The Ultimate Desert Island Supplement with Dr. Barrie Tan
15 Dec 2025 · 37 min
Dr. Barrie Tan explains tocotrienols, a form of vitamin E from annatto that most people don't get enough of. Unlike regular vitamin E, tocotrienols protect cell membranes and may help with triglycerides, fatty liver, and bone health in postmenopausal women. Tan recommends 200 to 400 mg daily.
Questions this episode answers
April 24, 2019
About 2–3 milligrams (dietary average)
Minimum of 100–200 milligrams per day to protect cell membranes
150–300 milligrams per day (Dr. Tan takes ~300 mg/day)
125–250 milligrams (rounded to ~200 mg in discussion)
Chapters
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Think Nature is like this, but actually it's like this. That's why Columbia engineers everything we make make for anything nature can throw at you. Columbia engineered for whatever. Welcome to the JJ Virgin Lifestyle show with celebrity nutrition expert, fitness hall of famer, and four time New York Times best selling author, JJ Virgin. JJ is a warrior mom whose knowledge and expertise have helped change hundreds of thousands of lives. With over 3.5 million podcast downloads and appearances on Dr. Phil, Dr. Oz, the Today Show, Rachael Ray, Larry King, love.
Whoa, whoa, whoa. This show is about you, not about me. I want to help you find practical, real world ways to dial in your health and mindset so you can finally lose that weight and feel strong and energized. Stop settling for less than your personal best. It's time to find out how to look and feel better than ever. And I'll be right here with you the whole way. All right, so what would you take with you if you knew in advance that you were going to be stranded on a desert island? What supplement would you pack in your bag? Well, I'm about to share the new desert island supplement with you today. It's not what you would think and probably you've never ever even heard of this, but after today, you will be going, where do I get it? How do I get that for everyone in my family? Which is exactly what I did when I started to really learn the biochemistry behind it. I got it myself, I got it from my husband, I got it for my family, and I've been recommending it to all of my friends. What the heck am I talking about? I'm talking about a very specific form of vitamin E called Delta tocotrienol from Monado. And with me today to discuss this is the foremost expert in that. In fact, he is the guy that discovered tocotrienols from Annado. He's going to talk about how he came to find that which is really pretty fascinating. Dr. Barry Tan is a PhD in chemistry and biochemistry. He is considered one of the world's foremost experts in vitamin E. I would probably argue he is the foremost expert in vitamin tocotrienol. He is the one who actually discovered, not only discovered how powerful the tocotrienols were in the annatto plant, but also a way to get those out in a safe and effective form, which is what you're going to have to do. Once you hear this, you'll realize you got to take this because you can't get enough in your diet to do anything. And you will want to do that because tocotrienols can help with cancer, heart disease, triglycerides, fatty liver, bone health, weight loss, inflammation, you know, those things. Anyway, we're going to be talking all about that. Before we dive in, I want to share this 5 star review from my buddy Connie Bennett, a member of my mindshare collaborative family. She says what a fabulous interview with Ty Ballinger. Thanks, jj. Five stars by Connie Bennett. Hey, jj, I just wanted to let you know that your interview with Ty Ballinger was simply fabulous. Great questions, awesome answers. See you soon at the mindshare summit. All right. I thank you so much for that, Connie. And I thank you all that have been leaving these amazing reviews over at JJ Virgin lifestyle show at itunes. Super appreciate it while you're over there. Be sure to subscribe so you never miss an awesome episode and today's show notes because you can hear us talk about a lot of stuff, but what we couldn't talk about was to really go in depth on some of this research. And so I have put@jjvirgin.com vitamin E all the research to back up what you're hearing about and also how the heck to get this stuff because again, once you hear about it, you're going to want to get on it. Trust me on that. Dr. Barry Tan, welcome to the show. Super excited to have you with me today.
Hello, jj.
All right, now we have a challenge today, Barry, do you know what it is?
No.
We are going to try to take. I've heard you speak several times. You are a genius. Brilliant. You are my go to guy on anything. Vitamin E, tocotrienols, et cetera. And boy, you know your pathways. And now we're going to do it at a fifth grade level or say, let's say seventh grade. Okay. So we're going to try to break this down so it's easy to understand for everybody listening because I want everyone to know the power of tocotrienol and annatto. Are you ready?
