Everything You've Been Told About Nutrition Is Wrong (What to Do Instead)

The nutrition standard we are measured against was created in 1941, and while they've been revised over the years, they've never been designed around perimenopause or menopause or what a woman's body actually needs when hormones start shifting. Meanwhile, 95% of us are nutritionally depleted. Yes, 95% of us, and we're being told it's just aging and we have to accept it. And today we're going to blow that up. So here is what I love about today's guest. Julie is a trained nutritionist with a Stanford MBA. She was doing everything right herself, like the farmer's market every Sunday, nutrition certifications, incredibly intentional about what she was putting in her body. And she tested herself. Now, almost every single nutrient came back on her in the red zone. Some of you are familiar with that red zone. It feels like a report card. And she thought, this is happening to me. I'm knowledgeable, I'm good at this. And if this is happening to me, what the heck is happening to every other woman? The question that became a company now called Needed, which is now backed by over 15,000 practitioners. But what I really want to talk about today is not just the company, it's the fact that women in midlife are running on empty. And we've been told that this is normal and we have to accept it, and that pregnancy and breastfeeding— RDA is underpinned by research that included only 5% of study participants who were pregnant or breastfeeding. And this is important because a lot of us had kids, we went through this, and now here we are again in perimenopause and menopause, faced with the same challenges. Today we're going to go deep. We are going to be talking a lot about what shifted, what we need to be aware of, and how we can correct this. Julie, welcome to Midlife Conversations.

Thank you for having me. It's great to be here.

So you're a trained nutritionist. You did everything right yourself. You were like the gold standard of what women try to do as their checklist, really. And then you tested yourself, and almost every nutrient was in the red. Uh, walk us through that moment.

Yeah, so I met my now co-founder and co-CEO Ryan in business school at Stanford, and we were both the uber nutrition nerds in our friend group, the ones that were doing all of the things that you mentioned, shopping at the farmers markets and sourcing really high quality food. And we realized very much through our own health journey, testing our own nutrient levels, that we were massively nutritionally depleted. And it shocked us. It was such an aha moment that women by and large are nutritionally depleted. And what struck us is, you know, once we started diving into the research was realizing that this depletion is a through line throughout women's health. Most women in the US will become a mother within their lifetime. I know most in your audience probably are mothers. And, you know, the nutritional depletion that women face is correlated with, for many of us, the start of our hormonal journey. So things like in early, you know, in earlier stages of women's health, being on hormonal birth control can be really depleting of certain nutrients, especially B vitamins, you know, Access to, you know, our just exposure to environmental toxins raises our baseline nutrient requirements so that our body can really go through the natural process of detoxifying. Soil quality isn't what it used to be, so our food is less nutritionally dense than it once was. And all of this is compounding into a state of nutritional depletion. At Needed, we like to talk about it as kind of like a continuum of women's health, starting with cycle support many women coming off of hormonal birth control for the first time, you know, in anticipation of starting a family. That depletion that is present before conceiving exacerbates through the 9 months of pregnancy and postpartum throughout the, you know, process of giving birth and breastfeeding, you know, times 2 plus, you know, depending on how many children that you have. Many of us are having children in our 30s and 40s. I read a stat recently that more women are having babies in their 40s than in their teens. And that trend isn't going anywhere. And for most women, what we found is that they think of a prenatal vitamin as being for the baby. And we're all told, like, take this, it's for the baby's health. But in reality, a prenatal vitamin is as much for women's health as it is for the baby. Our bodies are really good at prioritizing what a baby needs at the expense of our own body. So literally pulling choline from the maternal brain and omega-3 from the maternal brain, calcium from your teeth and from your bones. And most women, because we're told this is for the baby, when you're no longer pregnant or you're done having babies or done breastfeeding, we stop taking a supplement. We think, okay, well, that was a, a discrete time period and now I'm onto the next. And the reality is that if you start out pregnancy depleted and that depletion worsens throughout the perinatal, as we call it, it needed journey, and then you stop supplementing, most women enter midlife nutritionally depleted. And the most nutritionally demanding time in a woman's life is pregnancy, but the second most is actually perimenopause. So what we find is that that nutritional depletion is something that affects almost every woman. And although it is so common, it isn't actually normal to be this nutritionally depleted.

I have some questions I want to back up here for a minute because there's two things you said that I don't feel we ever really explain to women. And as much as you can help us understand this, this will be great. I come from the generation, I mean, I'm 54 years old, we were all on birth control pills from the time I was 15 years old, and I was that person that was on it for 20 years, right? And we hear now that that created issues, and this gets challenged a lot. Can you just explain what you meant by that? You said it—

Yeah.

Yeah. What do you see?

Yeah. So, I mean, I will say that I think we live in a time when access to choice around reproductive health is under fire. And so, I'm not I'm not saying that birth control, by and large, is a bad thing for women's health, but there are impacts to women's health that can come from hormonal birth control. One of them, and the one that we focus on at Needed, being nutritional depletion. So being on synthetic hormones can impact your body's ability to absorb—

How does it do that? And maybe this is too big of a question, or maybe, but it's just, it's so hard for us to wrap our brains around that. Like we hear, yeah, how does it do that?

So, you know, I am not a PhD in nutrition. I may not be the best person to speak to that, but it is pretty well understood that mechanism in the body does happen. That, you know, when we're introducing synthetic hormones, and this is true across stages of women's health, so birth control is one of them. My understanding is that it is the synthetic hormones of estrogen. I don't know whether it's the estrogen or progesterone or both that are impacting the body's ability to absorb B vitamins from food, etc. Also, minerals can be an issue. But, you know, that same through line is true throughout women who are undergoing IVF and taking medications. And, you know, in, in later life, it being on a medication like, you know, thyroid medication can interfere with nutrient absorption. That's why they recommend taking it at a different time of day than, you know, prior to eating food.

It's so wild. It seems like, I mean, every medication, it's like anytime you're taking any medication, you have the benefit from the medication, but you're gonna have the side effect of something else. And It seems like nutrition depletion is typically a common— because you'll hear like, "Oh, you're taking this, make sure you're taking CoQ10," or you hear this like, "Take this if you're taking that." What about the soil depletion? You mentioned that. Can you explain what that means, soil depletion?

Yeah. So, by and large in the U.S., our food is grown in an industrialized way, so on a large scale. Some may be familiar with the concept of monocrop, which basically means repeatedly we're growing the same one or two crops in the soil every single year, again and again and again. And, you know, that isn't the way that agriculture initially developed or the most sustainable way to farm. The best way is to do crop rotation because different crops have different nutrients, they can add things back into the soil. And we don't do that. You know, by and large, we're, you know, we are on a mass scale producing food. The other factor is that most of us are not eating within a short radius, food that's grown within a short radius of where we live.

Very true.

