TJ Walker explains why vitamin B12 injections sold at mall kiosks don't work the way they're marketed. He argues that sleep, exercise, and eating unprocessed food do more for your health than these injections ever will.
Welcome to the B12 Store, where you can get a vitamin injection between buying yoga pants and crushing a cinnabon. The menu? B12, vitamin C, glutathione, NAD+, and mystery cocktails with names like Lipo Extreme. It's like a juice bar for your bloodstream minus the flavor and minus the science. According to experts cited by Harvard Health and Very well Health, there's no strong evidence these injections improve well-being for healthy people. And risks include infection, nutrient imbalances, and oh yeah, doing something incredibly dumb in a shopping mall. But don't worry, the B12 store assures us it's all administered by licensed professionals right there next to the food court. This isn't healthcare, it's mall-based wellness theater, a syringe sideshow praying on panic. Health isn't a quick jab by the pretzel stand. Real health comes from eating unprocessed food, getting eight hours of sleep and daily movement, not shortcut syringes under strip mall skylights. I stumbled across one of these B12 stores just last weekend. I was with my family at the Boca Raton Mall, the Town Center Mall, one of the most beautiful malls in the country. and there was this thing I'd never seen before, the B12 store. Well, that intrigued me. I walked in, has sort of a clean, elegant health nutrition type of wellness center vibe to it. I'm like, what is this? Oh, we give you injections. You can get injections for things like Ozempic and Wegovy, their versions of it, and other vitamins. And I listened, they were all polite, nice. And I thought, this is just got to be one of the worst things ever. It's yet another excuse for us not to do things we know we need to do. You and I need to eat real unprocessed food on a daily basis. That's a message. We hear it from time to time. We like to ignore it. We really want to think, oh, I can go to Starbucks, get the 1200 calorie macchiato with cherries and cream and lots and lots of sugar. Eat the Cinnabon or maybe something more elegant at Starbucks, the fancier croissant. It's still lots and lots of processed carbohydrates, salt, fat, sugar, artificial sugar, processed sugar. And then, hey, let me go down and get an injection, it'll all be okay. Well, this is frankly aspartame. To get to the point where you think, I can't be healthy unless I go to some mall and have people jab needles in me. I don't know if they suck out your blood and put new blood in, or they're just sucking in other vitamins or nutrients. But there's a perfectly good way of getting nutrients into your body that does not involve jabbing something here. It's called, put it in your mouth, eat it. chew it, swallow it, actually eat real vegetables, eat a real apple, chew it. You want to eat some meat? Go ahead and eat some meat. I eat meat occasionally. I try to eat smaller portions these days. Eat some fish, chew it, swallow it, repeat. That's what you need to do. Not injecting though. Why do we have to overcomplicate things? It's, look, I'm guilty of it. I've bought gimmicks before. I bought supplements before. But we as humans, like to trick ourselves. We have a good clear message here telling us, get eight hours of sleep, exercise, walk a lot, get up and move around, eat real food from the produce aisle. We hear it, we've all heard it a lot, we ignore it. It's so much more enjoyable to think, let me eat processed sugar and garbage all day long and then I'll make up for it. It used to be all we had to worry about was supplements, someone saying, take this pill, take this pill. Add this powder to your water and stir it up. Now we got to worry about people saying, Hey, come on over here. It's not a back alley. It's a nicely lit mall and a nicely lit store. Hey, come on in. We'll just jab you with needles to give you all the healthy vitamins or drugs you need to be healthier. This is frankly bizarre and it's dealing with a real sickness we have. and it's, in my opinion, making things worse. So again, I'm fascinated by this, by how it's communicated. There's all these signals of people who look like they're medical professionals. Everything's clean, light, well lit, beautiful looking, using chemical terms and scientific term. It all looks completely legitimate, but it's not as legitimate as just eating real food. Now, I've talked about it before on this platform. I'll talk about it again. It takes a lot of time in popular culture. The Wegovis, the Ozempics, there's various different brand names for it. But these inhibitors make you feel full. Therefore, instead of eating three bags of potato chips, you eat one bag of potato chip. And if you're used to eating three bags of potato chips every day, or if you're used to eating six hamburgers every day, and now you stop at three hamburgers because you feel full, yes, you will lose weight. All things being equal, you're better off eating three hamburgers a day than six hamburgers a day. There's no doubt about that. But what if you just didn't eat processed meat with processed buns and all the chemicals and garbage on it? What if you actually ate a real meal that wasn't fast food. That's the question we all need to be asking ourselves. It's been said about all of these inhibitors, it's an artificial solution to an artificial problem. The problem most Americans have, certainly almost every overweight and obese American, is that we're eating so much processed food, we don't feel full. So we eat more and more and more. So we have such calorie overload, that it's converted to fat. There's not really much debate about that. So the Wego's, the Ozempics, it does solve that problem. But the real solution would be don't eat all the junk food, the heavily processed food, the standard American diet of heavily processed food. Now, all foods processed, I mean, I'm consuming tea right now. It's processed because I poured it in boiling water. that's a type of processing. But importantly, I don't have any sugar or sugar substitutes in my tea. I don't have a lot of extra dairy and calories in my tea. It's just hot water and green tea. So there are varying degrees of processing. No one eats a hundred percent or very few people eat 100 completely raw food all the time. I'm not suggesting but if you're going to the mall and eating anti-ems and cinnabuns and french fries and burgers and Chick-fil-A and fried food and then think, oh, let me stop off and get a jab and everything will be all right, you're fooling yourself.