I am ready.
That challenge. All right, so I know you as my go to expert on everything vitamin E. How the heck did you get into all of this? And. And then specifically your big discovery about the annatto plant. How did this happen?
It happened in 1994. It was discovered at Harvard university. They were looking for lutein for macular degeneration. And then so I know that there were giant marigold plant in South America. So I went there. So I did find my giant marigold. And about 20ft away from me I saw this annatto plant. Annatto plant is the color that we use to color our cheeses, when we eat cheese and wine, drink wine together about like that. I knew about that. But unusual about this plant that caught my attention was when the pot opens, the fruit open, there is no flesh, unlike all the other fruit that I know. And then I see the color, which is a keratin, and keratin are very unstable. And I knew that something is protecting these colors. And I was very curious to know what is it the strong protectant to protect the color. And that was the beginning of the path for me to discover what was inside because of that curious question.
Okay, so you asked the question, and then what did you do? Did you bring some monado plants home and start dissecting them? Like, how did you discover this tocotrienol that now is changing health worldwide and is going to really do that with all of your latest research?
Okay, so I didn't bring any seed home. I went to a Hispanic store in store. And then the Spanish wood is called achoitae. So I've got some seeds, and then I brought back, and then I did some analysis. The reason I went hard on this was because if you just take for a moment on carotene, we know carotene a lot. Beta carotene in carrot, lycopene in tomato, they're usually encapsulated, like in the cytoplasm, so they're stable. And then. Or in lobster, where they're bonded to protein, and then you cook them, and then the color you see, otherwise you won't. And then the most dramatic thing is in the northeast, when you see the foliage is shielded by the chlorophyll, the green color. And almost as soon as the green color goes, you get two weeks of brilliant color. And the color would go. So that there I knew carotenes are incessantly unstable, but with this annatto, you can actually touch the seed, and it will stain your hand enough that the British call this a lipstick plant. So therefore, it is not encapsulated, not bound, and not shielded. It actually stains you. So I suspect it would be something physical, Very powerful antioxidant that may be protecting the carotene color. But at the time, I was expecting that it was a polyphenol. And to my shocking surprise, when we came back and analyzed it, we found out that it contained the only two most potent vitamin E we have ever seen, and those are delta tocotrienol and gamma tocotrienoline. Now, tocotrienol is a mouthful of a word, not the common vitamin E, which is Tocopherol that you see on your cereal box. These are the lesser known one, but these two are the ones that actually help to intervene and mitigate human conditions.
And you know, before I met you, I kind of think of before, before berry and after berry, but before I met you, I thought vitamin E was really just tocopherols. And most people think of it as alpha tocopherol. And if you're really advanced, you'd take mixed tocopherol. But I know that taking a stand, that really when we think of vitamin E, we should be thinking tocotrienols. And should we even be taking tocopherols? And. And why is this? What's wrong with tocopherols? Are these something we should take, not take? What. What's going on there?
Good question. Tocopherol, as is known as vitamin E, was discovered almost 100 years ago by two pediatricians at UC Berkeley. And they found this thing from spinach, of all things, not a lot of it in it, tocopherol, toco, where oil goes. And there's not a lot of oil in spinach, but that's where they found. They found it and then they gave it to animal. And it is able to bring the animal to full term, the pregnant mother to full term. Most of us today do not know vitamin E does that, or because of that is known as a vitamin E. Instead, we know vitamin E as an antioxidant for which it is. However, over those years and many, many studies later, we have not come to grips with tocopherol bringing health to the human body, not besides just as an antioxidant. So 1980s, I was a young assistant professor at University of Massachusetts. And during that time I was studying palm oil. And palm oil contain vitamin E. I know, because it's a vegetable oil and it's supposed to just contain alpha tocopha. But Instead I found four peaks. And then the other three peaks were tocotrienol. That was in early 80s and that set my path to study tocotrienol. And then all the years later leading to me discovering it in annatto were the ones that we did chronic conditions like cancer, like diabetes, lipids, and all these other things in between that tocopherol does not share.