For many of us, we're consuming food, if you buy it at the grocery store, that, you know, was harvested weeks before you're consuming it. And fruits and vegetables, degrade vitamins and minerals very quickly. So, you know, what was the nutrient density of, you know, a tomato or an apple when it was picked is going to be very different than by the time you buy it at the grocery store. I think this is something that is pretty intuitive, um, and especially if you have access to a farmer's market near you and you try the produce there, it was picked the day of or maybe the day before, you know, you go to buy it, it just tastes different. I remember this aha moment when I was in business school and buying a lot of food at like Trader Joe's as example, and just noticing the difference of the produce there versus at a farmer's market. It just, to me, it just tasted and felt less nutrient dense than what I could buy at a farmer's market. And I think, you know, the prop, you know, there are many facets of what's leading to this nutritional depletion. You know, I actually in undergrad studied from an economics perspective, the problem of nutritional access. And, you know, we, we don't all have access to the same healthy foods. There are many cities, many rural areas throughout the US that are known as food deserts. So they're not proximate to a grocery store. So I'm well aware that when we're talking about nutrient density, there is, there is a challenge of geographical access, economic access. There's so much that goes into this problem of nutritional depletion, but I think that's what makes our founding story especially poignant is that we had access to healthy foods. We were shopping at the farmer's market. We were trained in nutrition, and yet we still had this deficiency.

Yeah, because that's what's coming up is like you're literally doing the textbook. Okay, I know this, so I'm going to get things from the farmer's market. I'm going to do this. And you still tested not showing that you're negligible in this stuff. And I find the same thing with me many times. Like I can do everything neurotically and it's still going to come up that way. It's wild.

Yeah. And I think, I think where it was for us particularly concerning is that at the time, Ryan and I weren't yet mothers when we started Needed, but we were really in that life stage of like cycle support, coming off of hormonal birth control, thinking about starting families and having a lot of friends go through the stages of fertility, pregnancy, and postpartum and struggling with it, you know, struggling to get pregnant or having difficult pregnancies or really difficult postpartum periods. And nutrition was almost nowhere in the conversation around those issues. Most women are told, take a prenatal, but they're really not told what to look for in a prenatal or the importance of supplementation or the fact that women start out depleted. And the same is true for other stages of women's health. For the stage in between having your babies and onset of perimenopause symptoms, there's just really no conversation happening about the importance of nutritional depletion and the problem that exists and that's impacting most women. I think we're just— society is kind of, and our culture has kind of evolved in a way where it's— we're just told that it's normal to feel the way that we do, to have low energy, to be constantly stressed, you know, experience. And perimenopause is a natural hormonal shift in a woman's life. It is natural. It is normal to go through perimenopause. But the exacerbation of symptoms doesn't have to be quite as intense as it is.

Yeah. I'm a huge fan of supplements and I always tell my clients and my audience, I'm like, no, supplements are not mandatory. Got it. We need to be hydrating, we need the proper food, we need to move our body. However, it is that insurance policy and we just cannot get all of that from— the amount of food we'd have to eat and variety to get all those things is very, very, very challenging. And one thing you just said that reminded me of a memory, my early and mid-30s, almost all my friends were on prenats. Prenatal vitamins because they were all trying to get pregnant. And every time someone was taking a prenatal vitamin, they would talk about how thick their hair was or their nails were growing. But what we didn't connect the dots on is why is that? Like, are we finally— we finally have the right nutrients? Like, that's not— we should be like that all the time. It should be working like that all the time. That's not just, just during that. When we look at the nutritional standard, we tend to be measured against the RDA. Oh, where did that come from? And why is that failing women?

Yeah, so the, the RDA is You know, and if you're looking at a supplement facts panel, um, you'll see also like a percent DV, which stands for percent daily value. They're very closely interrelated. They're not exactly one and the same, but they're very closely interrelated. The concept of RDAs came out of 1941. This is a wartime period, and really the idea behind it was to establish nutritional standards for a population that is in approaching war. So what amount of nutrition is needed to avoid a serious disease? What amount of nutrition, in other words, is required at a bare minimum to support a population? The paradigm of RDAs really was not designed around women's health specifically, or, you know, what a woman needs at the most nutritionally demanding time in her life. There is an RDA that is specific to pregnancy and breastfeeding, and then there is an RDA for women who are 18 to 50, and then over 50. But they are not grounded in research on women's needs specifically during those time periods. And I think to shine a light on this, it's a little bit more, uh, vague, I guess, for the women's RDA because it is such a large range of time, like 18 or 19 to 50 is such a huge time period. So it's basically women of reproductive age who are not pregnant is the organizing principle. So I'll instead focus on the pregnancy and breastfeeding RDA because I think it really shines a light on the problem. So there is an established RDA for pregnant breastfeeding women. It different than the one for women who are not pregnant and breastfeeding. There's research that underpins these RDAs, and of the research that was selected as the basis for these RDAs, there was a million study participants. So it's based on a lot of research, but less than 5% of those study participants were actually pregnant or breastfeeding.

Wow.

So we are basically— the RDAs are are essentially a nutritional standard that informs vitamin formulation. It informs doctors' recommendations. It's a really key pillar of, of public health policy. And the RDAs are grounded in this concept of nutritional bare minimum. So what's the bare minimum? Not what's optimal. And what's optimal is very different from what you need at a bare minimum to avoid a disease like scurvy, for example, an extreme deficiency in vitamin C. And then further, they're largely lacking in population-specific research. So they are a best approximation, but an approximation of what women need at a bare minimum to avoid a disease. And the diseases that were contemplated as part of the pregnancy and breastfeeding RDAs, and the same applies for perimenopause, aren't specific to that population. So they weren't looking at— for the pregnancy and breastfeeding RDAs, they're not looking at preeclampsia and gestational diabetes, hypertension, a lot of the kind of factors that lead to, you know, suboptimal outcomes for moms and babies. It's grounded in more general population-specific diseases. So it's, I think, in the simplest way to describe it is we view at Nita that the nutrition standards for women's health are broken and that We do have enough research to set a higher standard, to set a standard that is grounded on what women actually need based on research done on those specific populations. Julia, it's so frustrating. And that's really what we've been building.

It's so frustrating because what you're saying is exactly what we deal with with labs too. Like you think about when we get our labs drawn, it's that same conversation about optimal versus minimum. And it's confusing for women. But yeah, I was thinking about—

I think a good example to tie back to labs is like, In a, you know, standard medical practice, if you have vitamin D levels tested, your results might come back and you might be, you know, on the low range of normal. And, you know, your doctor's like, okay, you're in a normal range. But a functional medicine doctor who's looking for optimal is instead going to look at that same result and say, you are far from optimal. I want you to be, you know, at, you know, if you're like at a— I don't know, I remember earlier in my nutrition journey being at like maybe 20 to 30, the measure for vitamin D in blood assays is like nanograms per milliliter. And, you know, being at like 20 to 30, but an optimal range for, you know, for fertility and, you know, general women's health is more like 50 plus, 50 to 70. So, the reference ranges can be set too low. They can be oriented around bare minimums. And it makes the feedback loop of catching deficiencies very difficult if you're starting from the wrong reference range. If you're starting from a range of, deficiency rather than optimal.

Makes sense. You talk about depletion across entire time. Like, we tend to look at these things in separate times, like when I was a teen, when I was fertile, pregnancy, postpartum, perimenopause, menopause. And you have said that most women think of these as separate chapters, but really, it's just one pipeline that you view. Can you explain that?

One continuum. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that is one of the pieces of women's health and women's nutrition that is most lacking is education for women around our bodies and what we go through at each stage and what's around the corner. So I think for many women, they learn about pregnancy when they're pregnant, not before, not years before, not when they're in, you know, middle school health class. Like, we're learning about it as we experience it. And I think the same is true for perimenopause. Most women learn about perimenopause when their symptoms begin.

