Developing a Rational Approach to Supplementation for Health & Performance | Huberman Lab Podcast

Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and Ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today we are discussing supplements, or more specifically, a rational guide to supplementation. Now, to be forthright, I want to tell you that I am not a fan of the word supplements because it stems from this idea that all supplements are somehow food supplements or designed to compensate for what was one could otherwise get from food. And that's simply not the case. Many supplements are compounds that are extremely efficacious, for instance for enhancing sleep, or for enhancing hormone function, or for enhancing focus. And many of those compounds are simply not found in food or are not found in enough abundance in food to have the desired effect. Now that raises the issue as to whether or not these compounds are good to take, safe to take, and whether or not they are actually beneficial for us. And the short answer is that like everything else, supplements can either be good for us or dangerous for us, depending on dosage, sourcing, et cetera. But more importantly, we need to think about supplements and a rational guide to supplementation as taking into account a number of different factors. And we need to set aside the idea that all non prescription compounds that fall under this umbrella term supplements, are simply things that could be extracted from food, but most people don't either ingest enough of those foods or pay enough attention to their diet in order to obtain them. In fact, during today's episode I'm going to give you a number of different very specific questions that you can answer in order to decide whether or not you should be taking any so called supplements or not, and whether or not you should be taking one type of supplement or another type of supplement more or less than the other. I'm also going to discuss safety, of course, and I will discuss cost because obviously monetary cost is a serious consideration for most if not everybody considering the use of supplements. During today's episode, I will also discuss which specific supplements are optimal for achieving specific endpoints such as improved sleep, such as improved focus and such as improved hormone function, among other things. I plan to cover the full range of what are referred to as supplements, including so called foundational supplements that are designed to act as a sort of insurance policy against any deficiencies that might exist within your diet all the way up to very targeted outcome supplements and compounds, I.e. compounds that are non prescription, that are designed to achieve very specific endpoints, such as enhanced focus. Over the next four to six hours of physical work or mental work, so on and so forth. Plan to cover everything in between that as well. And I promise to cover how supplements interact with other things such as behavioral tools, prescription drugs, when supplements might be a good alternative to prescription drugs when they might not be a good alternative to prescription drugs, when supplements can serve as an augment to already excellent nutrition and prescription protocols and every feature of supplements as it relates to mental health, physical health and performance. By the end of today's episode, you should be armed with a number of different questions. As I mentioned before, that will allow you to develop the most biologically effective and cost effective supplement regimen for you. And of course I want to acknowledge that for some people the total amount or dosages of a given supplement or supplements that you might need to take could be zero. There are such individuals, but that many people can in fact derive tremendous benefit from supplements in a way that can be more cost effective than trying to obtain the same non prescription nutrients from food. As we head into today's conversation, I want to emphasize something very important, not just as it relates to supplements, but as it relates to all aspects of mental health, physical health and performance. And that is I take the stance that behavioral tools, that is specific actions that we take and specific actions that we avoid, form the foundation of mental health, physical health and performance. So things like viewing morning sunlight and exercise are behavioral tools. They don't require the ingestion of anything. Within the realm of behavioral tools. There are also some don'ts or do nots that can greatly enhance our mental health, physical health and performance, such as avoiding bright light exposure to your eyes between the hours of 10pm and 4am or avoiding caffeine too late in the afternoon. Because even if you can fall asleep after ingesting caffeine in the late afternoon, we know it disrupts the architecture of your sleep in ways that greatly diminish your mental health, physical health and performance the following day, for instance. So behavioral tools form the foundational layer of all tools for mental health, physical health and performance. Second to that, I would say the next layer is in fact nutrition. No amount of supplementation or non prescription compounds, or prescription compounds for that matter, can ever compensate for poor nutrition. At least not for very long. Okay, so this is a key point. Even though many supplements are not simply food supplements because they are not designed to compensate for anything that you could otherwise get from food. That is not to say that you can live on supplements. You know, I suppose you could live on whey protein and fish oil capsules and vitamin capsules or tablets for a short while, but before long you'd either suffer from boredom to the extent that you want to go back to food, or some other deficiency would show up. I think it's the rare individual that tries to survive entirely on food supplements and things of that sort. Most everybody, and I would hope everybody, is paying attention to their nutrition. So I would place behavioral tools, do's and do nots as layer one, the deepest layer, the bedrock of all mental health, physical health and performance. On top of that, I would place nutrition. And of course that's going to mean different things to different people with the understanding that there's a huge array of different food choices and nutritional programs. Nutrition is fundamentally important for macronutrients, for storage of energy in the form of glycogen, fats and phosphocreatine stores, and so forth, but also for obtaining basic nutrients, vitamins, minerals and micronutrients. Okay, so we've got behavioral tools, nutritional tools. Then on top of that I would place what is typically called supplementation, although today I'm trying to expand that word to include not just things that compensate for food deficiencies or that are layered on top of food as a way to enhance the amount of nutrients that you could get from food, but as I mentioned before, compounds that are non prescription, that can be for a variety of different purposes and many of which are not available in food. So I would place supplementation right on top of nutrition. Then past that I would say prescription drugs, obviously prescribed from a board certified MD can serve a very vital purpose in the treatment or augmentation of mental health, physical health and performance goals. So some people do in fact need prescription