So should we even. Do we even need to take tocopherols? Are these an important thing? Because I see most of the supplements when they look at vitamin E, people think of tocopherol, not tocotrienol. And you don't really see tocotrienols, you just see Tocopherols. Is this something that we need to supplement or.
Yes, this is something we need to supplement. In the typical American diet, we'll get 2 to 3 milligrams of this tocotrienol most the time tocopherol, and most of the time with tocopherol. They have done many, many studies over the last three or four decades, and it simply does not come up or come up short except as an antioxidant. Enough that I consider this the wrong vitamin E, because if for the reason to help a fetus to get to full term, then men should not be taking it, for example, but it is not because of that. I think that when they try to do it on chronic condition, it consistently never support how it can help in chronic conditions. And then in the last 30 years, people know about tocotrion or scientists know about tocotrine, then they begin to study it. And I was among one of them. And when we did, and then systematically go through the tocotrienol and compare it deliberately with tocopherol, we saw that there is a distinction that tocotrienol have benefits that tocopherols in general do not. So therefore, I think that today people have no reason to take tocopherol.
Okay, so people don't need to take tocopherols today because A, they're getting enough in their diet, and B, they're not creating the specific benefits that we think vitamin E has. Those are actually tocotrienols.
Yes. To answer your first part of your question, if we take a normal diet, we will typically consume. American diet would typically consume about 10 to 15 milligrams of alpha tocopherol, mostly from nuts and from oil and from some meat that feed on corn and soy. So that should be adequate for the tocopherol side. For tocotrienol, I search hard and deep and hard into this. We probably can only get 2 to 3 milligram, and the amount needed for tocotrienol would be much higher. And therefore supplementation in that case is necessary for tocotrienol.
Ah. And so for these tocotrienols that we need to supplement, because what we'll talk about therapeutic dosing, but we're not getting anywhere near what we should. We. What are. Let's talk about some of the key things that you've been finding that tocotrienols do. Let's build the case, because I know our buddy Jonathan Lazotte calls tocotrienols the desert island supplement, the one thing that you would want to take if you were Stranded on a desert island, and yet most people have never heard of it. So what are the reasons that we want to be supplementing with tocotrienols?
Okay, I will build the case and the compelling reason based on. If you think of this lesser known tocotriener, you think of a cell. We have approximately 38 trillion cells in one human body. That's a very big number. It's approximately 5,000 times the population of the world. So it gives us a little bit of grasp. And when we think of that, then the next thing we think of is fat. Usually the fat is the lowest line fruit for something to go bad because they're readily oxidized. And most of us think of fat as a subcutaneous tissue or a love handle like this. But that's not where most of the fat are. Even though we can easily feel and touch it, Most of the fat are on the cell walls, on the entire 38 trillion cell, which means that they're all over your body, from red blood cell to every parts of your body that have cells. The lining of those cells of the cell wall aligned with fatty acids. And if you talk to Dr. Chrishe and Jonathan Lazard, they'll tell you about this phospholipid. Now, in this phospholipid on the cell wall, they are protectant. They protect them from going bad. And there are many people saying antioxidants, but of the antioxidant in the cell wall, not that the other antioxidants are unimportant. 90% or more than 90% of them are vitamin E molecule, which means tocopherol and tocotrienol, not the other wonderful antioxidant like CoQ10 lycopene and all these, they are good antioxidant, but they belong someplace else, not in the cell wall. So I'm referring only to the cell wall, because if you distribute all the fats in a human body, most of them are in the cell wall. So I want that to be protected. And for that to be protected, I consider a minimum of 100-200mg per person per day will help us in the protection of the fats that line all the cell walls of the body throughout all the 38 trillion cel.
So I'm listening to this. And so if tocotrienols are the ones that are doing this, because you said most of us get, we get enough tocopherols and those aren't really doing the work anyway to the tocotrienols, but we're getting an average of 2 to 3 milligrams in our diet, we need 100 to 200 to protect our cell walls. What happens when we don't have enough?