For sure.

And I think, you know, it's amazing.

Do you remember that book, by the way, What to Expect When You're Expecting?

Yeah.

Okay. So, like, I remember reading that book every single day going through my pregnancy.

Like, we need—

we don't have that for perimenopause or menopause. That's what we need to add that because you're right, we don't learn until we're there.

Totally. And what we see is that women are searching for information about perimenopause. The search intent for— it's wild, but the search intent for perimenopause is more than double that of pregnancy. This is up to a 10-year time period in women's lives. You know, health textbook definition of perimenopause is the time period leading up to the onset of menopause. Menopause being defined as the time period where you're, you know, basically 12 months without a period, you know, and then at the end of that 12-month period, you're considered to be in menopause. So perimenopause is like a 10, up to 15-year time period leading up to that. Sometimes the symptoms are silent, sometimes the symptoms are louder than, than at other times. But this is a substantial portion of our lives, and health during this time period is really critical to longevity and to how we feel as we age, and, you know, kind of health biomarkers. And so I think that is, that is the message that we want all women to understand, especially those of us who are starting families later in life, later than past generations. If you're starting your family in your 30s, as I did, and you have multiple kids, as, as I've been blessed to have, we're not a far cry from perimenopause when we're postpartum. And it's just so important to understand the connection between the two, that depletion, if it's not addressed, is going to just carry through that next major hormonal shift in your life and make the experience of going through it more intense than it already is naturally.

I remember after having my daughter, having major hot flashes. And if I think about the symptoms now, perimenopause, menopause, all those things I actually had after pregnancy. And I wish I had connected the dots a long time ago because I missed this whole gap where I could have probably avoided this all happening. At such an extreme later.

Yeah. And I think that's, you know, the analogy that we would draw as it relates to nutritional depletion. This is not the sexy hot flash relief or, you know, symptom-specific. A lot of women, you know, postpartum and in perimenopause have sleep disturbances. Our approach at Needed is very much grounded in starting with depletion and then layering on the symptom-specific support. Because if you start out with nutrient gaps, and your system is depleted, it's like a leaky bucket. You can think of it like a leaky bucket that's slowly draining everything good that you're putting into it. So first we say, you know, fix the leaky bucket, solve your underlying— it's not sexy, but your vitamin and mineral gaps. Start there and then add in the additional support that can be really helpful. Like a good example being I love— I have it right here because I just took it. I love our Stress Support. It's such an awesome blend.

I have it here too.

Yeah. I mean, it's an amazing blend of, you know, herbs and adaptogens that support healthy cortisol levels, healthy, you know, I have Hashimoto's and I take it just for overall support of, you know, basically stress and hormonal balance. It's a beautiful product, but taking that in isolation while I have huge nutrient gaps and I'm not addressing it through a multivitamin would be a waste of money. And I think our culture is not, you know, one that likes the like more nuanced, you know, multi-step approach. But truly, that's the, that's the best way to really address your underlying health issues is to make sure you're focused on the, the boring basics first.

Well, it makes sense because one of the things that drives me bananas personally being in the alternative health space for a lot of things. I watch women jump into hormone replacement, which I'm a huge fan of, but before they've addressed these other things, and you're not going to get a true read on what's what. And then, I also see this in the whole biohacking space. So, everyone's on all these things to fix their mitochondria, like red light, and they're going to do NAD, and we're going to do all, but they haven't fixed these core things. And you don't know what's what when you do that. So, It's the basic stuff first.

I need to tell you about why we created our cognitive support. So my co-founder, Ryan, is— she's super smart, super intelligent, very cerebral, that type. When she returned to work at Needed postpartum after having her first baby, she said she felt like she couldn't— she wasn't herself. Her brain wasn't working the way that it used to. And she was really committed to breastfeeding. And there's a lot of research that shows that the breastfeeding hormones, those like feel-good bonding hormones, are directly antagonistic to brain function and like higher-level executive functioning. And she, you know, as women, so much of like how we think is associated with like how we self-identify. You know, if your brain isn't working the way that it once did, you can feel so just lost. And that's how Ryan felt returning to work. So, So we created a product really to address exactly that need to feel like you again by having your brain function back. And that's really what Cognitive Support is designed to do. It's designed to be something that's safe to take, you know, whether you're breastfeeding or you are just not someone who wants like a lot of like jolt of caffeine to get your brain to work better.

It's both gentle Yeah, that's important because I think so many women in that stage, they start feeling shamed. They start feeling like, what's wrong with me? And then you'll go to the doctor, you'll go to whoever, and a lot of times they're just like, well, that's just normal. You just need to— that's just— it's just normal. It's just time. And then there's like a shame around it, almost like you have to hide how you feel.

Yeah.

So that's like—

yeah, I think mom brain, like, it's been co-opted as such a negative term, but actually the, the shifts in a woman's brain That's normal. Like that's, that's evolutionary. It's intended to shift your focus towards your baby. But most of us didn't have like years of maternity leave with our babies at home. You know, a lot of women have no paid leave in this country and they're returning to work way before they're ready to. And, you know, similarly, it's not like when you're going through perimenopause, your life just is put on hold. You still have to be the mom. You still go to work. You still have to do all the millions of things that we do as women. We're, we're such good natural multitaskers. Frankly, I think so much better than men are at multitasking. But, when we start to notice like you are forgetting words or just don't feel like you're quite as sharp as you once were, it can really impact your self-confidence and make you feel different, kind of not at home in your body. And so, that personal insight to Finding that there was nothing on the market that really met women's specific needs is a through line throughout everything that we do at Needed, including our cognitive support.

You must feel so good when you hear back from practitioners about like results or like what changed. Is there anything that has stood out that you're like, gosh, this is so why we created this? This is— I'm so grateful that it's beyond me.

Yeah, I mean, there's so many examples. I think probably like one of the early ones that was so cool to hear was women, you know, and this is maybe a little less relevant to your audience, but women who are plant-based, vegetarian or vegan in their pregnancies, who had, you know, maybe a baby who was measuring small, at risk for IUGR, intrauterine growth restriction. And then, and this is all anecdotal, of course, not something we say on our website, but we heard from multiple practitioners, both OBs and, you know, some other adjacent practitioners that work with women who are pregnant, that once they started taking our collagen, the growth birth of the baby improved and they ended up giving birth to a healthy, normal—

Oh, that's awesome.