antidepressants, other people do not. Some people do in fact need prescription drugs for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder or sleep related disorders, so on and so forth. The whole issue of whether or not there is an over prescription epidemic or not is a separate conversation for a separate podcast. I would argue that many prescription drugs do in fact save lives. This includes the category of prescription drugs related to statins and cardiovascular health, related to any number of different things, even sleep disorders and insomnia, narcolepsy and so forth. That said, there are many instances in which people can either reduce their dosages of prescription compounds or can replace those prescription compounds with quality behavioral tools, nutrition and supplementation. But there are many instances in which prescription drugs are the only route by which people can achieve the mental health, physical health and performance goals that they wish to achieve. So I would place that as the fourth layer in this stack of layers directed towards mental health, physical health and performance. So just to list off again, I fundamentally believe that behaviors do's and do nots form the foundation of mental health, physical health performance. Next in line would be nutrition. That is the specific foods we eat, the amount that we eat, the combinations of foods that we eat in a given sitting, and the timing in which we eat our food. Then on top of that, I would place supplementation, the topic of today's episode, and finally, prescription drugs. And of course, all of these things interact in important and interesting ways, many of which interactions we will discuss during today's podcast as we drill into the topic of supplementation, developing a rational supplementation protocol and what that is most biologically and cost effective. Before moving further into today's episode, I want to emphasize a very important point which is that I am not a physician, that is I'm not a clinician. So I do not prescribe anything, nor am I going to do that today. I'm a professor. I review the research literature, I describe tools gleaned from the research literature and developed from the research literature. So I profess many things, but I do not prescribe anything. And I think it's vitally important that anytime you are thinking of adding or subtracting any behavioral protocols, nutritional protocols, supplementation based protocols, and certainly prescription drug based protocols for whatever purpose, that you consult a trusted board certified physician. That's absolutely essential. I don't say that merely to protect me, I mainly say that to protect you. The most important aspect of today's episode is not going to be that you discover one particular supplement or category of supplements or blended of supplements that is going to transform your mental health, physical health and performance. No, the purpose of today's episode is for you to understand where you have needs that can be met by supplementation better than any other approach. And most importantly, how to think about supplementation, that is how to think about the different categories of supplements that are out there and how those interact with your nutrition and your behaviors so that you can maximize your immediate and long term health. What I mean by this is that we have this word supplements or supplementation, but that means many, many different things. It means vitamins, it means minerals, it means adaptogens. Most people probably don't even know what an adaptogen really is. And in fact many people talking about adaptogens never actually define what an adaptogen is or it's designed for or the fact that many adaptogens are also used for other purposes. So today's discussion is really about you learning how to think about supplementation the same way you would learn to think about nutrition or exercise or anything related to brain and body health for that matter, in a way that lets you navigate this vast space that we call supplementation and develop protocols that are optimal for you. And indeed, it may be the case that the ideal dosage of a given supplement for you is 0mg. For instance, if I ask you, are you sleeping deeply and enough each night, do you feel rested throughout the day? Maybe you need a short nap and that's it. Or maybe you don't and you say, yes, I feel great, I sleep great, I wake up feeling great. I only need a short nap or no nap during the day to feel rested throughout the day. Well, then there's really no discussion about sleep supplementation to be had between you and me. However, if you are not sleeping well, then a big discussion opens up as to what the reasons are Is it related to nutrition or when you're exercising or ingesting caffeine? In other words, no discussion about supplementation can be had in a vacuum. Rather, discussions about supplementation need to be considered in a larger context. So today you're going to learn how to place the discussion and thinking about supplementation in a larger context and think about how specific supplement that is specific ingredients and combinations of ingredients can indeed be used to buffer and support your overall health and lead you to specific health and performance outcomes. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is Momentous. Momentous makes supplements of the absolute highest quality. The Huberman Lab podcast has decided to partner with Momentous because of the extremely high quality of momentous supplements and because they have single ingredient formulations. As we'll discuss more on today's episode, single ingredient formulations are essential for most all aspects of developing a rational, highly efficacious supplement regimen. And that's because the ideal supplement regimen allows you to adjust the dosages of individual ingredients as well as alternate days in which specific ingredients are consumed. It also allows you, for instance, to assess whether or not one given ingredient works for you and another ingredient does not. And it also allows you to assess whether or not any side effects originate from a specific component of your Supplement protocol. Another advantage of momentous supplements is that they ship anywhere in the world because we realize that many of you reside outside of the United States. If you'd like to try any of the supplements mentioned in today's or other episodes of the Huberman Lab podcast. So for instance, things related to sleep augmentation, hormone augmentation, enhancing focus, metabolic health or otherwise, you can go to Live Momentous spelled o u s so livemomentous.com huberman and you'll get 20% off any of their products. Today's episode is also brought to us by Element. Element is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need and nothing you don't. That means plenty of sodium, magnesium and potassium, the so called electrolytes, and no sugar. Getting sufficient hydration and electrolytes is key to brain health and body health. And that's because every cell in your brain and body relies on having enough electrolytes available in order to function. This is especially true of the so called neurons or nerve cells in your brain. They actually require sufficient amounts of sodium and potassium and magnesium, but especially sodium and potassium available to them in order to fire what are called action potentials or electrical signals. That's