This is what. And when we don't have enough, Let me give you a practical example. Omega 3 fish oil is very popular. And when people take omega fish oil and have no vitamin E, they actually can smell oxidized breath. Not the fishy smell, the oxidized breath. Because these highly oxidizable fat need antioxidative protection. And when we take them, they're supposed to be incorporated into their cell wall. So that's an example to tell you when we incorporate fat, they need protection. Why tocopherol cannot do the better job. The tocopherol moves around the cell wall. Think of the cell as, look, the shape of a bean and the tocoph cell wall. Slowly, a tocotrieno move along the cell wall really fast. Because the tail is shorter, it anchors into the phospholipid, or the cell wall less deep. So it spins around really fast to catch the bad guy to oxidize the oxygen. So I think of this as the policeman in the local town. That would be like a tocopha. They catch the same bad guys. And then the tocotrieno would be a state trooper. It crisscross the entire state to do the same thing to catch a bad gu. Do it much faster. And in that way, atcotrienol has been shown in UC Berkeley many years ago, is about 50 times faster than a tocopherol can capture radicals.
So what types of benefits or, you know, things, diseases, what are you seeing are the big benefits of taking tocotrienols? You protected cells. But let's put it into real terms. People can understand in terms of some of the most common diseases and what this can do to protect you.
I was hoping to answer this as part of how tocotrienol support women's health. And some of them crosses for both men and women. If I were to use a single word, it would be for chronic conditions. And the few that I have here to speak on is cardiovascular health, metabolic health, postmenopausal women, bone health, and breast and ovary health. So the first one, cardiovascular health, the single killer of both men and women, is clearly cardiovascular health like that. And in this case, the controlling of the lipids is all important, particularly the cholesterol and the lower cholesterol. But half the people that died of heart attacks have normal cholesterol. Half of them have high cholesterol for the one that Normal cholesterol. I implore the researchers, when we did this four or five years ago, please study inflammation, because inflammation is oftentimes caused by stress. And he did, he studied C reactive protein. So on average the cholesterol lower about 15, 20%. And on average the inflammation lower. The C reactive protein inflammation lower about 30, 40%. So I was thrilled.
Oh my gosh. Yeah, that is crazy huge. How much tocotrienol was used to lower C reactive protein? 30 to 40%. This is a major thing here.
Thank you. In that study, which was published three, four years ago, they use anywhere from 125 to 250 milligrams. Say we rounded off at 200 milligrams. So that was, for us, that was dramatic. So we published that. And very soon after that, the researcher asked the question, what about metabolic syndrome? This is a cluster of diseases that make people have diabetes, have fatty liver, hypertension. They all are a cluster of disease, but they are clustered under the phrase metabolic syndrome. They said, okay, let's study that. And then they understood that when you do metabolic syndrome, the cholesterol in this case may or may not be high. But in people with metabolic syndrome, before the sugar shot up the roof, when the sugar shot up the roof, then they're clear, Frank, diabetic. But prior to that, before they do that, then the triglyceride is always high like that. So they were determined to study triglyceride, which they did. And again, when they did this study, they also measured C reactive protein. They did that. They showed that the triglyceride dropped and the C reactive protein drop again. But before we even held our breath, and then they published the work, they decided, let's go for the big one. We will have a group of people who have fatty liver. So this is non alcohol fatty liver disease. Nafld. You can type mafld. You can see that a huge number of American have this kind of problem. And then when they did this, they systematically noticed that the triglyceride dropped, the C reactive protein dropped, and then they lost weight about 10%, about 10 pounds. Which may be is so so, but it's not so so when they saw that the BMI dropped 1.5, it's very difficult to see the BMI drop. And since these people have a dysfunction.
Was there a diet intervention here or was this just taking an auto.
No, this was just taking another.
Normally that makes 10 pounds even more. The 10 pounds and the BMI shift are even more significant because there was no dietary intervention. That's crazy.
