it's coming from, where they get it. They can buy it on Amazon and often the stuff is sitting on a pallet for a long time or it's some sort of ripoff product that doesn't have the nutrients in it. So tell us sort of unpack the real issues with the supplement industry as it is today.

As I said, we've got about 200,000 products. There's like 195 already done and then a big queue ones that have been submitted to us that we're going through. And that's up from 4,000 products in 1994. That's all there was, right? So it's been a 4,000 to 6,000. In 1994, there's 4,000 supplement products on the market, and now there's over 200. That's insane. And so we've kind of gone in and taken each one of the supplements, taken the supplement facts labels, and kind of taken the data so that you can get an aggregate view of what you're actually putting in your body. So that helps you understand what you're taking. But in addition to that, we've gone out and scored the top, there's 8,000 brands, which is insane too, if you think about it. We've taken the top 500, which covers, you know, a big percentage of it and kind of expanding down the long tail now. And we've given them a trust score. And so we basically have gone in and done what you were doing kind of manually and doing all these individual reviews. Built a 29 point system that goes in and, you know, checks what certifications, what kind of testing they're doing, and kind of breaks it down and gives them a score. That alone, that feature alone, you can.

Scan any, you know, supplement for its barcode and — basically you just take the bottle, you put your — I.

Can do it here while we're talking to you.

Yeah, it's pretty, it's a pretty cool thing. You don't have to, and you don't.

Have to like manually enter it, you just send in your code and it pops up right away and, you know, you get the trust score and all the information about the product. It's super fast, it's super easy, and the hit rate is really high. And if we don't have something, you immediately can submit it. You can AI scan the label and it'll put it in the system. And the queue is insane, like the long tail here. There are 20,000 products in the system that only one person is taking. There's a long tail here that is absolutely insane. And that's- I mean, there's unique products.

That are not commonly taken. Yeah, they're like one person's taking it.

I don't know how they found it. I don't know if that's a trusted brand. And you've seen an explosion on Amazon of these kind of brands that are just quickly coming to market because there's no real thing stopping you from bringing a supplement to market. There's a big difference in the FDA around the federal code between pharmaceuticals and supplements. supplements are covered under federal code 21 CFR 111.

Right? What is that?

And that's basically that for pharmaceuticals, there's a whole process that they have to get pre-approved following CGMP standards and all these different things that- that's good manufacturing standards. Yeah, current good manufacturing process. With supplements, it's not something that gets done up front. You can be held to this standard retroactively, like in the, if something comes up, But it's kind of up to you to just say, you're self-pleasing. You can get retroactively, someone can say they're having a negative experience, report it with the FDA, they can come after.

You for not following the practice, but no one's checking up front. I mean, the amount of attention that the FDA pays this is very, very.

Little, unless there's some serious adverse effect, or somebody has this problem with it.

Right.

And those latent things you're talking about, the ones that might be heavy metal.

Exposure that take a long time to ever show up, or you don't know the source of it, there's there's no guideline. I mean, a friend of mine was a researcher and he actually analyzed Ayurvedic supplements and found extremely high levels of heavy metals in them. Totally. So you're taking some Ayurvedic herb, which is some natural product, and it hasn't been tested properly.

And when they actually tested it, it was full of heavy metals. And if you even if you follow CGMP, you're supposed to occasionally test your lots. I think it's like once a year. And then even then they don't provide the guidance on heavy metals. It's like kind of up to you to be like, well, for this type of product, what should the Prop 65 helps a little bit, you know, in terms of making sure I'm sure you don't have to put the label on there if you exceed those numbers. But it's a pretty wild west, to be perfectly honest. And there are systems now that can say, come up with an idea and a brand and get a supplement market in weeks. So that's why you're seeing the explosion. So we've gone in and we've taken 29 different points and we've built a scoring system.

This is your trust score. This is our trust score.

So basically you're taking 29 different attributes, whether it's talks, lot testing, CGMP, the biggest one that makes a difference. is whether or not you're getting a third party to certify your CGMP practices, right? That's like kind of like the fundamental. So instead of you just saying, yeah, I'm good, you know, I'm gonna self-certify that I'm following these practices. There's NSF and UL, these two big, you know, firms that'll come in and do what you are doing, you know, go tour the facilities, kind of do, make sure you're actually following, give you a certification.

That's like a fundamental big one.

And there's a surprising number of brands that don't do that. And that means the manufacturing plant is clean.

Oh, yeah. The way they get sourced ingredients. They're testing each lot, you know, and like there's a lot.

To that to figure it out. The air inside your home might not.

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Interesting.

You couldn't get like metagenics or thorn or pure encapsulations. They only distributed through the professionals because they were higher level, higher grade, a little more expensive, but you get what you pay for. So for example, pure encapsulations, they actually test every single product, every lot, and we do it before they make the stuff with the ingredients and they do it after. And if it says, you know, it's supposed to say 400 milligrams of, let's say, magnesium on the label, if it's 350, they throw it out.

Metagenics, who you brought up, is our 10 out of 10. They're our highest scoring brand on the platform. They do one thing that is rare, but we really, we give some points to it, is they make every batch test COA publicly available. so you can look at your bottle, look at the lot number, go online, pull it up, and see the results from the test. That's like a gold standard for us. Pure ranks very highly, but then there's a big spectrum.

Yeah. And the stuff that you get in the grocery store or a Walmart or the drugstore is generally crap. Like you sent me, they texted me a screenshot of Centrum. Yeah, which is this massive advertising. It's really a big product out there. Everything's Centrum, it's high quality, it's good. I mean, but they've got, why didn't you take a blue pill or a red pill or have titanium dioxide or.