what allows you to think, to feel, to move, what gives you energy, so on and so forth. So when you are dehydrated, oftentimes you will need to get electrolytes. And that's true if you're exercising a lot or if you sweat a lot. But for many people it's just true because they're not consuming enough water and electrolytes in the form of of liquids and foods throughout the day. Element contains a science back electrolyte ratio of 1000 milligrams of sodium, 200 milligrams of potassium and 60 milligrams of magnesium. If you'd like to try Element, you can go to drink element. That's lmnt.com huberman to claim a free Element sample pack with your purchase. Again, that's drink elementlmnt.com Huberman to get a free sample pack. Today's episode is brought to us by Helix Sleep. Helix Sleep makes mattresses and pillows that are absolutely phenomenal. I've been sleeping on a Helix mattress with for close to two years now and it's the best sleep that I've ever had. One of the reasons is the mattress is customized to you. So you simply go to the Helix site, you take a brief two minute quiz. It asks you questions like you tend to sleep on your back, your side of your stomach, or maybe all of those across the night. Or maybe you don't know. Do you tend to run hot during the night or cold during the night? Or maybe you don't know and they match you to the ideal mattress for you. For me, it was the dusk dusk mattress that allowed me to achieve the best sleep of my life. If you're interested in upgrading your mattress, you can go to helixsleep.com Huberman take their brief 2 minute sleep quiz and they'll match you to a customized mattress for your sleep needs and you'll get up to $200 off all mattress orders and two free pillows. They have a 10 year warranty on their mattresses and you get to try it out for 100 nights risk free. They'll even pick it up for you if you don't love the mattress, although I think you absolutely will. Again, if you're interested, you can go to helixsleep.com huberman to get up to $200 off and two free pillows. Let's talk about supplements and supplementation and how to develop a rational supplementation regimen. One of the things that's really emerged over the last 20 years is that supplements and there I'm referring to non prescription compounds designed to augment nutrition, prescription drugs and behavioral protocols have emerged as a mainstay within the health and wellness, but also the medical communities that are focused on developing mental health, physical health and performance for their patients and their athletes and for the everyday person. Essentially what I'm saying is that 20 years ago a discussion about supplements would mainly take place within the niche communities of health food stores or of particular athletes. But nowadays I think almost everyone is familiar with the fact that yes, indeed there are standard vitamin supplements, but that there are also supplements such as vitamin D3 which are designed to make sure that people have certain amounts of hormones in their bloodstream because they might not be getting enough sunshine. Although I'll be very clear over and over throughout this episode that there is no pill replacement for Sunshine, nor is there a pill replacement or food replacement for that matter, for exercise or for social connection or for sleep or for simply getting smarter. Again, there is no pill that's going to replace excellent behavioral protocols. In fact, a physician friend of mine has a great saying that I think everybody should keep in mind as we wade into this conversation, which is that better living through chemistry still requires better living. And I think that's a very important phrase to keep in mind when thinking about the optimal supplementation or prescription drug protocol for you. So what is an ideal supplementation protocol? Well, I think what we need to do is to take a step back and ask what are different supplements designed to do? For instance, there are foundational supplements. These are supplements that are designed to establish a foundation or provide insurance along with your nutritional intake to ensure that you're getting all the things that you need in order to have a basic level of mental health, physical health, and opportunity for optimal performance. Now, this is the one category of supplements for which I think it's appropriate and in fact advantageous to have multiple ingredients in a given supplement. Throughout the rest of today's discussion, I'm going to talk about the advantage of mainly focusing on taking single ingredient formulations for a variety of reasons. But when it comes to foundational supplements, what we're mainly talking about are supplements that contain vitamins and minerals that are designed to compensate for any deficiencies you might have from diet or from lack of adequate diet. How would such a lack of vitamin and mineral intake arise? Well, for instance, if you're somebody that practices intermittent fasting or other components of fasting, or if you're somebody who does not get enough vitamins and minerals from vegetables and fruits and grains and meats, well, then taking a supplement that can act as an insurance policy against any vitamin and mineral deficiencies in many ways can be advantageous. Although I will talk about some of the safety concerns in just a few minutes. Now, I want to acknowledge that as soon as we talk about vitamin mineral supplements, the skeptics immediately raise their hands and say, well, all that vitamin and mineral supplements do is give you very expensive urine. And there the skeptics are referring to the fact, the reality that when you ingest high levels of water soluble vitamins, so think vitamin C and some of the other vitamins that indeed you will excrete them in your urine. However, it's also the case that many people are not getting enough of the water soluble vitamins from their foods. And it's also the case that many people are. And it's also the case that ingesting higher than needed amounts of most water soluble vitamins, provided those levels aren't exceedingly high, is, or at least we should say can be safe. And again, this is provided that the levels that they're ingesting are not exceedingly high. So the typical vitamin mineral supplement is indeed going to cover any gaps or deficiencies that might arise in the water soluble vitamins from your food intake. But the reality is that most people are getting enough of the water soluble vitamins from their food if they are Paying attention to a couple of things, and those things are very simple to lay out. Regardless of whether or not you're a vegan, a vegetarian, a more traditional omnivore, eating from both animal based and plant based sources, grains, et cetera, or even if you're in the pure carnivore or strict, I guess it's called the lion diet, where it's just meat and salt. Regardless of what type of nutrition you follow, you will get vitamins and minerals, but you'll get more or fewer of them depending on the nutritional program you follow. And of course depending on how often and how much you eat. That's just sort of obvious. Most people who take a vitamin mineral supplement will indeed excrete a lot of the water soluble vitamins. They will retain the fat soluble vitamins. And there again the skeptics will raise their hands and say, you do not want to take high levels of fat soluble vitamins because they will be stored in your system