We could have dietary intervention. JJ is a very important factor. We didn't do this because these patients already are frank having fatty liver. So we decided to see if the tocotrienol may do something. It clearly did. Reducing inflammation is always big because tocotrienol is a very powerful antioxidant. So once you quench and quench down, play the fire of oxidation, then the inflammation soon would also follow. So we saw that. And then before I move on to the third one on bone health, we asked them, please also study liver enzymes. Because people who have fatty liver, the enzymes are hard to control. Basically, the whole liver is stressed and the enzyme is shot up the roof and they are called transaminase enzyme. And these enzymes are dropped. And this is a delight to the patient as well as to the attending doctor. So that study was done, was published last year. Then the third one is on postmenopausal women bone health. So this study was done in Texas. We recruited women at menopause not more than one year from menopause, but not more than 10 years. Because after 10 years they may get into osteoporosis. So we only studying the stage when they're having osteopenic, which means the bone is beginning to thin, but not necessarily beginning to fracture or break. So in this we'll give you the shorthand. We saw that the tocotrienol is able to increase the osteoblast, which means the bone that grows the cell grow new cell and resist the increase of osteoclast, which means that the bone cell determines breaks the cell down. So this we saw a ratio between the building and the breaking down. We see that the bone is being resisted for loss. In other words, if she is going to be osteoporosis 15 years after, this might be 30 years after or 20 or 30 years after. So we see this as a very good trend.
So really, every woman 35 plus should be on this.
Yes.
The last thing you want to do is start dealing with osteoporosis. When you have osteopenia or osteoporosis, you want to avoid that ever happening. But then you couple that with weight loss and reducing inflammation and lowering triglycerides and having good liver enzymes. Oh my gosh. And I know there's more which is even more exciting, right?
Yeah. And I have people ask me this, and I thought that for our audience this might be of interest because there are several things out there. Tendering for help to strengthen our bone calcium is one. So I'll say just the bolts and nuts of this. Calcium is a constituent mineral in the bone. Of course we need calcium. And then the second one, people say vitamin D. Vitamin D is good for the bone because vitamin D makes the calcium more bioavailable to the bone. It's like a chaperone taking the calcium to the bone. And then they say vitamin K, which is manoquinone. Vitamin K is important because vitamin K make a protein called oxy calcium that traps the calcium in the bone. So it retains the bone. Retains the calcium in the bone. So now you talk about tocotrienol. How does tocotrienol work? It doesn't work on any of these three that I mentioned. Instead, tocotrienol work to increase the building up of the bone osteoblast and resist the breaking down of the bone called osteoclast. So it directly speak to the bone cells so that I help to differentiate. So the last part is breast and ovary health. Now this is the big C word. We don't usually like the C word. Cancer. And for women, breast cancer and ovarian cancer is something in the back of our mind. And cancer, keep this in mind. Cancer is not a good word for anybody because we could not dodge the bullet and it happened to us. So, so we focus on these two. We actually focus on five different cancers, but these are the two on women. The breast cancer trial that we are doing will complete end of this year. The ovarian cancer trial has already completed and published. And in a situation that is not good, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. And I like to share this light at the end of the tunnel. This study was done on stage four ovarian cancer patient, which means that the cancer is recurrent, they are inoperable, and they do not use any more radiation because it's probably even more toxic. So the only thing left would be probably to continue chemo drug. So the standard of care would be to use chemo drug and the other half would be the same chemo drug and tocotrienone. That's it. So the comparison just between these two and then over a 12 month period, all of the cancer patients that are on standard of care died. They are on Avastin drugs. Those on avastin drug and the tocotrienol, 100% of them increase in survival. And even after 24 months, 1/4 of them are still surviving. I think that this is just a remarkable finding. And this is on a nutritional supplement, not even a pharmaceutical. So I shouldn't say I'M glad. But I'm hopeful that I got a chance to bear this news out to our audience.
It just seems like this should be standard of care for any oncologist is put your patient on an auto. I mean, why wouldn't you?
Yes. And this is a pure supplement. It is not a pharmaceutical. It's approved as a supplement and it's extracted from a plant. If you remember, I extracted it from Manatto. And when we did this early on 20 years ago, my wife told me said Barry, can you extract this without using severe chemical or solvent or something? And I'm proud to say it took me a long time to get here. We do not use chemical nor do we use solvent. Nothing harsh, nothing chemical. So we use a physical process to do this in Massachusetts. So I'm proud to say that.
So to recap all of this because, well, you also said breast cancer, do you have any preliminary information on that? I know the study hasn't concluded yet. Or is it too early?