Have dyes and chemicals? Yeah, that was a super interesting thing about that Centrum pill in particular is that the Centrum brand ranking is pretty high, but we just started exposing the excipients, the inactive ingredients. And it had titanium dioxide, red 40, red 5, these things that, I'm sorry, yellow 5, these things that are not good. I mean, titanium dioxide is banned in Europe. It causes DNA damage and they don't need to be in your supplements. So that's another thing we just rolled out was not just the manufacturing standards, but now we're going down to the product level and actually going in, we have like, forget how many, it's a couple thousand of these excipients that get added and ranking them out by how cautious you should be about.

Yeah, and there's a lot of stuff in them that we often are not known. There could be gluten or dairy, like lactose, other things that are in these, in addition to all the other kind of excipients, fillers, additives, colors, chemicals, things that make it look good or or stick together. And I mean, you don't want that crap. You want the nutrient.

And I think it's going to be interesting. We're starting to send out, you know, different supplements for our own independent testing to do what you were saying, just kind of like verify that even if they're highly rated, are they is it actually in there what they say it is? Right. So the precision of the nutrients that they're they're claiming are in there. It's a complicated market. And I think that what we've done though, by just making a simple score, Making it out of 10 is like, it makes it really easy for people to understand, right? The simple red, yellow, green, you can go deep and you can go look at each of the 29 points.

Trust scores, one to 10. This is a nine, this is a two.

That has been helpful for people to just simply take a glance. The user base we have, one thing I like doing in general when designing software is it's got to be easy enough for grandma to use, but powerful enough for the most hardcore user in the space to go deep on.

Right.

I did that with Splice, making sure that 40% of top 40 music using it to create music, they're like the hardcore guys and the brand new music creators. Right. So we're doing this in supplements, right? There's a way to dive way deep into what those 29 points are and each one of the excipients and all that. Or you can simply look at the score at the top and be like, okay, that feels good.

Because some people just, we gotta be meet the consumers where they are. Because nobody's really doing that. There was a company called Consumer Labs that I used to kind of use to reference stuff. yep, they would go and test products and I would rely on their independent analysis. But, you know, they weren't able to do the 200,000 products. So you basically, just for the simple scan of the barcode, the technology behind it, the use of AI, I mean, it's quite amazing now you can literally see what is the problem or how good a product is and whether or not it actually says what it is on the label.

Yeah, and like I think the big thing too is like we're not out here to, we just want to kind of arc the industry in the right direction, right? Like some of our trust scores, if you find a negative one, we're not all doing the big gotcha, you know, story on it. We're having conversations. A lot of the brands have reached out to us. First, the top end brands are like, thank you, right? Thank you for simplifying and raising to the attention how much work we are putting into testing this. So like super appreciative, you know, sometimes they'll clarify a piece of data that we might not have right, because we've collected it through our teams, you know, reaching out to them and they might provide something, which is great. And then we've had brands also reaching out, one, they want their trust score because the consumers are starting to care about this. And then how do we make it better? And that's our big if we can just help the industry move in the right direction with the scores, I think we've done something really great.

I think what you're saying is also important because people are taking these things. There's a, I don't know, $40, $50 billion industry.

Totally.

It's not well regulated. And it, you know, nobody's sort of looking at quality or efficacy or bioavailability or. Right. What form the nutrients are in. I mean, there's so many levels. Like, if you take, for example, magnesium oxide. Right. A great example. I was in the hospital for a back surgery recently, and, you know, I, I was taking painkillers, which can make you constipated. So I wanted magnesium. Yep. And I said to the, the attending physician, I said, you know, I want to get magnesium. Sure. and he wrote a prescription. What are you ordering? He said, well, this is such product. I said, that's magnesium oxide. That's so poorly absorbed. And it's also something that doesn't work for constipation that well. I said, how about magnesium citrate? He's like, oh, he looked it up.

He's like, oh, you're right. I'm not kidding you, Mark. This is true story. My fiance Kelly with her OB, her feeder, my son doctor, she was having restless leg syndrome and magnesium oxide was the only one the doctor Recommended. And we were like, where are we? And like, you know, like it just felt very out of date. And he's like, you know, best in his field and all that. But for nutrition, we're not following his advice.

One, we don't, as doctors, we learned.

Very little, if anything, about nutrition.

Was it like 20 hours or like less than a day? And it's usually for me when I learned nutrition, it was about all the deficiency diseases. Right. That were happening in the developing world. So it was interesting, like marasmus and kwashiorkor and xerophthalmia, which is vitamin A deficiency, causes blindness. and Berry Berry and Polagra.

So this is preventing the disease at.

The very low end. I'm like, okay, great. I don't, I've never seen any of these diseases. I probably never will. I, I think I remember when I was a kid, I, I did know people who had rickets and they had bow legs. And, right. So I, I had met them, but they were, you know, in the era before the vitamins were fortified in milk and in food. But, you know, these are things I didn't see. And that was my nutrition. My daughter just graduated, is graduating now from medical school. and I'm very proud of her.

She got into orthopedic residency.