potentially to levels that are dangerous. Again, provided that vitamin mineral supplements are not taken in excess, it's unlikely that you're going to have such a buildup of the fat soluble vitamins in your system that they're going to be a problem. So that raises a very specific question that you need to ask. Do you want to take a vitamin mineral supplement? Well, the answer to that will be highly individual. But you really just need to address two things. First of all, is the cost within the range that you can afford and want to pay? Right. Oftentimes these vitamin mineral supplements can be quite inexpensive, but some of them can be quite expensive. And you can see the full range of ones that are pennies per day, all the way up to many dollars or tens of dollars per day because of what are reported to be variations in quality and sourcing and so forth. I'm not aware of any real differences between the quality of the water soluble and fat soluble vitamins found in the the less expensive versus the more expensive vitamin mineral supplements. More typically, the cost scales with the dosages of these different vitamins and minerals. And as could probably be expected, the more expensive to obtain and source vitamins and minerals tend to be in lower quantities in the less expensive versions of vitamin mineral supplements. This is kind of obvious. So you need to ask yourself, can you afford it financially? And then you need to ask yourself, are you able to regularly ingest enough foods with enough variety to cover your vitamin mineral needs just from food? And for some people, the answer is going to be an immediate yes. They are careful to get enough of the foods that allow them to obtain their vitamin and mineral quota. And for other individuals, the answer will be no. I would say for people that are extremely physically and or mentally active, and for people that perhaps are following a intermittent fasting schedule so they are not ingesting a lot of food in general or restricting their food intake to specific times of day, well then a vitamin mineral supplement likely makes sense for them. However, it's going to be very important to ingest that vitamin mineral supplement with food and ideally early in the day. So that can set up a little bit of a challenge for the intermittent fasters who are restricting their feeding window to late in the day. Why do I say this? Well, many of the water soluble vitamins, in particular the B vitamins, need to be ingested with food because otherwise they can cause some stomach upset. And again, there's a range there. Some people like myself can take B vitamins on an empty stomach and feel fine. Other people feel really lousy when they take B vitamins. There are a few other things that we'll talk about later, namely Zinc and Coenzyme Q10 that really should also be taken with food. But the best time to take a vitamin mineral supplement is with food. And I believe that if you're going to take a vitamin mineral supplement that you want to take it with food and you don't want to take dosages of vitamins and minerals from supplements that are exceedingly high for a couple of reasons. One is the buildup of fat soluble vitamins that we talked about before. The other reason is that when people tend to take very high levels of vitamins and minerals from supplements, they tend to spend less time and focus on making sure that they're optimizing their nutrition or at least trying to get their nutrition right. What do I mean by, by getting their nutrition right? Well, I think regardless of whether or not you're keto, omnivore, carnivore, vegan or any other nutritional plan, the key thing is to get most, that is about 75 to 80% of your foods or more from non processed or minimally processed sources. I think there is agreement across the board that most people should avoid highly processed foods. Highly processed foods are going to be foods with very long ingredient lists that have very long shelf lives. So this often includes snack foods. It does include snack foods like chips, et cetera, pastries that could sit on the shelf a long time. But it also includes things like canned soups and number of different other foods that have many, many ingredients, preservatives Most people would do well to avoid those kinds of foods and focus most of their intake on things that are non processed. So these would be things like fruits and vegetables. You'll notice that the non processed foods will tend to have very short shelf life life or require refrigeration in some cases, such as meat, eggs, et cetera. Or minimally processed foods such as, you know, rice and oatmeals and pastas, beans and things of that sort. Beans oftentimes can be completely unprocessed as well. Of course, this is two general categories, unprocessed and minimally processed. That should make up about 80% or more of your food intake if your goal is health and obtaining adequate amounts of vitamins and minerals. The so called foundational supplements include of course vitamin and mineral supplements, but has expanded over the last decade or more to also include supplements that have vitamins and minerals, but also things like digestive enzymes. And again, here we have an example where indeed you can get digestive enzymes from foods. For instance, eating a bit of papaya or even a little bit of pineapple can assist in the digestion of certain aspects of macronutrients because these are naturally occurring enzymes that help digest things like carbohydrates, fats and proteins. And there are other food based sources of enzymes. You're welcome to look those up online. Just put food based sources of enzymes and you'll find those. But nowadays a lot of the foundational supplements will include papain or they will include different lipases or anytime you hear the word ace, by the way, it means an enzyme. An enzyme is designed to break down or to catalyze some sort of reaction in biology and in nutrition in particular. So you can find foundational supplements that include vitamins and minerals and digestive enzymes. And nowadays, more and more the quality foundational supplements are also including things like adaptogens. And here the name adaptogens is sort of vague and it indeed has no specific operational definition. This is something really important to understand about supplementation, is that companies and indeed podcasts can talk about adaptogens without actually defining what an adaptogen is in an operational way. When we say operational, what we mean is a definition that everyone in a given arena or space, research, for instance, can agree on, so that when we talk about the adaptogenic effects of a given compound, we're all talking about the same things. Well, foundational supplements nowadays include vitamins, minerals, digestive enzymes, and the so called adaptogens. And the adaptogens, broadly speaking, are thought to improve the body and brain's ability to buffer against various stressors. So these could be things like herbs like ashwagandha that are designed to reduce cortisol levels. In that sense, ashwagandha is an adaptogen. And. But ashwagandha has other effects related to hormone augmentation in both the testosterone and estrogen and maybe even the thyroid pathways. We'll talk about this a little bit later when we talk about supplements for hormone augmentation. So foundational supplements has really expanded to include a lot of different categories of