You know, and one of, I think one of the reasons for it is collagen is so important to placental health. And this is again, like we think of collagen for beauty benefits for our hair and our skin and our nails, but it's so much more than that. It's such an important— those amino acids are just so critical to so many functions throughout the body. Let me think of one other, just to give you different options for the soundbite. You know, I think it's so rewarding to hear from customers who started out with us maybe 5 years ago during their pregnancy journeys, and they've stuck with us throughout, you know, the next stages of women's health through, you know, those what we call the kind of middle mom years where sometimes you forget to take care of yourself and your focus is all on the kids or on your marriage or on your job. And hearing from, you know, when we launched our Perimenopause Multi earlier this year, hearing from some of the customers about how big of a shift it has been for them in terms of their energy and their mood. It's just so rewarding to be able to support women throughout all the stages of their journey. A lot of our— one of our practitioners that we work closely with, she's so great at these analogies that help to really break down very complex concepts into really easily discernible, you know, things that stick with you. And one of the things that she describes it as is like, having vitamin and mineral deficiencies is like having letters missing from the alphabet. You just can't spell all the words when you're missing the letter E or the letter A or the letter D. It's just not possible to spell all of the words in the English language. And the same is true for our bodies. If we're missing those building blocks, we don't have all of the tools to do everything that your body is designed to do, to be as resilient as we need our bodies to be. So absolutely agree with you. I think there's so many amazing things that can come from, you know, focusing on symptom-specific relief, or, you know, thank God we have synthetic hormones and other, other tools to help women to feel better. But it is often the unsexy basics that are the right place to start.

I want to talk about some of those specifically because I know women are thinking, well, what about— I don't know, I'm taking a multi, or I don't know, I'm— what do I need? So let's start with like kind of perimenopausal because that's like the biggest— my— most of my listeners are there, or menopause. But when you look at perimenopausal women specifically, what they're actually consuming versus what they actually needed, where do you see the biggest gaps?

So many women, we're either guided there by practitioners, we find this through our own research, are focused on, you know, moving immediately to a solution. And sometimes that solution is medication. It's going on a, you know, hormone replacement therapy in midlife or even earlier. Think about how many of us, of us, when we were teens, started on hormonal birth control. And, you know, a lot of times, it was used to regulate cycles or to, you know, and/or for its intended usage. But one of the things that I think is concerning to me as someone with a background in nutrition is that so often we're focused on intermediating, not through nutrition, not by focusing on the foundation, but on going to a a solution like medication that is a major— it's a major intervention, and it can be awesome. It can be so helpful and so therapeutic. I mean, so many women and families have successfully conceived babies through IVF. Like, thank God we have these tools like hormone replacement or IVF or birth control. But if we jump to those synthetic hormones without first focusing on How is our body actually doing? Are we in a state of nutritional depletion such that adding those hormones is actually going to tax the body further? We can have unintended consequences, and it can leave women feeling worse than they did before in the case of something like HRT.

Yeah, you know, as you're saying that, I'm thinking a lot of my women will take the bioidentical hormones, which is more natural, and that's great. But even with bioidentical hormones, If we don't get that baseline really dialed in first, I feel like we're not giving it a fair chance. In fact, even if you look at the cancer conversation, like a lot of women are scared of HRT because of cancer. And even though that the Women's Health Initiative was debunked and there's a lot of that supporting that it actually helps you, I don't think the cancer conversation is false. And I'm going to explain why. It's not coming from necessarily the HRT itself. It's coming from all these other things that were wrong with us that we didn't actually address. And now, we throw hormones on top of it. And we're masking and we don't actually know that there was a problem.

Exactly.

So, to me, exactly, when we can really dial in the nutrition and the health first, then it's like the icing on the cake when you add HRT or biohacks. That's my thought.

Exactly. Yeah, it can make it so much more effective. And also, you think about how much money women are spending on— I can't help but think in these discrete time periods in a woman's life, think of how much money people spend on HRT or how much money they're spending on IVF medications or that whole process. And nutrition, even though, you know, optimal nutritional supplements can be an investment, it's so much less of an investment than some of these other therapies and can make them so much more effective, so much more likely that you're going to get the outcome that you're looking for if you make sure that you are first properly nourished. So some of the biggest ones are, you know, a nutrient like choline. So 95% of women in the US are deficient in choline. It's a really important nutrient for brain health, cognitive development in a baby, but also cognitive health for women who are in midlife and really women at every stage of their journey. Choline is something that's found, you know, in diets. It's found in eggs, specifically the yolk of the egg. So egg whites aren't going to help you meet your choline needs.

Yeah, you think about all our Gen X women throwing away their yolks.

Decades that we were told to avoid egg yolks.

Yeah.

And in fact, choline is a really, really important nutrient. So, you know, many women are deficient in choline. Many women's vitamins don't include choline. The same is true in pregnancy too, which is shocking because the nutrient needs are high. So choline is a bulky nutrient, meaning that it has a large molecular size to it. So it takes up a lot of space. In, you know, in a one-a-day pill, it's going to crowd out some of the other nutrients that are needed. But, we found a way to formulate our, you know, our Women's Multi is, and our Perimenopause Multi is our 2-capsule product. So, and we have a really good amount of choline in those products that's meaningfully higher than industry standards. I think in our Women's Multi, it's at least 4 times higher than—

Yeah, you have 130 milligrams, it looks like.

Exactly. Yeah. So, that, you know, it's not designed to meet all of your choline needs. It's designed to fill in the gaps in your diet. And so we absolutely would still recommend prioritizing choline-rich foods like egg yolks. It's also found in foods like liver. I'm not a big liver eater personally, but, but, you know, if anyone loves it, there is— tends to be—

does anyone really love liver? Let's— I mean, I want to— if you're listening to this and you really love liver, please let me know because I know my mom really telling me that her dad, way back when, he would eat liver and onions once a week.

And it sounds pretty bad to me, but some do love it. My co-founder, Ryan, actually loves chicken liver pâté. And so, maybe that's the way to do it.

I've heard it really does boost your— if you eat it, you really do feel good instantly. But psychologically, I cannot do it. No.

Yeah.

Can't do it.

Yeah. And so, then on the point of— yeah. So, choline, broadly, women are deficient and the needs do increase in perimenopause. Causes estrogen drops. So that's a really important nutrient to focus on. And, you know, more than half of perimenopausal women are vitamin D deficient. Some research suggests up to 85 or 90% of women are vitamin D deficient. And this can be true even for those of us— I live in California— even for those of us who have an abundance of sunlight and we can absorb it through, through our skin. Many women will benefit from supplemental vitamin D. So that is a nutrient that we very much prioritize. And that most, again, most women's vitamins are designed around a minimalistic amount, not an optimal amount. And then a couple of the other kind of highlight nutrients you mentioned earlier, magnesium. Magnesium is a critical nutrient, kind of a feel-good nutrient. So can have an overall— if it's the right form of magnesium, it can have a nice, like, relaxing, you know, kind of nervous system relaxing impact. But magnesium is a critical nutrient for many processes in the body. Calcium is a critical nutrient, really important for bone density, which is a key focus for women who are in perimenopause and postmenopausal. And then, you know, potassium is another one, a really important electrolyte. Research shows that only 8% of perimenopausal women meet the dietary reference value for potassium. Wow.

Blame it on the banana scare. People saying that you can't have— like, another thing we miss learned a long time ago.

Yeah. You know, and I think it's really, I, I'm glad you're bringing up some of these and that we're focusing on some of these like food myths or fears, because I think one of the biggest challenges with nutrition is that it's overwhelming. There's so much conflicting information out there. It's hard. It's hard to know what is the right information and is, you know, one year this is in vogue and the next year that's out of vogue. Totally. You know, I think that's contributed to some of the deficiencies that we're seeing is that there's a lot of, there's a lot of food fear. And then another factor being, you know, GLP-1 resistance.