It's a great. So I'm super happy about that. But anyway, she, she's like, I asked her, what are you learning about nutrition? She's like, nothing, really. Like zero. I mean, it's like, amino acids, fatty acids, you know, sugar, whatever. Like basic stuff. That's not, I think, what do you have your patient eat for lunch? Right. And then supplements, almost nothing. Right. You don't really learn about them, what they do, how they work, you know, the Assumption that the food is adequate or getting it from our food. But our food's depleted. I mean, we that data back 40, 50 years are the, the quality of the soil, the organic matter is depleted because of our farming practices, the interaction between the microbes and the organic matter and the plants is actually how the minerals and nutrients are extracted and from the soil in to get into the plant. So we're seeing, you know, between five to 40% decrease in a lot of key nutrients. And on top of that, we're seeing, you know, people eating more and more processed food and sort of not getting nutrients and eating more and more. Part of the, one of the things that happens when you have a deficiency is you try to find more nutrients somewhere. Animals do this. I remember being in the Amazon, there was this mineral sort of deposit across the bank of the river and there were all these birds are flocking just eating the dirt. And I saw this also in the Amazon a couple of times. I was like, wow, this is fascinating. You've got like thousands of birds of all species coming to get the nutrients they need. So animals know, and kids will eat dirt if they're iron deficient because they want to get iron from the dirt. Somehow the body knows, but we're so eating such a shitty diet and so processed and it's so devoid of nutrients. Although some is fortified, it's only fortified because it's so impoverished to begin with, otherwise it wouldn't need to be fortified. And it's caused a lot of problems in the population that we're seeing increasing nutrient deficiencies. The problem is that people I know how to diagnose it. They don't know that what their symptoms are related to it. They don't know how it makes them feel. And so they think this is just how I'm supposed to feel. You know, I feel like crap or I have this symptom or that symptom, but often it's related to their diet and their nutritional status. And this is the whole problem of like drugs and drug nutrient interactions. And there's a whole host of those.

Totally.

And so people are taking all these drugs like statins, for example, which is the number one prescribed drug, you know, 100%. It interrupts the enzyme that makes cholesterol. That same enzyme makes HMG-CoA reductase, it makes CoQ10. So you're blocking CoQ10. What is CoQ10? It's essential nutrient for making energy from food. And your mitochondrial function. So people get muscle injury and muscle pain and elevated what we call CPK, which is damaged muscle enzymes because of this. and doctors don't recommend usually CoQ10 with statins. Personal story on that.

So, you know, I got into this kind of longevity movement young at 30, and I did a calcium score at age 30. Which is like a heart scan. Heart scan, see how much plaque I have. Zero at age 30. At age 35, I had eight, so that was something. And I was off the charts. And so I went on a statin at age 35. It was not recommended to go on CoQ10 at the time. No. It ended up finding about founding it myself, right? Take MitoQ now. You know, it's just one of those things that feels essential.

It is.

It can be totally missed in the doctor's office.

And there's actually a book, a textbook, medical textbook on drug-nutrient interactions because there's so many. The next kind of one of the class of drugs, I think it's third after two or third most prescribed drugs on the planet are acid blockers for reflux or heartburn, which is because our diet's so crappy. I mean, if I get stuck somewhere and I have to eat something crappy, because I'm starving, I'm in an airport or whatever, and I try to do it, I will get immediate reflux or heartburn. Yeah, totally. And I'm like, it's because of what I'm eating, it's not because I have some defect that causes me to have reflux. And you're taking this drug for a long period of time, it inhibits mineral absorption like zinc and calcium, you get osteoporosis, it inhibits B12 absorption, which is critical for so many functions, it can cause depression, dementia, neurologic issues.

People don't know this and we don't know how these all are interacting. And so we see another layer of problems in terms of nutrient deficiencies that's not being addressed. Yeah, and that's one of the things I think together as we keep navigating the space and increasing the functionality on Suboxone, the interactions, I think they're gonna be really important to have on there, right? And there's like the ones that you should be aware of, like St. John's Wort, reducing effectiveness of birth control and antidepressants, vitamin K interacting with blood thinners, like there's a lot. There's legit stuff. Yeah, and that's a layer that we wanna get into as we keep going. We think that getting people's stacks on there now, knowing what they're taking, and then giving them the jumping off points to improve things and find the warnings.

It's huge. It's huge. If you're on a diuretic, which many people are for blood pressure, it causes you to leach out minerals. So you leach out magnesium and you pee them out. And so we've seen these massive symptoms of magnesium deficiency, which are sort of, doctors don't know how to diagnose and it's pretty easy. There's this moment where I think we're, you know, what you're creating with Subco, this company, there's gonna be a sort of a realization that one, you know, with a partnership with function, which we're working together, which is testing. So I say test, don't guess, you know. Yeah. We check your magnesium level. We check your level of B vitamins like homocysteine and methionine acid, which measure B12, folate, B6 effectiveness. We measure omega-3s. We measure vitamin D. We can measure zinc. We can measure copper. We can measure iodine. We can measure so many different nutrients. minerals that are commonly deficient in people. And then people can actually then go figure out what to do, because we don't actually with function health recommend any particular brands. But we want some way to help people navigate what's going on there in the landscape and actually come up with a coherent strategy of what to take and where to find the products and how to trust them.

And that's kind of a future for us, right? There's an evolution of where, so we launched our beta in October. It was kind of an early beta that to just, you know, I had to update my LinkedIn and say I was working on something new. So we launched, you know, in beta and it's going great. But what exactly what you're talking about, why we're working together, why we have the function partnership is, you know, we really do want to incorporate more data and there's kind of a church and state mentality too around the product recommendations and the like nutrient supplement recommendations. The product side feels like the things we were talking about, the trust score that's based on manufacturing, like quality, cost and then some of the dietary preferences like, do you want vegan, that kind of stuff. But the nutrient recommendations, right now they're kind of generic. We asked you basic questions, height and weight. We have 80 protocols. You can go in for different health goals and kind of see the general recommendations there, but we really need to up the game there. And people want our number one most requested feature is a personalized supplement plan. And so that's what we're working on. It's a big thing to take in as much data as we can and help people understand what they need to take. Once they understand that need, how you get it in your body, the cost, the which brands, all that, that can become an independent thing. That might even change over time, right? New products might come out, lower cost options might come up, higher trust scores may change, but we need to make sure you have a really good nutrient plan and that eventually you're also going to need to track whether or not you are hitting your goal. And so one of the things we talk about a lot is being aligned with the customer to be just as excited when they stop taking something that's not working, as we are when they try something new. And so, you know, it's a big part of our overall kind of ethos is being your companion to navigate the space.