nutrients and micronutrients, vitamins and minerals, digestive enzymes designed to achieve a broad spectrum of effects. Again, this is the one category of supplementation where I think it makes sense to explore multi ingredient formulations. And the other thing that's often included in these so called foundational supplements are probiotics or prebiotics, which are designed to augment and support the so called gut microbiome. The gut microbiome is the collection of trillions of little microbacteria that exist in all of us. They mainly exist in the mucous membrane lined tissues of the body. So that would be your nasal passages, your mouth, the vagina, the urethra and the gut the whole way from your mouth all the way out the other end. So not just your stomach, trillions of bacteria live there. Trillions of microbacteria also live on your skin. In fact, every time you shake someone's hand, you are exchanging microbacteria. These microbacteria often are healthy for us, good for us, they support a huge number of positive biological functions. But there are other microbacteria that live in our gut and elsewhere on those mucus line tissues that can be disadvantageous for us, that can harm our health. A growing idea of the USDA is based on a number of different laboratories work, including the laboratory of my upstairs neighbor at Stanford, Dr. Justin Sonnenberg, who's been a guest on this podcast. Is that having a great diversity, a range of microbiota as they're called, micro biome microbiota and these microbacteria are all essentially referring to the same thing. The microbiome is the whole collection of these microbacteria. But having a lot of different so called species of these microbacteria is known to be advantageous for immune system function, hormone function. It supports the so called gut brain axis. That's important for a number of things, including mood and motivation. Actually supports the production of neurotransmitters in the brain and body that can help keep you motivated. Elevated mood support the general function of neurons. Well, not surprisingly, there are ways to support the gut microbiome and there are ways to harm the gut microbiome. I'll refer to the podcast episode we did with Justin Sonnenberg. You can find that@hubermanlab.com if you want to learn all the different ways that you can support your gut microbiome. But for sake of today's discussion, I want to emphasize that some of those methods of supporting the gut microbiome are through the direct consumption of particular foods. And there are two categories of foods that if you're getting enough of them, it's likely that your gut microbiome is diverse and is going to support all those important functions I just listed off and other functions as well. The two sources of gut microbiota supporting foods are low sugar fermented foods. So these would be things like sauerkraut, kimchi, Greek yogurt, again low sugar Greek yogurt, kombucha in particular as a drink, things like kefir. There are a bunch of other varieties of fermented foods. Different cultures have different fermented foods. So the Japanese natto is another source of ferment that is very good for the gut microbiome. And work from Justin Sonnenberg's lab and close by labs at Stanford School of Medicine have shown that if people ingest four servings a day of these low sugar fermented foods, it greatly improves the function of the gut microbiome and in particular enhances the function of the immune system and it reduces the so called inflammatome. It reduces inflammation in the brain and body in ways that are helpful and effective for brain and body, that is mental health, physical health and performance. So there are ways to support your gut microbiome strictly from food. But it should come as no surprise that most people are not ingesting four servings a day of fermented foods. Hopefully they're getting enough fiber, especially prebiotic fiber, which is one other way to support the gut microbiome. Although the studies from Justin Sonnenberg's lab point to the fact that fiber intake itself was not directly supportive of the gut microbiome in everybody, it was in some individuals, but not in others. In some had no effect and in other individuals it actually made the category, or I should say the array of inflammatory markers worse, it actually led to more inflammation. So that's not to say that fiber is bad. In fact, in the episode that we did with Dr. Lane Norton, he discussed the many benefits of getting enough fiber There are a lot of reasons why people should get enough fiber in their diet. But at least for supporting the gut microbiome, 4 servings a day of low sugar fermented foods seems to be the best way to support the gut microbiome through the intake of nutrition. Again, most people are not achieving that. And therefore these foundational supplements that can be just vitamin and mineral supplements, or could be vitamin and mineral supplements plus digestive enzymes, or both of those things plus adaptogens now also tend to include prebiotics and probiotics that are designed to support the proliferation and maintenance of enough gut microbiota in order to support the gut microbiome and the gut brain axis. Now, because of the importance of the gut microbiome and because most people are not getting enough support for the gut microbiome in the form of low sugar fermented foods and prebiotic fiber from their diet, I think perhaps one of the most essential foundational supplements, irrespective of whether or not it includes vitamins and minerals, adaptogens and digestive enzymes, is some way to support the gut microbiome. Now this gets into a whole dimension of categories of prebiotic and probiotic capsules and one needs to be very careful there. I do want to say that most of the prebiotic and probiotic capsules that you can buy, first of all, are very expensive. The best ones are going to be refrigerated or require refrigeration, just as do any good low sugar fermented foods, by the way. So for instance, pickles are a low sugar fermented food that can support the gut microbiome. But if you're buying pickles from the section of the grocery store where they, the pickles are not refrigerated, well then you're not going to get the gut microbiome supporting effects from those pickles. Sort of funny we're even having this conversation talking about pickles, but the reality is they can greatly enhance the microbiota. If you are getting the pickles that are and require refrigeration and include the brine which is the, the liquid around them, the same is true for sauerkraut. Non refrigerated sauerkraut is not going to support your gut microbiome. It will supply some other things perhaps, but it's not going to support your gut microbiome. It has to be the refrigerated versions. For the reason that most people are not getting enough food based support for the gut microbiome and because of the importance of the gut microbiome One of the key categories of foundational supplements are supplements that create support for the microbiome through prebiotics or probiotics. Again, they tend to be the refrigerated varieties are the ones that are actually going to work. Those also tend to be very expensive. And there are some evidence that taking excessive amounts of prebiotics and probiotics that is typical of these capsule forms of prebiotics and probiotics, if they're taken ongoing, not for short periods of time, but if they're