I was just gonna say that. Yeah, because eating less, less variety, less food, we're gonna—

exactly. And what an amazing tool, like, we, uh, what an amazing tool for insulin, you know, for those who are kind of diabetic, like my dad was, and for general, you know, for those who need it for, um, weight loss support. But it does have the impact of typically slowing digestion. There can be a gut health impact and you know, less reduced. It's the same with any kind of calorie restriction that as you're restricting calories, unless you're just cutting processed foods, which most people don't just cut from that, they're also eating smaller portions of foods that are nutrient dense. It's something to be really mindful of.

I'm seeing a trend not just with the GLP— so GLP is a whole topic in its own, but even aside from that, I'm seeing a trend of higher protein, which is good for a lot of reasons, but also leaning— a lot of people leaning more towards keto or carnivore, um, and just really prioritizing meat. And my concern is that might be great for bone and muscle and for hunger and all those things, but we then get into this whole other area of depletion because we're not getting all these nutrients from other— like, yeah, phytonutrients from all the vegetables. That's why I'm saying we— I don't know that we'll ever eat enough fruits and vegetables, nuts and seeds, to get all of these things. It's critical. I read that choline, you brought up choline, and I read, maybe I hope I read this and wrote this down right, but in April 2026, there was a study showing choline can improve brain function in postmenopausal women within 3 hours.

Yeah. You know that? Yeah, I'm familiar with that study as well. Yeah, I think it's important for making acetylcholine. It's a neurotransmitter. That impacts memory, mood, attention, and focus. So, it's one of those superstar nutrients that it's kind of funny, I guess, how in vogue it's become, but choline in the, you know, and certainly in the perinatal world, choline has become a buzzword. It's like, it's really as critical as folate. A lot of women know folic acid, or you should take folate during pregnancy, and choline is just as important for that baby's brain functioning as as folate is, and it's a really, really superstar nutrient for women who are, who are in perimenopause. And, you know, one of the most common things we hear in terms of, you know, symptoms in perimenopause is brain fog. You know, frankly, postpartum as well.

Totally.

You know, mom brain can be real, and choline can be a nutrient that helps to support that, like, mental clarity and cognition. I think one of the other cool things is You know, there's really compelling research on the role of choline. Choline doesn't just— choline in pregnancy doesn't just impact, you know, the health outcome of a baby at birth, but also longitudinally. So they see improvements in cognition in children 3+ years after birth. So that's just a key understanding of like choline is— it's critical across all these stages of women's health. Health.

As you just said that, I also had another random thought that a lot of women that I work with on fat loss, one of the first shifts they make is adding more protein to their diet in the morning. So, I'm just thinking about all the women that were having maybe oatmeal and berries and yogurt for breakfast and they switched now having eggs and they feel so much better. I've always blamed it on sort of blood sugar, but now that you're saying this, honestly, the choline could be a big part of it.

It could be. Yeah. And in some ways, like, eggs are almost a better source of choline than they are protein. They do have some protein in it. And it's one of my favorite ways to get protein in, in the morning.

But yeah, we can never get enough eggs. That's the thing.

There's not that many eggs.

It's like 12 grams of protein. Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. It's a, it's a great one. And then the other thing that, you know, is present in eggs is, you know, is fat. And we need fats. I think obviously fats have been so demonized and then the pendulum has swung the opposite direction. Getting the right type of fat, the right ratio of fats is really critical. And one of the sources of fats that is really beneficial to women in midlife is omega-3s, both EPA and DHA, which are two forms of omega-3, the most usable forms of omega-3. This is something that I struggled with in my, in my 20s, because there was a time period where I preferred to eat in a plant-based way. And there is there are plant-based foods like flaxseed and chia seed, et cetera, that are good sources of omega-3, but it's in the form of ALA. And, you know, research shows that our bodies really aren't that great converting ALA into the more usable DHA and EPA forms. You know, it's like at 5% or less for some people, depending on their genetics, it can be even lower. So you can be consuming like all the flax, all the chia, and you might still be depleted of DHA and EPA.

Not to mention, with things like chia, I don't know that some of you realize this, but like, if you just add a scoop of chia to your cereal or your smoothie or whatever, your body does not necessarily break that down. Like, you have to soak the chia seeds, otherwise it's passing right through you. So it's not— you think you're getting all this fiber and it's just going right through you.

And it can be good, I guess, back to the point of the, you know, those who are on a GLP-1. One of the biggest concerns is, um, is the slowdown in digestion. So it could be a great tool for that purpose, but not necessarily for absorption.

But even, even for that problem, you still want to— if you soak them, you're going to get all the benefits. Like you get the fiber, you get everything. When you don't soak them, you don't. Yeah.

I think they taste better too when they're soaked. Much better.

Oh, for sure. For sure. So, okay. I want to talk more about omega, but I want to just point out one more thing on choline. Um, so I want to make sure you all really took note of this. So, we talk about brain fog all of the time. That is a big symptom in perimenopause, menopause, postmenopause, and we continually link it to a hormone problem. And I just want to make sure everyone heard that that could literally be a choline problem. It's as simple as it could have been a choline problem. And that's a really simple thing to replace if you're not ready to do hormones. If you're not, this is a really easy thing to add. And then, back to your omega-3, first of all, I feel like everyone thinks they're getting enough. So, I want to talk about what you're seeing there. And I also want to mention our brain, our brain is 60% fat. So, the most important fat for brain function is the one that we're lacking. So, can you see— tell us what you're seeing with omega-3?

Yeah. So, you know, based on kind of average dietary patterns, we see that, you know, most Americans are consuming around 50 milligrams of omega-3 in the usable form of DHA per day and about 18 of EPA. And that's well below what's considered optimal, which is more like 500 milligrams combined across the two. So far, far from that. And one of the, one of the most kind of nutrient-dense omega-3, EPA and DHA-dense foods that you can eat is fish, and specifically fish like salmon and sardines and mackerel. Salmon's probably the most popular among those options. But, you know, we don't consume on average, we don't consume, you know, a huge amount of seafood in this country. Our diets are more oriented around animal proteins that are raised on grain, largely not on grass. Um, you know, grass-fed beef or pasture-raised, you know, chicken, et cetera, tend to be more nutrient dense than those raised on grains. But, you know, even still you can get higher density of omega-3 from fish than from, you know, an equivalent amount of beef, even if it's pasture-raised.

So when we take omega-3, which I do recommend every woman take, there is a little bit of stuff I wanted you to help clear up here. I hope you know these answers. I don't know. I can't figure it out. Why do some people, me included, get a stomachache if you don't take it with enough food or if you take too much? Like, what is that? Have you heard of that?

Yeah.

And how do we also hear all the time that we have to really be aware of the quality of omega-3 because it could be rancid Can you tell us what you know about those two things?

Yeah. So the quality of omega-3 really matters. Most of the omega-3 on the market is rancid. Mixing omega-3 with vitamins and minerals is one of the easiest ways to turn it rancid. It's just not stable when mixed with, with many of the vitamins and minerals that you would find in a typical multivitamin. And that's the reason why it needed— we formulate our multis separately from omega-3s. It's really to maintain nutrient integrity and purity. Omega-3s are really helpful for you know, maintaining normal, healthy inflammatory response. But when they turn rancid, they can actually increase inflammation in the body. And so that's a net negative. That's the opposite of why you're taking it. You're taking it to reduce inflammation. So this point is really important. It's really important to source a high-quality fish oil. You know, there's some forms on the market that are, you know, the version that we use at Needed, it's a triglyceride version. Ethylester, which is like the cheap version. I would suggest looking— probably a good starting place is look for brands that are third-party testing.