Yes, the preliminary thing. We have done many, many animal studies. It works exceedingly well for progesterone induced cancer. Also HER2, which quite bad and triple negative things. So we have tried on all these, on mammary tumors and they work on all these different ones. But the one that we most popularly use because most women have ductile carcinoma, more progesterone induced and then that we have seen that it would work so in animal, it consistently reduce the tumor and the cancer by about two fold or so. So we are waiting and watching and the results will not be long. Probably by the end of this year we will know the result coming out on a human clinical trial.
But there's zero risk for taking these supplements. They're supplements.
That is correct. We have about three. Thank you for asking that question. We have about three published paper on this women on osteopenia study. They use 600 milligrams and the FDA approved that. And we did not find any safety issues on the women. And also on the cardiovascular study, we use about 300 and 600 milligrams. No problem. Only on the end stage cancer patient we used 900 milligram. And even over two years we still did not see any safety issue on women who are in a highly compromised stage with the cancer. So we are comfortable with what we have seen up to about 1,000 milligrams. But for normal taking we don't expect people to reach 1000mg. It typically it would be about 3-600mg for any conditions, specific needs.
Yeah, that was. I was going to ask you as soon as I started to hear about this and you know, got the download from Jonathan, heard you talk about it, I started taking them for someone listening. And we will have all of this in the show notes@jjvirgin.com vitamin E. I'll have resources for how you can get this. What would you recommend as a supplement? Someone who has not been diagnosed with any of these things, but, but, you know, would like to do everything they can for their health. They're, they're 40 plus. They want to have good bones. They don't want to end up with, with diabetes or heart disease. What would be a good dose for someone like that?
I would say somewhere between 150 to 300 milligram. In other words, there's no existing condition and a person can guess this from the average weight. So I would say 150 to 300 milligram. I'm a slight bill and I take about 300 milligrams a day myself and being Asian and about 130 pounds and I take 300 milligrams.
You're not going to be able to get this from your diet. You can't sit down and say, okay, I'm going to, in my diet get 300 milligrams of tocotrienols.
No, in the diet it would be about 100 times less about, not 300 milligrams but about 3 milligrams from a diet. So I understand that, you know, you.
Have to supplement, you have to supplement this. There's really, this isn't one of those, you know how some of these things you say, okay, omega 3s. Well, you could be incorporating fish into your diet, say four, four or five times a week. You could get your omega 3s where you want them to be. But this is not the case with, with these tocotrienols.
No, this is not the case with tocotrienol. I wish we could, you know, if you go online and see rice bran oil or palm oil or cook food with annatto, if you do this, perhaps you might get about 5 to 10 milligram. Nowhere near my suggestion of 150 to 300 milligrams, it'll be dietary. Now if somebody, I have done some experiment, I thought this might be fun for you to know. You know, we use Italian dressing at home. Sometime I nip the end of a soft gel. I squeeze three or four of this thing in, I shake it. I discover two things. One, I am taking it, not thinking much of it, you know, because it's my salad dressing. And two, surprisingly, my Italian dressing lasts even longer because it's an optimal food. So this is a small little take home thing. But still you have to supplement the Italian dressing in order to get it in. It is not naturally in it.
All right, so we might have a few salad dressing recipes too. So jjvirgin.com vitamin E. I'll give you the information on how to get it. Just to recap, Barry. So supports weight loss, reducing inflammation, lowering triglycerides, helps with bone health and, and helps with fatty liver and liver enzymes and cancer. I mean, it's, it is. I can see why Jonathan says it's the ultimate desert island supplement. It is one that I've added into mine and my son's and my husband's. Everyone around me packs and I had a girlfriend going through cancer. I immediately chemotherapy, I immediately sent it to her. I and so I'm encouraging everybody listening to grab the show notes. This is when you're going to want to be, be getting on. I'll include some of your links to some of your research too in there. And again, that's jjvirgin.com forward/itamin E and oh, thank you, Dr. Barry Tan. You are the best. I super appreciate you.
Thank you.
You're welcome. After the break, I'll be answering a listener's question, so stay with me.