taken ongoing, can lead to some issues like brain fog. There's a nice literature on this and a growing one at that. So my suggestion is that if people are going to take supplements to support the microbiome, that those supplements include low enough levels, that is small enough amounts of prebiotics and probiotics that you don't start to venture into the realm of of brain fog and some of the other issues that could be associated with taking too much prebiotic and probiotic in the form of supplements. I'd like to take a brief break and thank our sponsor, InsideTracker. InsideTracker is a personalized nutrition platform that analyzes data from your blood and DNA to help you better understand your body and help you reach your health goals. I've long been a believer in getting regular blood work done for the simple reason that many of the factors that impact your immediate and long term health can only be analyzed from a quality blood test. The problem with a lot of blood and DNA tests out there, however, is that you get data back about metabolic factors, lipids and hormones and so forth, but you don't know what to do with those data. InsideTracker solves that problem and makes it very easy for you to understand what sorts of nutritional, behavioral, maybe even supplementation based interventions you might wanna take on in order to adjust the numbers of those metabolic factors, hormones, lipids and other things that impact your immediate and long term health to bring those numbers into the ranges that are appropriate and indeed optimal for you. If you'd like to try InsideTracker, you can visit InsideTracker.com Huberman and get 20% off any of InsideTracker's plans. That's InsideTracker.com Huberman to get 20% off. The other category of foundational supplements are those adaptogens that we mentioned earlier. Adaptogens, again being a very poorly defined category. But these are typically micronutrients, herbs, sometimes they go into the mushroom category. Again, these are non psychedelic mushrooms that provide either some buffering to the stress system by reducing cortisol typically or that are thought to or known to based on research studies to enhance things like blood flow to the brain or to enhance some aspect of cognitive function by way of enhancing neurotransmitter function. This category of so called adaptogens is an important one. We'll get back to this a little bit later. The reason I mention it now is that it is indeed hard to get the so called adaptogens in sufficient concentrations from food based sources. I have to assume that most people aren't out there collecting chaga mushroom or the ashwagandha herbs and then combining them with their salads or their foods. And so that's why this adaptogen category fits into foundational. Now this opens up the category of foundational supplements that are broad spectrum, that is that include vitamins and minerals, that have digestive enzymes, that have adaptogens, and that also have prebiotics and probiotics at the appropriate dosages. This is one reason why I'm a big fan of supplements like Athletic Greens, which is, as many of you know, a sponsor of this podcast and does really nicely cover all of these categories of foundational nutrition. But I do want to emphasize that this is not a way to focus on athletic greens specifically. There are other categories and brands of excellent foundational nutritional supplements that cover these categories of vitamins and minerals, probiotics, prebiotics, digestive enzymes, and adaptogens. It just so happens that that Athletic Greens is the one that I discovered and that works best for me and that many people find works really well for them. So this is why when people approach me and they ask me, as they often do, very, very often do, I should say, if I'm only going to take one supplement, what supplement should I take? Rather than just give them one specific answer, I actually ask them three questions. The first question I ask them is how well are you sleeping at night? Are you getting enough sleep? Are you waking up feeling rested? Because if they're not, that opens up a whole different set of interactions that we need to have and discussions around what sorts of things they need to do and possibly take in order to get their sleep right. Because sleep is the foundation of mental health, physical health and performance. We will have that discussion a little bit later in this episode. The second question I asked them is how's your nutrition? That is, are you eating regularly? Have you found the combination of macronutrients? Or which diet is right for you? Do you think you're getting enough vitamins and minerals? How's your digestion we have that conversation. And then the third thing that I ask, which is extremely important, is what's your budget? Because if somebody has $10 a month total to spend on supplements versus $1,000 a month to spend on supplements total, well, then there's a different set of conversations to be had as to which supplements they should take. Now, once those three questions have been answered, assuming that somebody is able to spend about $100 or more on supplements per month, then my recommendation is that they not focus on any specific supplements directed towards sleep or toward focus or hormone augmentation, but rather that they focus on buffering and enhancing their foundational nutrition adaptogens, probiotics, prebiotics, and digestive enzymes, because of the simple fact that if they do that, they're going to raise the tide on all the biological and organ systems that are going to lead to enhanced mental health, physical health, and performance supplements, including sleep. So this is one reason why if people say, well, if I can only take one supplement, what should I take? I say, well, what's your budget? If they say they can meet that $100 threshold per month, then my recommendation would be athletic greens or something like it, or that they invest the time and energy to go find the various combinations of vitamins and minerals and probiotics and prebiotics and adaptogens and so forth in individual components that they can then take in combination in order to meet their foundational needs. But most people are not interested in doing all that homework and legwork to figure out exactly what those dosages are. That's one reason why, indeed, I have taken athletic greens since 2012. I like it. It makes me feel better. I have more energy. I sleep better, My digestion is certainly better, and it supports the gut microbiome. I do that for that reason. But again, I want to emphasize that there are other great sources of all the relevant things within those foundational formulas that athletic greens contains. So it's certainly not the only route to covering your foundational health needs. There are other ways to do that. Now, if somebody has a budget lower than $100 per month to spend on foundational supplementation, well, then there are a couple of discussions to be had. Now, if the amount of money that they have to devote to foundational supplementation is 0, I of course respect that. And then it becomes a discussion about what sorts of foods and patterns of food intake are going to best support their mental health, physical health, and performance. Now, if somebody has somewhere between $0 and $50 to spend on supplementation for sake of this thing we're calling foundational health per month. Well, then a different