So how do you tell this stuff? Because like, okay, for example, like I'm looking at your bottle and I know yours is, but like, how do you help us with understanding a label? Because I think there are so many omega-3s on the market and this is a really confusing topic for women.

We—

and I think a lot of them just gave up on them because they're like, well, we don't know if it's rancid or if it's hurting So, okay, so you first said if it's mixed with something, that's not good. We don't want that. And then like, I'm looking at your label. How do we— tell me where you're seeing it.

Yeah. So on our label, some of the things to look for, and we actually have more of our, even more of our certifications online, but, but this product is certified, you know, it's a Clean Label Project certified product. So what that means is Clean Label Project is basically independent certifying body that will review all ingredients back. And product, and they'll do their own testing of the product to see if it basically— does it pass their purity standards. So, they're looking at basically, you know, things like heavy metals, which can be a problem with nutritional supplements and fish oil in particular. And, you know, in different nutrients, they're looking at pesticide residue and, you know, other contaminants that shouldn't be in a supplement. So, very helpful if a brand has a certification like Clean Label Project. Others that are awesome, like NSF certified, especially certified for sport, means it doesn't contain, you know, any of the, the ingredients that are, you know, would be like disbar an athlete from competitive sports like the Olympics. In the case of— there's also some sustainability challenges with fish oil. So we also have Friend of the Sea. Certification, which means this product was basically sourced from fish oil that's highly sustainable and not bad for the environment. And then, you know, you can also— we also have certified pesticide-free. You can also ask a brand whether they third-party test and ask to see. Either they'll share with you a certificate of analysis, which comes from the lab, or a certificate of conformance, which basically summarizes the, the testing results. So that's a really important one. And then I think the other thing to look for is, is just the potency of the product. Our omega-3 is much more comparable to a practitioner-grade dosing than most of what's on the market. So if you were to take, you know, the kind of total 4 softgels a day, you're getting 2,000, you know, over 2,000 milligrams of DHA and EPA a day. You can also take less than that. You could take 1,000 combined, or you could even take one of them a day and get 500. So you're getting a really good amount. A lot of it.

Why is it hurt stomach? So if you take too much, or maybe yours doesn't, but what, like, have you heard that?

So it can. And one of the reasons is, you know, if you— some people are sensitive if you take too much fish oil on an empty stomach and if it's not a great quality one. It can cause either like the burp, you know, fish burp, kind of burp-back effect, or it can cause some digestive discomfort. We don't hear that very typically at Needed. Our product is very well tolerated. But if you are someone who's sensitive to it and you want to take a, like a therapeutic amount of fish oil, I would recommend dividing the dosing if you're buying it from a brand that doses like Needed. So in this case, if you wanted to take 2,000 milligrams of DHA and EPA combined, you could literally take one at each, you know, meal and/or snack a day rather than taking it all up front. Another thing that some women who are pregnant will do is take it before bed. I personally think it's better to take— I experienced it better taking it not right before bed.

Okay.

Not right before I was going to lie down, but maybe half an hour before or so. But we really hear almost no customers have, you know, that kind of digestion issues or that burp back exact thing that you experience.

So it's probably the quality, I would imagine, of this. Do you recommend— I've heard of keeping them in the freezer or the fridge. Does that matter, and does that do anything different?

Our products are shelf-stable, so this, this omega-3 is, um, is stable at room temperature. We definitely wouldn't recommend leaving it in direct sunlight. Um, you know, if you live somewhere really hot, um, don't leave like a package on your porch for, you know, days on end once it's delivered to you. But I would say putting it in the refrigerator is really personal preference beyond that. If you're going to keep your bottle open for like a year, if you really don't go through it very quickly and you're like a one pill a day kind of person and this bottle is going to last you 120 days or something like that, you might benefit from putting it in the fridge. Some just prefer the experience of it being kept in the fridge, like in terms of, I guess, like usability. They—

Yeah. So I try to take high doses of fish oil. And, but it was definitely hurting my stomach. So I'm just, but I feel everything. But one, I was told by a doctor to keep it in the freezer and it wouldn't do that. So I really, for me, I'm doing that. I want to, but I would want to make sure.

That might be related to just like the timeline for it to reach, you know, your small intestine for absorption. So maybe when it's frozen, it just, you know, you're not, you're not starting to absorb it. It's not, it's not interacting with stomach acid, it's just going kind of in, in whole to your— I'm not, I'm not familiar with whether that science is accurate, but that would be my guess is maybe it's something to do with like freezing it means the oil isn't interacting with your stomach acid.

I want to talk about red flags on labels, like all types of red flags on labels. But before I do, before we close the loop on fish oil, what would be the danger in not taking it? Because I feel like we hear all these benefits, but I want women understand what happens if we don't get enough omega-3, like what would happen?

Yeah. So omega-3 is really an important nutrient. It is like, it's up there with choline as one of those like super nutrients, really important for heart health, for brain health, for immune function. It's one of those like kind of building block nutrients that's important for mood, for, you know, can be supportive of brain fog and, you know, feelings of anxiousness or stress. So what can happen if you don't take it is, you know, generally speaking, our bodies are pretty good at functioning in a state of depletion. They're kind of used to it. But you might be experiencing more intense, you know, impacts of, you know, some of those perimenopausal symptoms. I've even heard anecdotally that women find taking omega-3 can help with, you know, their monthly cycle, like for minimizing the, you know, intensity of menstrual cramps. So it, you know, we try not to be very doom and gloom at NEATed and go to worst-case scenario, but I would just say, I think like alleviation of some of those, or, you know, supporting of some of those symptoms is probably the main reason to utilize it.

I know a lot of my women are probably looking at labels on things regularly, and it's hard to know all the things, but can you go over kind of like what are the big red flags and what are the big green flags?

Yeah. So I'd say probably the first red flag would be, you know, related to ingredient form. So a couple quick examples. You know, the most common form of folate is in a supplement is folic acid, which is a synthetic form of the nutrient folate, which is vitamin B9. You mentioned earlier that you have an MTHFR variation. Women who do often benefit from methylfolate or from folinic acid, so a form that's not folic acid, because their bodies don't absorb folic acid properly. So in general, I'd say look for methylfolate. You know, it's especially helpful for those who have that MTHFR variation, but can be beneficial for all women. And a lot of us are getting synthetic folic acid through food, even if you're not taking it in a supplement. So there is very little likelihood that you are deficient in folic acid, but you might not be replete in the more usable form, methylfolate, which is actually, uh, makes up, I think, 96% of the circulating folate in our bodies. Another red flag form is magnesium oxide. Um, very much the cheapest form of magnesium, tends to have the most like laxative impact.

So, could that help though if you're like constipated or you need that help there?