It's almost like consumer reports that, you know, magazine that tests products and sort of checks quality, but it doesn't really exist for the supplement industry, which is-.

And it's not integrated into a flow, right? Like there are some websites that you can go to and look at some lab results and things like that, but there's not like action to take. There's buy. But that's not really the thing we're looking about. We want to make sure that you can have a conversation with your doctor about what you're actually putting in your body, look for alternatives that might be cheaper cost than the thing that you found through some influencers website, and that you're tracking results alone, our scheduler, 30 to 50% of supplements don't get finished the bottle that you buy. People just stop. They stop, they forget. A lot of things, they forget is the one thing, right? And then, I don't know, some people have just very much the wrong expectations upfront. They think they're going to feel something immediately. they don't understand what the protocol is to actually getting the results they want. They don't know that they should be actually checking their vitamin D levels in six months or, you know, three months.

And so you might notice the absence of something, right? Like, in other words, I, I talked to this woman the other day who did her function test, and she had a vitamin D level of 20, which is extremely low. And I said, gee, your vitamin D is low. You could have more frequent infections. You could have seasonal affective disorder. You could have muscle pain and aching. And she looked at me, she's like, yeah, I have all those things. Yeah, yeah, right.

So when you take something and you go, well, I'm not noticing something, I'm.

Noticing the absence of something. I'm not getting sick all the time.

I'm not having muscle pain. I don't have muscle pains while I'm taking high dose statins. So that's the thing. We really want to set people's expectations right and also that they're dosing it, they're taking it at the right time.

People don't follow, it's very rare that people follow the with food without food. Yeah, because talk about that for a.

Little bit in terms of different nutrients and how you need to take them with or without food. Yeah, I mean the fat soluble vitamins like A, D, E, K should be.

Taken with a meal to help improve.

Absorption and it can impact it by up to 50%.

With fatty food.

Fatty food, particularly.

Right.

Let alone any food. Right.

So if you take your vitamin D, you have to have it with some fat. Right.

As opposed to vitamin C, which-- so we have a scheduler in the app too that lets you, you know, takes all your different products and then helps you build what time of day you should be taking it at, set reminders for it, and soon track whether or not you're experiencing side effects or the results that you're looking for. So we've got to kind of close that loop, then feed that data back in. help you optimize, make changes, and kind of keep improving things. And it'll be a journey.

And then you get feedback from people about how they responded. So you get data on- that's gonna.

Be the key, right? Like to me, right now we have the protocols, and the products, you can see how many people are taking them, but how many people are actually hitting their results, right? And I really struggle when I look at reviews, like on Amazon reviews for supplements. It's usually like one of three things. This changed my life. this did nothing, the package came damaged. That's all that's happening on these Amazon reviews. There's no one actually seeing whether or not they're hitting results with it. We definitely aspire to do that. We talk a lot about the creating that closed loop experience. And I think that's when the N.

Equals one data starts to become really valuable.

So what does N equal one mean? N equals one is like one of one, it is my data. I am an individual in this. It is not the clinical result, it.

Is not the aggregate, it is just my personal, you know, — It's your.

Testing, your own data.

Biology against- It's just your own story, right?

It could be subjective, but the n equals one is the sample size is me. And that is the, as we talk a little bit about the battle of the institution and the individuals, there's so many people on Twitter. If you get caught up in your algorithm on kind of the supplement health Twitter, you just see people making some pretty outlandish claims about the impact of supplements, certain supplements on their life. And we need to start feeding that back into a system that can aggregate whether other people are having those experiences or just the loud voices on Twitter are having those experiences on X. Because those people stand out and people make decisions, as I said before, like 51% of people buying a health or wellness product because they saw it on social media, that's real. Even though the trust with them is not necessarily high, they are making these decisions. And so we can really find out whether or not these are working because some of these things are in complete contrast to what the medical world, thanks. We need to build better data sets.

And you're also helping solve the problem of quality in the sense that there's so many products in the market that have stuff in them that shouldn't be in them, whether it's performance enhancing kind of mail enhancing drugs for sexual function might have Viagra in it, or you.

Could have- that came out recently. That was, FDA went after a brand for having a bunch of these natural supplements, Viagra in them and all that. And there was a scandal even in the kind of Amazon basics world where they had tested some of their products and they weren't hitting the numbers that they said. There was a Ginkgo Biloba test that the FDA, I think, did where there was zero of the product. There was zero Ginkgo in the actual-.

So you buy a product, but there's like nothing in there. There's nothing active in there.

Yeah.

And so you were kind of in a wild west out there and you're trying to help people solve it for many levels, like helping understand what they're taking, whether the dosing is right and then you're taking too much or too little of something. whether the quality is there, whether there's contaminants. These are things that are so important. And what's really interesting to me, Steve, is when I talk to doctors, you would kind of ask a group of doctors, how many people recommend men's supplements to their patients? And very few hands go up. It's more and more now. If you ask that same group, how many of you are taking supplements? Like 70 or 80% of hands go up. And when I got to Cleveland Clinic over 10 years ago, we did a survey of the physicians there of 3,000 physicians. And it was so fascinating because we wanted to know whether they were interested in having a source of trusted brands that were verified and certified in sort of the similar way that you've done and what their uses, recommendations are. So it's like how many are actually recommending? It was very few. How many would like to actually you have a source where you could trust. And it was like almost universal. Yes. 70% of the doctors were actually recommending stuff already. And you know, the cardiologists were recommending fish oil or CoQ10. Totally. The gastroenterologists were recommending probiotics. The OBGYNs were recommending prenatal vitamins and, you know, the endocrinologists were recommending vitamin D for osteoporosis. And so, but they didn't know what brand. Totally. They didn't know what to take. And, you know, for example, vitamin D is a great example because when I learned medical school, there was a prescription vitamin D, which is vitamin D2. Right. Which isn't really the optimal vitamin to take. You want to take vitamin D3. Yeah. And it doesn't work as well for many reasons. And so, but that's what we learned in medical school, that this is what you, what you do in your residency. And so it was really interesting to see the number of Physicians at Cleveland Clinic, which is a, you know, one of the top institutions in the world who were taking them, recommending them, wanted to have a quality source, and there was nothing. And so I think, you know, despite doctors being a little bit negative on it, it's partly because it's so unregulated. It's partly because people don't know what they're getting. It's probably because they don't have a sense of quality control or how to actually recommend stuff they know is going to be safe and effective and not problematic unless it's a prescription vitamin. And there are a lot of prescription vitamins. Yeah.

