Do You Recommend a Certain Brand of Multivitamin?

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Do you recommend a certain brand of multivitamin? This is JJ Virgin, four time New York Times bestselling author, celebrity nutrition expert, and fitness hall of famer. I've been on a lifelong quest for answers to the toughest health questions and now I'm sharing what I found with you. Welcome to Ask the Health expert. Sandra Bennett, 99, watched my IGTV the Importance of Supplements video and asked, do you recommend a certain brand of multivitamin? Well, as a matter of fact, I do. But more important than that, I'm going to really share with you what to look for when you're choosing a multivitamin. What else you want to make sure you're getting besides just vitamins? I'll be right back with that answer.

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So I have my own line of supplements. The things that I use myself and recommend to my friends and family and use with clients. And so obviously those are the ones that I would recommend. But I want to go higher level here and explain what to look for in a multivitamin. But of course, we're looking beyond just a multivitamin. You want to have a multivitamin, multimineral and antioxidant formula. So you want to make sure you're getting all of those things rather than taking them all individually because they work synergistically. So there's some things you want to make sure you are getting and then there's some things you want to make sure you're not getting. We're going to go through both of those super important. And then we might also. We'll see how we're doing on time. Talk about some of the things that you should add that you can't quite get all of in a multivitamin. First really important thing is the idea of taking one pill a day to cover everything would be awesome. It would be like the size of an eggplant. So that ain't happening. You're gonna probably take anywhere from three to six pills a day to get a good foundational support of key multivitamin mineral antioxidants. Okay, so that's the first thing is look at taking a multi pill package type of thing. So first off, what are we taking? We're not just taking vitamins. We're taking vitamins, we're taking minerals and we're taking antioxidants. Now for vitamins, A couple things you really want to look at for the B vitamin family. You want them to be methylated. When we look at different things, we're looking at what will your body be able to absorb and use. So you want to have methylated B vitamins. Here's a really important one. You want to make sure you're taking folate, not folic acid. Folic acid is synthetic. You want to avoid that. Avoid that in processed foods. Do not take that. And ideally with folate, you're getting some 5 methyl tetrahydrofolate too, because so many of us, it's like 40% of the population has something called the MTHFR gene SNP and that makes it so that you need to use that specific form of folate. Folate. So this is critical. Next one is look for vitamin E. I have switched everything over in my line on this. So it's one thing to get tocopherols, which is vitamin E. There are tocopherols and there's tocotrienols. It's one thing to get tocopherols in food. You're fine there, but you don't want to add extra of that because in supplements they can be something called pro oxidant and we don't want that. That means it can make things oxidize and spoil. In fact, in fish oil, you can use tocotrienols to preserve the fish oil from getting oxidized from the air. But if you use tocopherols, you will oxidize it. So that's a great way to see that. So for vitamin E, look specifically for something called tocotrienols, not do not take alpha tocopherol. And that's pretty cutting edge news. I've done some podcasts on that before. You can go back and look at my podcast with Dr. Barry Tan. Next thing. In terms of minerals, you want to make sure that your minerals are chelated. Think of minerals like big rocks. And when you chelate them, you bind them to different nutrients, usually amino acids that help your body absorb them better. And remember, it's what you, you know, it's, it's all about what you absorb. One of the things that can help with absorption and things that are fat soluble is lecithin. Um, what I do not like and do not use is bioperine. Because the way bioperine works, I think it's bioperine is like black pepper extract, biaperine. The way they work is actually to make your gut more permeable so that you enhance the absorption. But you don't want to do that because that can lead to food intolerances. So that's the opposite of what you want to do there. All right. You also want to make sure, of course, you got synergistic ingredients. So you're taking vitamin D3 with vitamin K1 and K2, you've got calcium, magnesium, potassium. So everything's meant to work together. And yes, there will probably be some things that you're going to want to take more of. Magnesium is a great example of that. Usually vitamin D is another example of that. But I do this as my first foundational is a good, high quality, professional grade multivitamin mineral antioxidant formula naturally. Now meaningful doses of the different nutrients in it. Again, the synergistic ingredients and then another thing to look at. You want to make sure it's third party tested and if you can get it in glass bottles, bonus points. I just recently switched over to glass bottles. This was not a cheap thing to do, but it was a definite decision of what's right and what's best. So it took a while to do. It's a lot more difficult to ship, et cetera, but it's just better. And you know you can save money on, let's say, I don't know, your toilet paper, paper towels, of course, if you can even find these things. But don't look to get the cheap deal on supplements, buy the best ones. I'd rather see you take less of the best than more cheap stuff. So look for high quality supplements. And again, remember what I just said to not not get in there as well. This is JJ with Ask the Health Expert. I do this five times a week, so make sure you never miss a show by going to subscribetojay.com.

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