I’m Interested In Adding Supplements to My Health Routine. Where Should I Start?

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I'm interested in adding supplements to my health routine. Where should I start? 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. Nora from Instagram asks, I'm interested in adding supplements to my health routine. Where should I start? Hey, it's JJ And I've got my buddy Sean Wells with us today to answer this question. He is the world's leading nutritional biochemist and expert on health optimization. He's formulated over 500 supplements, foods, beverages and cosmeceuticals and patented 10 novel ingredients and now is known as the ingredientologist. That means the scientist of ingredients. Formerly, he was a chief clinical dietitian with over a decade of clinical experience and he's counseled thousands of people on innovative health solutions such as keto, paleo, fasting and supplements. He's also personally overcome various health issues including Epstein Barr virus, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, depression, insomnia, obesity and a pituitary tumor. As a world renowned thought leader and author on mitochondrial health, his expertise can help any health conscious individual to better manage stress, experience higher performance and gain energy through utilizing his practical research based solutions. And his new book is called the energy Formula. You want to grab that? He's also an action sci, fi and fantasy nerd who loves Spartan races. All right, we'll be right back with the answer, so stay with me.

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Great question. Where do you start? If you're starting basically from the bottom or the basics with supplements and your health routine, Great question. The biggest thing is going to be what are you going to use every day? What are you going to make a part of your lifestyle? If you have 10 supplements that each are supposed to use four capsules a day as part of their serving, are you going to take 40 capsules a day? I can, but I don't know if you will consistently. So what matters is that you do it consistently, that you have compliance just like medications. And you know when people don't take their medications, they're not going to get results and in fact they can even be dangerous. That won't be the case here, typically with supplements, but you won't get the benefits. So think about the format that you'll take, what works for you. That's going to be critical. Maybe some of these have to be in a powder form and some of them will be in capsule form. Is it the size of the capsule that will work for you, et cetera. So getting into some of the supplements that I would recommend. An active B vitamin, multivitamin is going to be important. One that has the active Bs. It's also called coenzymated B vitamins. Things like P5, P for B6, methylcobalamin for B12, 5 methyltetrahydrofolate for folic acid. They're in their active forms. This saves you the enzymatic steps of converting them. And some people have issues like the MTHFR gene in doing so. So that's really important, that you get the energy and the benefit of your multivitamin by getting the more active form. Next up, I would recommend a probiotic supplement that also has prebiotic short chain fibers in it, things like fos gos. There's one called pre4pro, that's a phage that helps build up more bacteria, good bacteria in the gut. That's called probiosis versus dysbiosis, which means your gut has too much bad bacteria. And you want to make sure that the probiotics are in microencapsulated or spore form, meaning they're stable and they're protected. Because typically probiotics are very susceptible to damage from light, heat and moisture. So I've found that the microencapsulated or spore forms are best. Moving on. Okay, so creatine, you've probably heard of this, you think it's for bodybuilders, you think it's for guys trying to get big, so on and so on. But they've actually shown creatine in smaller doses, like a gram to a gram and a half a day is going to help with bone health, reproductive health, brain health, like literally helping against Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, traumatic brain injury, et cetera. And people function better on it. It's a really good methylator, protecting you from cancer and DNA damage. And yes, it will help with your strength, your muscle mass maintenance as you age, protecting you from sarcopenia. So creatine is a huge one that I support. Moving on. Vitamin D3, you might already have some in your multivitamin. It's not enough and it's not in the right form. It's probably in a dry form. And the oil form is much better, much more absorbable. So vitamin D3 is going to be superior as the oil. So make sure to get about 5 to 10,000. I use a day of the vitamin D3 and also get vitamin K2 in the MK7 form with it. That's going to help protect you from calcium, which actually can be counterproductive if you're not getting the D3 and K2 with the calcium, you can actually cause calcification of arteries and it can be counterproductive. With the vitamin D3, it's best to get your blood levels checked. I would say 5,000 is a decent amount if you're not getting much sunlight. And 10,000 would be if you're not getting much sunlight at all. 5,000 would be if you're getting some sunlight. So that would be, you know, something that I think about. I use about 5000ius with about 50 micrograms of K2, so those are going to be some big ones. On top of that, I recommend dihydroberberine. So this is a really active form of berberine that's about 5 to 10 times more bioavailable than berberine. And it lasts about twice as long in the plasma, so you only need to take it twice a day. Berberine has been shown to be superior to metformin head to head. And this form, dihydroberberine, is better than berberine. So what's really cool is it's potent against anti aging, especially with glycation, which is blood sugar damage. And we all tend towards insulin resistance. We tend to put on body fat easier as we age, we tend towards inflammation, we tend towards something called advanced glycation end products. And that's that blood sugar damage that literally that acronym means ages. And it does age you. And that's why metformin is one of the most powerful, not only diabetic drugs, but most powerful anti aging drugs. And so dihydroberberine is something that I would recommend that everyone take because it's the most powerful thing I know of to protect you.

This is JJ with Ask the Health Expert.

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