A lot of prescription vitamins. You know, I mean, this is, this is what I'm so excited about, about us working together.

Right.

I remember when I showed you the the platform initially. And it was like, whoa, I've wanted this for 30 years, but like, I'm a tech guy, right? Like, I love to build. The initial version of this is built out of the product that I really wish I had. And for stack sharing and creating all that. And then my co-founder Nick came up with the trust score rating. And the other thing we have is this sub score rating, which is take everything that's in your stack, grade it against the brand qualities, price, does it hit your demographics? Are you aligned with your health goals and kind of give people an easy score to iterate on, right? So these are some of the core functionality you have, but getting into the mind of the people in the clinical world and what they need and how to kind of interface with them where this, we're really focused more on the self-directed health journey, but it seems like there's just so much with your guidance that we're able to kind of tap into the mentality of the doctors and how patients can kind of interact and show them their actual, you know, supplement list right now. Like you can actually share it with your doctor, which you go to those intake forms and it's just like, oh.

My God, I don't feel like I.

Can even fill them out. How do you even fill them out? Yeah, I know. They get so mad at me when.

I try to not fill them out, you know?

Here's a spreadsheet, you know? Yeah, exactly.

Right?

And so now it can be a link to us and you can actually analyze it and we'll see what doctors really want to take the time to.

Kind of take action on it. But we're going to navigate. It's a pretty exciting moment with this sort of innovation in the industry that's been a gap for so long. It's been an area that's just been self-directed, blindfolded, trying to find what's good. Right. Hoping, you know, the company that you buy the product from has got integrity.

Right.

Hoping that it's gonna work. I think it's a lot of money people spend on this stuff. How do you actually find the quality?

And I think the money side though is a big one, right? So one of the things that we really wanna do over time is drive down the cost of supplements. There's a big problem in the industry is that they're really not designed. Like in my mind, when you think about taking a supplement, especially some of these like, you know, core ones, you should be thinking about your customer's lifetime value in years or decades. But so many, because of that, you know, 30 to 50%, of people not finishing the supplement, not reordering, the way the margin structures are and how much they're costing to acquire customers keeps the price really high for people who are on stuff for a long time. I remember I was on year five of taking Elysium and I was like, Guys, I sent customer support an email. I was like, you,'ve made all your money back on me. I want to take this for my whole life. Can I get a discounted rate on this? And they said, no. And I was like, Cool, I'm out. like, why? I'm just, you know, why do they say no? Their customers, they said they don't have that yet. And I was like, cool, there's not a real reward for the people who are in this for the long haul, who are taking, there's not a system designed for people who are in it for the long haul with their health. I mean, we should be measuring their LTV in decades, not months.

Lifetime value.

Lifetime value, yeah, of the customers. So we're trying to find the right intersection between capitalism and health and help drive that down. for people, like, and see that from us later.

And what's kind of cool about Sepco also is you can put in what you want to be taking, let's say function, health recommends, not products, but ingredients or nutrients that you need. You can put that into the system and then it'll come up with a ranking of which products are the optimal ones, the best price, the best quality.

The least amount of pills.

So you solve so many problems with this. I think one of the challenges that the regulatory environment has got to change. So I don't know if it will or not.

I mean, I'm curious. You've done so well on the policy front and I think a lot of change for things that you've been caring about for a long time are starting to come into taking action. What do you think of the regulatory side of this space?

I think the Deregulation was a necessary set of regulations at the time because it was kind of the wild west and there was nothing guiding what people could say because literally say, you know, take this pill, it'll make your penis grow six inches longer or it'll cure heart disease or it'll, and people were just, so it kind of came up with some kind of limits on what you could market it as, which I think it was good because they can create, you know, structure function claim. That's why you say it supports healthy blood sugar, supports a healthy immune system, but you can't say it treats diabetes, right? Even though it might help like bitter melon or, you know, certain compounds actually can help with blood sugar regulation, right? Yep. Or like berberine and so forth. You can't say that it actually, but they do.

It works. Berberine's a good one.

Yeah. I think there's a lot of kind of messiness that kind of got left over from that regulation, which was in the 90s, which helps sort of set a level of standards. You know, the FDA can't police it all. And right now, you know, you're kind of, SUPCO is kind of like the police, sort of the FDA of supplements in my mind, because basically doing a lot of the work that they should be doing, right? You've actually done the homework, kind of look at all the products, look at what's in them, kind of find the sources. How do you actually find, like, when you look at a product, whether there's contaminants or fillers or excipients or things that shouldn't be there?

For us, it's about bringing the awareness to what we have found, right? So their manufacturing process, do they have the COAs that show this? Are they doing their lot testing? So there's a lot like, you know, are they following the guidelines that they should be? And then the excipients list that we have in there is helpful too, so that you can see, you know, the inactive ingredients. But then we're gonna try to do a bunch of our own independent testing as well to verify these things. Personally, I like the edge of medicine where we have a lot of agency over what we're doing. Like we don't necessarily need prescriptions for things. We can make our own decisions. But there does need to be something that's giving consumers guidance, and that's kind of what we're trying to be.