category of supplement discussion arises, and we'll have that in a moment. But to sort of close the conversation on foundational supplementation, again, that means many different things. It's vitamins and minerals, sometimes that's one vitamin and mineral supplement. It means digestive enzymes that could be its own supplement or in combination with vitamins and minerals. It means often, not always, adaptogens, things like Ashwagandha, different plant based and mushroom based formulations that can buffer stress and provide other brain and body support. And it often, although not always, but should, I believe, include the probiotics and prebiotics or anything that supports healthy gut microbiome. Once again, I think a broad spectrum supplement that has many, many ingredients of high quality, that covers all these bases is going to be the best route to ensuring foundational supplementation is covered. And I do think that should be the starting place for any and all supplementation regimens. I'll say that once again, I think covering your foundational needs in the realm of vitamins, minerals, probiotics, digestive enzymes and adaptogens is going to give you the most benefit by cost and the most benefit across the board in terms of brain and body systems that's going to allow you to feel better overall, sleep better overall, focus better overall, and support all the different systems in your brain and body that are going to allow you to be at your best, while of course also paying careful attention to your nutrition, because you simply cannot abandon nutrition. Again, better living through chemistry still requires better living. So now that we've had that discussion about foundational supplementation, and again highlighting the fact that that's the one category of supplementation where multi ingredient formulations make the most sense, I'd like to now shift our attention to single ingredient formulation supplements that are designed to achieve specific endpoints. And here again, rather than focus on specific ingredients and supplements to achieve specific endpoints, because we've done that already in episodes related to sleep and focus, et cetera, I'd like to take a step back and focus on the larger theme of today's episode, which is how to think about supplementation in a rational, cost effective and biologically effective way. For each of these categories. And the three categories that I'm going to cover are sleep hormone support and cognitive enhancement and focus, Cognitive enhancement and focus being the final third category. Let's talk about sleep and the rational approach to thinking about supplementation for sleep. As I mentioned earlier, in this episode and on many previous Episodes of this podcast. Sleep is the foundation of mental health, physical health and performance. You might be somebody who can do an all nighter and feel okay the next day, or maybe even great. But most everybody, once they start to have minimal sleep for one or two nights in the form of broken sleep, poor sleep, not enough sleep, or sleeping at the wrong time of night, there is such a thing or day, they start to suffer, their mood starts to suffer, their cognitive clarity and performance starts to suffer, their mental health can suffer severely, and physical performance definitely suffers, Hormones suffer, everything suffers. Conversely, when people are sleeping well, that is deeply and enough 80% of the nights of their life, mental health, physical health, and performance all flourish. And I think most people start to be almost amazed at how well they're doing in various domains of life that previously they might have struggled with. So sleep is fundamental, that's established. When thinking about supplementation for sleep, we need to ask ourselves a number of important questions. First of all, you should ask yourself how well that is, how deeply and how much are you sleeping per night? Assuming you're somebody who can fall asleep easily, stay asleep through the night, wake up feeling relatively rested, maybe a little groggy, and then can move about your day with plenty of energy and focus, you're not falling asleep in class or at work, or behind the wheel, or as a passenger on public transportation, well, then you're probably getting enough sleep. And by the way, it's perfectly normal to require anywhere from a 10 minute to a 90 minute nap in the afternoon for some people. If you're not a napper, no big deal. It's known that naps can disrupt nighttime sleep, but provided that they're early enough in the day, if you take a nap and you are still able to fall asleep at night, then naps are fine for you. If you're somebody who doesn't like naps because you wake up groggy or grumpy, which often happens to certain people, then don't nap. You certainly do not need to nap. But if you're feeling energetic throughout the day, chances are you're getting enough sleep at night. But there are people, of course, who are struggling with sleep, either falling asleep, staying asleep, or they're not feeling alert enough during the day, or all of the above and. And then it makes sense to step back and take a look at what supplementation can provide. If you are one of those people who is not sleeping enough or well enough at night that you are suffering during the day, in whatever way, mild to severe, there are two questions you should ask yourself, first of all, are you ingesting caffeine after 2pm? If the answer is yes, you want to limit or eliminate caffeine after 2pm, maybe even push it back to noon or earlier. I know that can be excruciating for some folks, but it can really help with your ability to fall and stay asleep at night. Second thing is, most people would do well to avoid food within the two hours prior to bedtime, but of course you don't want to be so hungry that you can't fall asleep. So those are the nutrition and behavioral tools that everyone needs to consider. If you are not ingesting caffeine 2pm or onwards and you are not eating excessively immediately prior to bedtime or within the two hours prior to bedtime and you're not hungry when you go to sleep, well then there are certain supplements that can support your sleep and we've talked about these in the Perfect Sleep episode and in the Episode with our guest expert Matt Walker from University of California, Berkeley, and in the Mastery of your Sleep episode. And we have a toolkit for sleep that you can access zero cost by going to hubermanlab.com and going to the menu. Go to the newsletter and you can find that toolkit. You can sign up for other free free toolkits like it. But the point here is not to go systematically through each of the supplements that is beneficial or has been shown to be beneficial for sleep, but rather to address specific aspects of sleep that can suffer and why and how certain patterns of supplementation can support or alleviate those pain points. If, for instance, you're somebody who falls asleep just fine, but wakes up in the middle of the night around 2 or 3am or anytime for that matter, and has trouble falling back asleep. There are two categories of supplements that you might want to consider. The first is Myo inositol, typically taken as 900 milligrams of myo inositol, Myo Inositol can help shorten the amount of time that it takes to fall back asleep. If you wake up in the middle of the night, Myo Inositol has other beneficial uses as well for mood, etc. If you'd like to