We would probably recommend citrate over oxide in that case. You know, magnesium oxide, it's just not that well absorbed and it does have— so it's less well absorbed than citrate with the GI impact. So, it's kind of not worth, you know, it's worth avoiding, I would say, picking a different form. We use magnesium glycinate. In our multivitamins, in our— we have a sleep support, sleep relaxation support product that uses 3 complementary forms of magnesium that are all well-tolerated and not giving you kind of an excessive amount of, of the bisglycinate form of magnesium that's in our multis. So that's a great option. But yeah, generally speaking, the forms that are best absorbed tend to be inversely related to GI impacts. So you get kind of a double benefit. From higher quality forms of magnesium. And then, gosh, one of the most common things that we see on supplement facts panels is the, the form of B12. So the most common form is cyanocobalamin. It's literally B12 attached to a cyanide molecule. We generally avoid this. We prefer two other forms of B12. One is methylcobalamin, so B12 attached to a methyl-donating molecule. And then the other is adenosylcobalamin. We use a balance of the two. We find that it's It's, you know, the kind of combination is well tolerated by most women and much more usable by the body than cyanocobalamin.

I do want to point out, you made a statement which is true for a lot of people with MTHFR about needing methylated. However, there are some variations, not a lot of, but some, if you have a slow COMT or you have some specific variations of it where it actually could be very too stimulating. So, it's really important when you're adding ingredients or monitoring them, you're really looking at one thing at a time and going, do I feel good? Do I feel better? I feel worse. Like, I know for me, for example, I cannot take a methylated B vitamin. It makes me feel like I'm on speed. It does not— it backfires for me.

So the other thing that I wonder in your case, what we often find with the methyl nutrients is that brands that are using methyl nutrients sometimes dose them inappropriately high. Makes sense. We find that with, you know, think very highly of a brand like Thorne, like great practitioner, great quality, but they've sort of taken the notion that like the right nutrient form and then more is more. And that's not always true. Sometimes less is more. So, yeah, like they're—

I think that's the one with the B complex that has super high doses.

Yeah, they have a really high— they have a really high amount of B12 in their prenatal too, and a really high amount of methylfolate in their prenatal. Sometimes less is more if you're using the right nutrient form. Sometimes less is more. But then there are also some women, not every single person is going to feel their best on those forms. I think one of the brands that is most thoughtful about those edge cases is Seeking Health. They, you know, they do compete with Needed in some products, but they have a whole line of methyl-free vitamins that are— they haven't replaced the methyl nutrients with the cheap forms. They're using just different forms like folinic acid in the case of folate. Makes sense. And I think they're using probably 100% adenosylcobalamin instead of any methylcobalamin in any B complexes. So, one to check out.

When we see proprietary blends, that is frustrating to people. And I know you had mentioned that's something to avoid. And what was the reason? Tell us what that means.

Yeah. So proprietary blends is like, it's a branding trick to make basically, I guess, like a a sprinkling, a pixie dust amount of a nutrient appear on your supplement facts panel, but in, in an amount that hides the actual dosing behind what's included. And we see this a lot in the case of like adaptogenic herbs, or in the case of like probiotics, or in the case of— I'm trying to think of another example. Sometimes you see it in like a sleep support product, or in like antioxidant product, you know, it's very common to see proprietary blend of blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, laundry list of what's in it. Or they'll even brand it like proprietary greens blend or proprietary immunity blend. I think, you know, a popular greens powder does this quite a lot. Like they, you know, claim a lot of benefits around a lot of different need states like immunity and cognition. And, you know, the list goes on, but they're not disclosing actually the amount that they're using. And Nita doesn't do that. Yeah. We, you know, for any of the active ingredients that have, that confer a benefit, we disclose the amounts that are included in it. So, I'm looking right now at one of our probiotics and we actually list, we have 30 billion colony-forming units in this probiotic, 2 capsules, and we actually list the exact amount of colony-forming units by each strain of probiotic. So, you know what's in it. And then, we do the same thing when it comes to, we add lactoferrin to our probiotic, which has a lot of benefits for immune health and for iron, actually iron absorption and metabolism. And we name the exact amount that's in it. So makes sense. Proprietary blends is generally a way that people are, and this is a problem. It's just such a ubiquitous problem that we haven't spoken a lot about today. We've talked about bare minimums and bare minimum dosing, but this concept of like pixie dusting, we call it at Needed, where you put like a a sprinkling of a nutrient to be able to make a label claim about it. It is so common. It is so common. I mean, in the case of a nutrient like B12, the most common dosing is like 2.8 micrograms, which is like orders of magnitude, like 70 times lower than what's actually needed for optimal health. So very common. Be skeptical of, uh, pixie dust dosing.

And there's so many— so the other thing that really, well, the proprietary blend thing, the pixie dusting thing that you're talking about, like mentioning something, and then also so many people white labeling the same thing. So, that also gets confusing because you might be following your favorite doctor, your favorite whatever, and all of a sudden they have their own line and it's honestly just somebody else's that they relabeled.

Exactly. So, yeah. And that is the industry norm is white labeling, which is basically taking a product, a formulation that's available off the shelf from a manufacturer who makes makes the same product for a bunch of different brands. And sometimes you can tweak a couple of nutrients, but generally speaking, what's available is just off the shelf. It is what it is. And Needed, you know, has taken a very different approach. It took us 3 and a half years to launch our initial products because that's the timeline for real R&D, for real research, and really deeply understanding what women need. And then once we found out what women needed, like, the amounts were so vastly different and the nutrient forms were so vastly different than what in most women's vitamins that the only approach possible was to custom formulate. There was no option to white label even if we had wanted to.

Makes sense.

Because what's off the shelf just wasn't meeting women's needs.

There's two of your products that really got my attention that I want to kind of break down for people. I think one of the nutrients not talked about enough is glycine. And I know with my own self really working on nervous system dysregulation, working on things that calm, that we want the opposite of stress, right? The opposite of cortisol. I feel like we hear a lot of things that we rarely hear about like ashwagandha, we hear about L-theanine, but we rarely hear about glycine. And when I was diving into glycine, the appropriate dose, the therapeutic dose is 3 grams. And it caught my eye on your sleep relaxation support, you have exactly 3 grams where a lot brands do not. Can you talk a little bit about glycine?

Yeah, so glycine's an amino acid. It's really key to many of the things that you mentioned. Sleep, you know, shown really good benefits for sleep and relaxation. It is not a sedative. It is very much just like a natural, you know, supporter of sleep and relaxation, and it's in our Sleep and Relaxation Support product. But glycine is also actually an amino acid that's present and abundant in collagen. So it shows up in a few different of our products. It's also, you know, as we were talking about earlier, a lot of our minerals are bound to glycine as well for optimal absorption. And, you know, you mentioned that the kind of therapeutic dosing that is, that's a hallmark of Needed, you know, and what we do. We are one of the only brands that is dosing therapeutic. We're creating products for not a label claim, not the pixie dusting, but really for therapeutic benefits for you to feel a difference when you're taking the product. And we are in a class of our own within the women's health space. There just really aren't— it's a lot of brands that are doing overlapping things, like a lot of sleep supports, a lot of stress supports on the market, but very few that are actually dosing in a way that is backed by the clinical research. A lot of times they're taking an ingredient like glycine and adding enough amount to put it on the label.

Maybe they'll even say it's clinically studied ingredients, but they're not using it in the clinically Valerie, like a half a gram, like a lot of the supplements that have like a half a gram or like I had ordered some plain glycine tablets a while ago and it was like you have to take like 6 of them to even get close to therapeutic dose.