So in the absence of new policy.

We'Re going to keep trying to up the standards and push the industry in the right direction.

It's so important because, you know, as a practicing physician who's been doing functional medicine, using food as medicine, using nutrients, using herbs, it's a challenge because how do you, how do you actually find the right product for your patient that's going to work? And, you know, it's sort of the, one of the, when I first started out, I would call the sort of elders in the, in the field and say, well, which probiotics should I recommend or which magnesium product or this herbal product is good. I mean, I did, there was no way to know. And I began to see what was working clinically, what wasn't working clinically. And when you start to apply these clinically, you see changes in people's biology, you see changes in their biomarkers, you changes in their health and their well-being. And this is kind of what, what, what's been missing is a way to sort of have a, a independent verification system that analyzes everything that integrates with your products easily. that you can use your phone and your camera to basically track everything in two seconds. You have to add everything into a spreadsheet.

Right, and we want to be customer aligned, right? We want to find that intersection between capitalism and health that really looks out for the consumer. A big thing is we don't ever want to profit from supplement sales, right? We need to be just as aligned when you stop taking something as you are when you try something new. From the stories that we're hearing too, supplements for doctors, the doctors who are prescribing them and getting involved in the product, It's becoming like a bit of a revenue stream for them. And, you know, I had a friend who said their doctor came up to them in the grocery store, didn't ask anything about how they were doing or whatever, and said, why'd you stop buying your supplements from me? And that just doesn't feel, that doesn't feel right. That left a really bad taste in their mouth. So, you know, we're gonna keep evolving in the direction that we think is gonna best look out for customers and be their advocate.

It's okay. And what's also good about it is you're layering a lot of the science that it's hard to get. What are the interactions between different nutrients? what are the interactions with drugs? What are the, you know, there's drug nutrient interactions and nutrient drug interactions. Sometimes a nutrient will affect the drug function, right? Like you mentioned St. John's Wort, which can affect medications. So you have to kind of be aware of all that. And even if you're a smart doctor, it's really hard to kind of figure this out. It was a big nutrient supplement database where it did a lot of this, but it was, I had to pay $3,000 a year for the prescription subscription to this platform. I had to actually be able to go in and search and read, you know, monographs that were like 30 pages long on each nutrient and talk about the issues. I mean, it was really, it was really dense and it's hard.

What's crazy is you, you're getting that, right? But like the consumers are so much making their own decisions about the supplements. So they're never even touching a doctor that knows that. So there's just so much risk out there with them not, you know, having that information at their fingertips in a self-directed way. And, you know, it's one of the things we aspire to get on the platform. You're gonna help us with that. You've already sent me some resources. Um, and, you know, we think it's.

A, it's a, it's a big opportunity.

To help consumers not make a mistake.

When they're doing things on their own. Yeah, I think it's important. You also created something called Stacks.

We just touched on it briefly, but I don't think we mentioned Stacks. I want to talk about our Stacks. Whatever Stacks mean. Look, so Stacks is like, to me, a stack is like the, when you're taking a bunch of things together that have a, for either an individual effect, like this is my muscle growth stack or this is my daily stack. This is the stuff that I'm taking every day and the stuff that's meant to be taken together. And so, as I said in the beginning, the kind of core offering here was the ability to share your stack and see other stacks that people are taking. My stack is on there in public, your stack is gonna be on there in public. And I think you can learn a lot from people like you or people facing the same challenges. One of the things I love that I came across a year or two ago was the effects of taurine on longevity. Two grams of taurine a day, it's kind of much more than people had thought about before, but in primate studies showing really long extensions to 20% extension, I think, in primates to life and a bunch of cardiovascular effects too.

To.

No doctor has recommended me to take taurine. I've had to find that on my own.

Yeah. You know, and it's amino acid that's really important for many functions, and it's, it's very good for regulating a lot of neurologic issues and kind of calming. It's very calming neurotransmitter, helps with preventing anxiety. And, and I actually use a product. It's a menogenic product called TranqCor for a lot of patients, which has taurine, magnesium, B6, a lot of things are very helpful. and calming the nervous system, which, you know, a lot of people have a lot of anxiety. And it's, and often, you know, part of the problem is we deplete our nutrients under stress. You know, we deplete our nutrients because we need more of them because we're overloaded with toxins. We need more of them because we eat shitty food that needs nutrients to be metabolized. In other words, when you eat food, it has to be broken down, absorbed, or digested and, and actually turned into various pathways that are important for your body. And often it's, if you're not taking the right nutrients, you're going to not have the right functions in your body on a cellular level. So whether it's CoQ10 or taurine, these are so, these are not considered essential vitamins or nutrients. But, but there, I call these conditionally essential because of the increased load of stress, of toxins. It's interesting, you know, when, you know, when you just stress alone will deplete magnesium. So if you're stressed, you're gonna pee out more magnesium.

And guess what? Everybody's stressed. Everyone's stressed. But like, this whole concept of sharing and learning from each other, like, I remember I was over at your house for dinner one day and I saw you were taking timeline, you know, the Urolithin A, right? And you were like, I fucking love this thing. And I started taking it, you know? So like, learning from each other, I think is such a big piece of it for, you know, people who are.

Facing similar things or have similar goals to you. So the stacks are basically guiding you if you wanna have a longevity stack.

Or you have PMS or you have- yeah, we have the protocol.

Gut issues or you have, it's like a protocol.

Our protocols are very much designed for like the crossover between the nutrients and the health condition. In the health conditions, right? So you're gonna be on there with a longevity one, a brain health one. That's really exciting to have those protocols on there. And the stacks to us are what you know, what you're taking daily. And then you can see how they relate to the health goals, you know, the nutrient totals across all of them.