see many of the different effects that have been explored in the scientific literature for Myo Inositol you can go to examine.com it's an excellent site, not just for Inositol, but for all supplements for that matter. Talks about the human effect matrix, that is the different effects of different supplement compounds on different Aspects of hormone, brain and body health, where the evidence is strong, where the evidence is weak, has links to studies and so on. Again, it's examine.com amazing website, wonderful website. It's provided such a rich resource for me and for many, many other people. Other people who wake up in the middle of the night will wake up because their dreams are very intense or they were having dreams that were so vivid that suddenly they were jolted from their dreams. Those people would do well to avoid certain supplements. So in a moment, I'll talk about the value of a supplement called theanine for falling asleep. But theanine, which typically is taken in dosages anywhere from 100mg to 400mg depending on body weight and experience and what you find to be most effective for you, minimally effective for you. Well, theanine can be great for many people, but for people who have excessively vivid dreams, those excessively vivid dreams can lead to immediate waking and sometimes a little bit of anxiety upon waking in the middle of the night. So some people who wake up in the middle of the night, sort of jolted mentally and physically out of sleep because of their intense dreams, would do well to avoid theanine supplementation. I've talked about this a bit before, but it's something that I think a lot of nighttime middle of the night wakers might be familiar with and would want to take into consideration. Now, for those of you that are not waking up in the middle of the night or not having excessively vivid dreams, but are having trouble falling asleep, two supplements in particular have been shown to be effective for shortening the transition time to sleep and allowing people to ease into sleep more readily. And those are magnesium threonate, which is interchangeable with magnesium bisglycinate. Magnesium bisglycinate and magnesium threonate both have transporter systems that allow them to readily cross the blood brain barrier and they lead to a mild form of drowsiness. Mild in the sense that it's not going to prevent you from operating a motor vehicle or kind of any conditions under emergency that might arise in the middle of the night, or if they did arise during the middle of the night, you'd still be able to function. So it's not like a sleeping pill. But people who take those often find that their transition time into sleep is much faster and their sleep is also much deeper. Incidentally, those supplements are also thought to be useful for cognitive support and neuroprotection, although there's less data on that. So that's for falling Asleep. That's one category. Either magnesium, magnesium threonate or bisglycinate would be interchangeable for assisting the transition time into sleep. And then the other supplement is apigenin, A P I G E N I N. Apigenin, which is a derivative of chamomile. I've talked about this in various podcasts before, also acts as a bit of a anxiety lowering compound, which is essential prior to sleep for people to essentially turn off their thinking or to be able to reduce the amount of ruminating and problem solving and future anticipation that they're doing, which is a requirement for falling asleep. So what's the rational approach to supplementing in a way that allows you to fall asleep more quickly and stay asleep? Well, would you immediately take magnesium threonate and apigenin together? Well, that depends. If you have the budget and you just simply want to fall asleep quicker and you don't care which of those two ingredients is going to be more effective for you, well, then you could try one, for instance, magnesium threonate, and try it for perhaps a week and see how that affects your latency to sleep time, that is how quickly you fall asleep. Or you could try apigenin in the first week, or you could combine them both. Or you could try magnesium threonate for a week, then switch to only apigenin for a week and evaluate which one works better for you. If neither works for you, I do recommend trying the combination together. Again, this is just the way that any scientist would design an experiment to try and understand which variables, that is which ingredients are most effective for the result that you want, as opposed to just lumping them together and taking them. That said, a lot of people want excellent sleep so badly that they just say, okay, I'm just going to take magnesium threonate, I'm going to take apigenin, I'm going to take theanine. If my dreams are too vivid or I'm waking up in the middle of the night from excessively vivid dreams, I'll drop the theanine. And many people actually derive great benefit from that approach. But because today we're talking about the most rational, cost effective, and biologically effective approach to supplementation. If you're not sleeping as well as you would like to, or if you want to explore what sleeping even more deeply might do for your mental health, physical health and performance, well, then it makes sense to think about the various supplements for falling asleep versus remaining asleep, what to include, what not to include, and to do that systematically. And again, I think one week's time of taking something, provided it doesn't induce any negative effects. Right. If something induces a negative effect, I recommend ceasing taking it immediately. But if something does not produce any negative effects, then I think you want to try a single ingredient formulation for about a week, while not varying anything else, not changing anything else in your overall protocols of nutrition or supplementation. I mean, it's impossible to clamp everything perfectly from week to week. But, you know, don't change anything else dramatically and just add that supplement for a given week, see how it benefits your sleep, maybe add in a second supplement if you like, or rather swap and try a different supplement for a week and then see what works best and see if the combination works even better. Now, I acknowledge that what I just described is exceedingly basic, but it's something that I don't think most people do. Most people either decide they have the budget and the interest in just improving their sleep across the board, and they don't care what ingredient is providing the maximum benefit, or they simply try something and decide, oh, well, it didn't work for me and so I'm not going to try anything else. Supplements don't work for me, or magnesium doesn't work for me, or, you know, I woke up in the middle of the night from vivid dreams. And that's because they're taking more of a shotgun approach without teasing out the different variables. In fact, if there's an overriding theme of today's conversation, it's really about learning how to isolate variables in the realm of supplementation. Because once you do that, and once you start to develop that intuition or sensitivity of sorts to how different ingredients impact you, it is an enormously powerful stance to have because you're going to keep your costs limited. You're also going to find the things that work particularly poorly for you, and more importantly, the things that work particularly well for you.