Glycine is one of those big— so magnesium glycinate, it's big and bulky. It's much bulkier than magnesium oxide. You know, back to our magnesium conversation, that's one of the reasons that— and it's more expensive that people aren't using it in their supplements. Cause it takes up space, but our, you know, our sleep support is a powder, so it allows us to dose that full 3 grams.

Oh, that makes sense.

You know, in a way that, yeah, that's also easy to take. And a similar story with, you know, the glycine in collagen. And, you know, I think we launched our collagen product, you know, with a focus on women's health. We were one of the early companies to do so. You know, I think everybody knows collagen for like hair, skin, nail health, but collagen is rich in glycine and proline, which are two amino acids that become conditionally essential in pregnancy, meaning your body can't make them. I'm not, I'm not sure whether that's true in perimenopause, but we do hear amazing feedback from women who are in perimenopause with our collagen product that it is just so helpful. It's also helpful for, you know, connective tissue for, you know, supporting skin elasticity as we age, but also joint health. And, you know, has the added benefit of having, you know, having a lot of that glycine, which can help with, yeah, just overall.

So this, well, I mean, we'll obviously link below to to all their line and how you can get it and try it at a discount. But I wanted just to point out the sleep and relaxation support. I just want to tell you guys, so you'll recognize a lot of these ingredients, but L-theanine, chamomile flower extract, magnesium, small amount of magnesium, but the glycine is the therapeutic amount. So I— it really does. It's, it's not like it knocks you out asleep at all. It's just more, especially if you're like that wired but tired feeling, or you have that— you all know what a cortisol spike feels like. You're like a little jittery. It feels like you're like, wait, I was tired and now I'm wide awake and what's going on? It just blunts that. So it's—

yeah, I totally agree.

It's just, it's a really easy thing to add and I just don't think it's been talked about enough. So I like your product, really does nail the responses, uh, to— it nails the ingredients there. They also have one that I've been keeping on my desk and it's their Stress Support. And I liked this one. There's a couple ingredients I wanted to ask you about in here. This one has just holy basil, rhodiola, ashwagandha, schisandra. I don't know. And then saffron. I've heard recently more and more about saffron. Can you tell us what you know about that?

Yeah. So saffron, we actually— so this is a product that's been in our lineup for several years. We just recently launched a new formulation of it that includes the saffron. The research is really strong, both. And I guess when it comes to a product like Stress Support, we rely on available clinical literature, but also really how it's been utilized in women's health for millennia. So we kind of looked at traditional wisdom, herbal, you know, how are herbalists using this nutrient and midwives, etc. over time. And the research shows that saffron is really supportive of, can be supportive of mood, stress, anxiety. It's a, this product, the Stress Support, we formulated it to be something that that women could take when they're trying to conceive, when they're postpartum, including breastfeeding, but also safe and highly effective for the other stages of women's health, like perimenopause. So it's a really nice, effective, and immediately effective, but also gentle product. And I think that's one of the really positive things that we've heard since the new kind of version of this product came out, is that the impact, like feeling better immediately, is really present. And we attribute it, you know, it's a, not a proprietary blend, but it's a thoughtful blend of named, you know, specific amounts of ingredients. You know, they work synergistically together. So it's hard to say whether it's exactly the saffron alone, but—

Well, I was also listening. I was actually— I was reading and then listening to stuff around. I was really intrigued by saffron because I also heard it helps people with depression. It just seems like a lot of benefits that it's not talked about enough. So just an interesting thought there.

Yeah, it's really a great product. That is one of the products that I like I can't live without. And then, you know, you mentioned the ingredients that are in our sleep support. I usually take that before bed, but I've actually also found that some days, you know, some days you just wake up and you're like immediately stressed, like you have that cortisol rise in the morning and it's like, I don't, I don't need caffeine. I need to chill out. Totally. Sometimes I'll have our sleep support, or if I don't want to take a powder, I will also just take like other practitioner-grade brands that make a standalone L-theanine and magnesium glycinate. I find that it really helps. Helps. I think the L-theanine is just like, it really agrees with my body. It's really, really good for just as simple as—

I cannot have any caffeine. I can't have any caffeine without L-theanine.

If you're a slow pro—

like, if you're the kind of person that drinks caffeine and it's like in and out in 5 seconds, you don't need to hear this part. But if you're like me where you have a cup of coffee or you have caffeine and it's like 4 hours of like, yeah, what's going on? You have to balance.

And I'm even like a green tea drinker. I'm, I'm not I'm a coffee drinker and sometimes I, there's still some days where I wake up and I need to chill out. So yeah, it's a good product for that.

Well, this has been awesome and super informative. I know you all, if you have any questions, please ask below, but this is, I love, first of all, I love interviewing founders of nutrition companies and I'll tell you why. There's always a story behind why they created it. Like it comes from a really good place. I don't typically love, I mean, I have two friends that their line's an exception because I know their whole story behind it. But I don't typically love just when every doctor all of a sudden has a supplement line because I think sometimes it's like a money grab.

It's exploitative.

Yeah. So, I have two in particular that that's not them. I know their whole story. But I think most of the time I'll see someone, all of a sudden they're big on social media and now they have a line. And just y'all, I'm not a doctor at all. I play one, I guess, on my mic sometimes. But I have had more companies reach out to me to white label their stuff. And I just don't— it doesn't feel right to me. I don't have a story behind why I wanted to create it. So I love interviewing founders on when they did this. And I do feel if you use any supplement, it's really good for you to listen to the founder of the company or who's behind it because then it either resonates or it doesn't, right? So rather than just buying something on Amazon or going to the store like that, I love learning. And then I— and that's why I'm not like just one line. I usually have like a few things. Things from different lines.

Yeah. And, you know, I think Needed, like, Needed slots in well in that, you know, for the consumer who likes to take things across different brands, we, you know, I think the magnesium amount in our sleep support is a good example of that. We create every product to work in a system so you can safely take products together. It is so rare for companies to do that. A lot of companies are putting like some amount of folate and vitamin C and vitamin E and magnesium in like 5 different of their products. You can't take them all safely together and you can't take them across different ranges. And the way that we formulated Needed makes it very stackable within the Needed line, but also feasible for you to kind of dabble as you need with the Needed products and take them alongside other brands. And I think that just is back to our practitioner heritage. We, you know, once Ryan and I realized we were depleted, we, we started interviewing, getting to know women's health practitioners that that, you know, are in the functional nutrition space. And their insights were so critical and remain so critical to everything that we do. And it's why we've found traction in that practitioner-grade end of the world. A lot of practitioners want to recommend across different supplement lines. And, and there's just not a lot of great options out there, especially there's like a total lack of therapeutic-grade women's health supplements that are founded by women founders.

Yeah, it's amazing.

It's a lot of, uh, either men deciding what women need or— it's true, you know, pixie dusting out there.

So yeah, I'm gonna link this below, but if you're listening, you want to come back later, it's thisisneeded.com. So thisisneeded.com. And you know I was going to ask, and I did, for a coupon so you can try a 20% off. So if you use my name, as always, Natalie Jill, 20% off your first order. If we miss any questions questions, please let us know. But thank you so much for being here today. Thank you.

Thank you for having me. It's been great.