You know, it's really fascinating to go look at other people's stacks and see what they're taking. And you're also gathering information from the users about their own health issues, their health goals, their their age, their demographics, and so forth.

Yeah, when you come in, you give us some basic information, which is gonna be expanded more soon, and then you go and you scan your existing products so you can kind of get them in the system, and then we give you a score, right? And that score tells you how well your supplements are aligning with your health goals, the quality of your supplements, the cost of your supplements, and people just seem to do really well with this. They want a simple, easy to understand number that they can go move. Well, I talked to all of my friends who are coming in, they're like, I got a 75, I want it to be an 80. And so they go and do something. The average person is right now making two to three changes to their product stack based on the sub score, which is amazing. These are potential decisions that could impact in their whole life.

It's really a way to personalize what you're taking. Correct. It's really more of a data-driven approach, right?

I think that's what it really fundamentally is, like the structured data finally being available and the ability for us to soon provide recommendations that span, give you the info on whether it's an AI-based recommendation, whether it's coming from Mark's protocol, whether it's been tailored based on some of the data that you provided us, and actually give you a pretty comprehensive way at looking at why you are making this decision, why you are going to take this. And then the end game, which we are working on, is then to self-report back in whether or not and once that loop is closed, you know, we think we've completed the journey end to end on supplements and we can just keep improving.

It's almost like you're creating a research infrastructure.

I think so. I think it's a huge benefit. I think in the world of kind of, you know, of an AI driven world too, there's this kind of blocked on human concept they talk about where like at some point the AI only has enough information it now needs to get from you whether or not you are getting results from this, whether or not you're taking your pill successfully, that it doesn't have this information. And if you can kind of sit at the intersection of that, I think you found a very, very valuable seam as the collective intelligence grows and the individual intelligence gets fed back in.

It's powerful. I mean, you know, I think where can people learn about what we've discussed?

Yeah, so sup.co is the site. You can go on there. SUPP.co and if you go to supp.co/mark, you'll be able to find a link to the protocols and Mark stack on there, which is pretty exciting.

My goodies.

Your goodies. and you get to see when that gets updated and when things change, which is very cool. And look, I think together we're gonna build something, something better, something better for this industry and something that, you know, I know you've wanted to see exist for a long time. And so this is just the beginning.

So there's a website, which is sup.co.

There'S also an app. Yeah, the app. Though you can get the, if you can get it in the App Store, just search sup.co, you'll see it in there. And, or you can go to the site and sign up and we'll send.

You the links to it. You can go to sup.co slash Mark. And then you can share it. You can share that data with the community. You can share with the community.

We've added a bunch of social sharing features too. You can build customized lists and stacks that you think work for you and share them to the community, which is kind of a fun new thing that's on there as well. So we have a mix of AI-driven data, clinical data, expert data from yourself, and then users sharing their unequals one stories too. And so it kind of wraps it all up in an easy way for you to make decisions your health.

The bottom up data is really interesting because it's often dismissed.

It's so dismissed.

There's a battle going on between them. It's like, oh, I took magnesium or I took zinc or I took oga. And here's what happened to me. Yeah. That data is really valuable. I know. And in aggregate. In aggregate. When you look at all the people putting the data in about how things are affecting them.

Right.

And what works and what doesn't work, you know, we're going to learn a lot. We're going to learn a lot. And I think for me, I've learned a lot. a lot doing, you know, this clinically with tens of thousands of patients over three decades and doing lots of Diagnostics to see what levels of nutrients people have, what their risk factors are, you know, and it's so important. I mean, you know, one of the things I test for is glutathione. Yep. Which is a really important compound that's involved in detoxification, that's involved in regulating immune function and inflammation. It's sort of the most powerful antioxidant in your and there's genetics involved in what your needs are and how much you need. And, and there's a lot of toxic load out there. And so the body uses it up very quickly. And it's kind of the final common step to remove stuff from your body, like heavy metals or environmental toxins. If you're urinating during the fires or house burn down, which is tragic. And you're exposed to all sorts of things. So how do you up regulate your body's detox system, for example? And N-acetyl cysteine is a compound that boosts glutathione. down. There's also other things like lipoic acid.

And you wouldn't know this.

You wouldn't know these things unless you test. Or, you know, you, if you are.

Someone in LA, I would say, here's some things you should take. Someone has shared an LA fire recovery stack.

You know, someone has shared that in our community. That's amazing because I think there, there, there's a lot of value in that. And, and also, you know, even for basic things that, you know, we think are kind of standard in medicine, like prenatal vitamins, most of the ones that are prescription are just full of all kinds of crap. Yeah. And are including nutrients that are not the bioavailable and not in the right forms don't work as well. And so women are just unfortunately getting stuff that is kind of second rate or third rate.

Yeah, that's a topic that's kind of near and dear to, you know, while I was building the first, you know, Sepco, Kelly was pregnant and going through it. Yeah. And it was hard to get the right information. We had one saying only take magnesium oxide. We had another saying buy my supplements. Like it was a wide spectrum. So we think those issues, menopause issues, things like that, that we really want to have somebody to yourself coming on the platform, another round of experts are coming on to tackle individual topics that they're the best at. So you'll be able to see a nice mix of what the individuals are doing, what the experts say, and what.