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Welcome back. This is the time where I answer a listener's question. Lisa jumped on Facebook Live the other day, said, hey, JJ, what supplements do you take? All right, I'm going to answer this question in two parts because the first part is really what supplements are kind of the foundational supplements that you want to take no matter what. And then what are you going to add onto it? And I'll share what I add on and why and then some things you may want to consider. So I believe, I believe, I believe that everyone should be taking a good multivitamin, mineral, antioxidant and essential fatty acid supplement. That is starting point. You need that. And so that's the first thing I do. In fact, I created my daily essential packs that have that. And I don't take just one of those a day. I actually double down on that. So I take two of those a day. So I'm getting in, you know, all, all the basic goodies, minerals, antioxidants, vitamins and my essential fatty acids, both EPA and DHA and some gla. Okay, that's step one. Then I added in because how could I not a nototechotrienols and I'm taking 300 milligrams of that a day. I also take my vitamin D plus, that's vitamin D with K. And during the if I'm not getting out in the sun much, I take two of those a day. If I am, I take one per day. And I tend to tell people to dose vitamin D based on the seasons and also based on lab tests. And we'll put a little link to how you can test your vitamin D. But I look for a 25 hydroxy vitamin D test and then I'm going to optimize my vitamin D between 50 and 80 ngs per milliliter. And I always supplement vitamin D with K because as you heard today, what Barry said is vitamin D will direct, that will help you absorb that calcium, but you want vitamin K to keep it in the bones. Now beyond that, you may need some more extra fish oil. I get between my daily packs and my diet, I'm good. I do take some extra magnesium and I find a lot of people will need some extra magnesium. Magnesium. We'll put a resource for my favorite magnesium glycinate. Right now, I'm recovering from surgery still. I had to do some antibiotics early late last year, so I'm doing a couple months of extra probiotics. So I'm taking my microbiome balance. That's not just a probiotic, but it's also something called a bacteriophage. That's fertilizer for those probiotics. And I also always take enzymes, so I take safety net whenever I travel. And then I take metabolic digestive balance at my meals that don't include shakes. Now, I do my all in one shake and I generally eat usually an all in one bar every day, so I'm getting extra vitamins and minerals in that as well. Every night when I go to sleep, I take sleep candy every single night. I have missed it twice in the last, I don't know, six months and totally noticed it. So helps me fall asleep and stay asleep. And quality sleep is where it's at. Remember, it's not just getting eight to nine hours of sleep. It's getting quality sleep. That's the difference. So those are the basics that I take now, what you need, you know, results might vary. I will tell you that the basics are key. If you're not sure what you need to take beyond that, we'll put resources in here, both for a health coaching session that can help look at everything going on and make some basic recommendations of things that could help certain conditions. Also, we have a lot of that information on my website. And then finally, you can also do some testing. We can put some guides to how you can do some testing as well. I like to say test, don't guess. Right. Okie dokie. That wraps this week. If you've not yet subscribed to the show, please go jump over to itunes and do so because you do not want to miss out on the good stuff. And this way, you'll never miss when a show is dropped and we're doing more of them. We're doing two a week now, and sometimes we even drop a bonus. All right, see you next week. Bye.
That's all for this episode of the JJ Virgin Lifestyle show, which marks another step towards a healthier body and mind. Don't forget to rate, review and subscribe to the show, and we'll talk to you next week.
Hello listeners, this is Anne Bogle, author, blogger and creator of the podcast what Should I Read next? Since 2016, I've been helping readers bring more joy and delight into their reading lives. Every week, I take all things books and reading with a guest and guide them in discovering their next reading. They share three books they love, one book they don't, and what they've been reading lately, and I recommend three titles they may enjoy reading Next. Guests have said our conversations are like therapy, troubleshooting issues that have plagued their reading lives for years and possibly the rest of their lives as well. And of course, recommending books that meet the moment. Whether they are looking for deep introspection to spur or encourage a life change or a frothy page turner to help them escape the stresses of work, school, everything, you'll learn something about yourself as a reader and you'll definitely walk away confident to choose your next read, with a whole list of new books and authors to try. So join us each Tuesday for what Should I Read Next? Subscribe now wherever you're listening to this podcast and visit our website what Should I read next podcast.com to find out more.
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