Is the kind of clinical data. And I think one of the things that people probably have ringing around in their head is, gee, all these big studies on supplements show they don't work. Omega-3, vitamin D, B vitamins, beta-carotene, this and that. And so the doctors see these big studies, studies, they show there's no benefit. And so they basically dismiss it all. And so people have a kind of a, in, in their heads, this sort of background talk around, well, my doctor said that there's been big studies and shows that vitamins don't work. And there's so many problems with those studies. One, they don't often measure the Baseline level of nutrients. So if your vitamin D is fine and you take vitamin D, you won't notice any change. But if you don't measure vitamin D in the beginning, or omega-3 fats, if you don't measure if someone's deficient and you give everybody a thousand to people vitamin omega-3 fats, some might be fine because they eat a lot of fish, but some might not be. And, and so you, so the effect size washes out. And, and also when you look at individual problems, there's a lot of data. For example, fertility is a big issue, not just prenatal vitamin, but fertility is a huge issue, especially for men. Men don't realize that there's sperm count, there's sperm quality, there's sperm motility, they're ability to be potent is dependent on certain nutrients like zinc and other things that are really key for men that they need to be taking in order to optimize their sperm production if they want to have a healthy baby. But these are, these are things that people don't know.

And it's all in the scientific literature. Right. So we've packaged those up. Some of those topics, particularly fertility, prenatals, they're like, they're on the platform with the, the protocols. And every one of the recommendations has an explanation of why.

Right.

So, you know, you have an ability to really understand why and you can pick and choose whether or not you want to follow it to, to exact or to the fact that you might know that you don't need to supplement your vitamin D. You are okay. So that's, I think, giving people the ability to either click the button and go for it or tailor it to what they know they need is a unique feature that we have.

To me, it's so exciting because it's been a problem that needs solving for a long time and no one's really figured it out. And there were attempts like Consumer Labs or some of these natural medicines database, which is Know, thousands of dollars, usually only really accessible for physicians to look at things in detail. Uh, or some text sort of textbook that nobody looks at or it's like, but how do you actually solve the problem in the marketplace? And I think subco has an incredible job. And I think, you know, partnering with function to do diagnostic tests, see what's going on is really helpful because we're going to be measuring a lot. We do already measure a lot of things. We're going to be expanding our testing to do more and more nutrient testing because it's so widespread. You know, when people tell me, oh, you don't need nutrients because it's not an issue, I go, well, here's, here's our data. I mean, I, I have my data from my own practice and the other five doctors in my practice, but we've got 150, 000 people now who've tested their nutrient levels. And the amount of just Frank deficiency, not insufficiency, but Frank deficiency, is shocking to me. And a population I think is probably more health forward.

Right.

If they're using function, they're probably like a little Right. Leaning into their health. They want to be healthier. They're probably eating better. They're probably taking vitamins.

I mean, it was like, the average subco user takes six products. They're probably, if they're correlating the same.

To your data, they're taking the wrong thing. And so you solve that problem. So I think, I think it's really exciting. I think we're in this moment where we can really give people the support they need to make the right decisions, to understand that they're not overdosing on certain things, to understand the quality issues and where to find the right products.

Engage in conversation, be able to talk to your doctor about it, be able to talk to your friends about it, share the things that are working for you, aggregate on equals one data. There's a lot of submissions in making.

Sense of supplements with SuppGo. So everybody just go check it out. It's supp.co, S-U-P-P.co.

If you want to find out what I'm taking, go to supp.co/mark.

Supp.co/mark. Yep. And you can see the kinds of things that I recommend that I'm taking. And I think we're at this really transitional moment with sort of a consumer empowerment, you know, AI, data-driven healthcare, you know, you're tackling on the supplement end. I'm doing it on the biomarker testing, lab testing, and we're combining forces. And to me, it's really an exciting moment where people can start to own their own health. They can be the CEO of their own health. They don't have to abdicate or wait till their doctor learns about nutrition, which might be 10 or 20 decades from now. For sure. I mean, hopefully not. But actually, Texas, where I live in Austin, where we are now, Now I testified in front of the Senate Health Subcommittee. And this Health and Human Services Committee basically introduced a bill called SB 25, where they said, which passed, which mandates that Texas doctors have to learn about nutrition.

That's great. Which is amazing.

You're great at the policy stuff. It's amazing. Finally, people are talking about it. And I think it's exciting. I think so all the forces are moving towards people being empowered, people being agents of their health. And agents of their health. Agency over their own health. and what I like to say is being the CEO of your own health. So if you want to do that, you need the data, the information, you know what you're doing. And, and actually, the truth is, I, I have been taking a bunch of stuff, and I, I, I haven't run it through subco yet. And I want to go right now to my medicine cabinet or by supplement cabinet and actually scan everything and see what I'm doing because it's so fascinating and see where we are. Because I think, you know, we, we all try figure it out. Even, even I try to figure it out, and it's not as easy as you think. So thanks for what you're doing, Steve. Thanks for starting this company. And I look forward to, you know, how we kind of unfold this, the.

Future and empower people. So good job.

Thanks for having me. It was great. Don't forget, there's a way to listen completely ad free with Hyman plus on Apple podcasts. You can enjoy every episode without any breaks. Just open Apple podcasts and tap try free to start your seven day free trial. If you love this podcast, please share it with someone else you think would also enjoy it. You can find me on all social media channels at Dr. Mark Hyman. Please reach out. I'd love to hear your comments and questions. Don't forget to rate, review and subscribe to the Dr. Hyman Show wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to check out my YouTube channel at Dr. Mark Hyman for video versions of this podcast and more. Thank you so much again for tuning in. We'll see you next time on the Dr. Hyman Show. This podcast is separate from my clinical practice at the Ultra Wellness Center, my work at Cleveland Clinic and Function Health where I am Chief Medical officer. This podcast represents my opinions and my guests' opinions. Neither myself nor the podcast endorses the views or statements of my guests. This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided with the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, please seek out a qualified medical practitioner. And if you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, visit my the Ultra Wellness Center at ultrawellnesscenter.com and request to become a patient. It's important to have someone in your corner who is a trained, licensed healthcare practitioner and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health. This podcast is free as part of my mission to bring practical ways of improving health to the public. So I'd like to express gratitude to sponsors that made today's podcast possible. Thanks so much again for listening.