The Nutrient Blueprint for a Longer, Healthier Life

Nutrients are far more than supplements on a shelf—they are life-sustaining molecules that determine how well the body ages and resists disease. For years, their importance was overlooked because many studies were poorly designed, failing to consider existing nutrient levels or how vitamins and minerals work together. Strong evidence now shows multivitamins can slow brain aging, omega-3s can extend life expectancy, and shortages of vitamin D, magnesium, and B12 are widespread drivers of inflammation and chronic illness. Knowing and addressing individual deficiencies is critical, as these nutrients power billions of chemical reactions every second and are foundational to vitality and longevity. In this episode, I discuss, along with Dr. Rhonda Patrick and Steve Martocci, why nutrients are essential for a healthy body and how to choose the highest quality supplements. Dr. Rhonda Patrick is a scientist and health educator recognized for her leadership in aging and disease prevention. As the founder of FoundMyFitness, she provides evidence-based insights to a global audience through her website and podcast. On YouTube, she engages millions in in-depth discussions on evidence-based strategies for well-being. Dr. Patrick’s focus areas include genetic influences in dietary response, micronutrients, sleep, non-pharmacological approaches to mental well-being, and the surprising and paradoxical benefits of biological stressors such as exercise, heat, cold exposure, and plant phytochemicals. As an associate scientist and board member at the Fatty Acid Research Institute, she advances understanding of omega-3 fatty acids in aging and health. Her research has been published in high-impact journals like Nature Cell Biology, Experimental Gerontology, and FASEB. Steve Martocci is the co-founder and CEO of Suppco, a smart supplement tracking platform helping people take the right supplements with confidence. After years of struggling with his health and hitting 300 pounds, Steve turned to functional medicine and supplements to reclaim his well-being. That personal transformation—and the confusion he faced along the way—inspired him to build Suppco. Suppco helps users track what they’re taking, avoid unnecessary or low-quality products, and personalize their supplement routine with tools like brand TrustScores, protocol guides, and stack analysis. This episode is brought to you by BIOptimizers. Head to bioptimizers.com/hyman and use code HYMAN to save 15%. Full-length episodes can be found here: The Nutrient Gaps That Could Be Aging You Faster My Favorite Supplements for Optimal Health & Longevity How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Coming up on this episode of the Dr. Hyman Show.

• 0:02Speaker 01

  Smokers and nonsmokers and their omega-3 index. What Bill and his associates and colleagues found was that smokers with a high level of omega-3, so they had a high omega-3 index of 8%, they had the same mortality as nonsmokers with a low omega-3 index.

• 0:22Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Before we jump into today's episode, I want to share a few ways you can go deeper on your health journey. While I wish I could work with everyone one-on-one, there just isn't enough time in the day. So I built several tools to help you take control of your health. If you're looking for guidance, education, and community, check out my private membership, The Hyman Hive, for live Q and As, exclusive content, and direct connection. For real-time lab testing and personalized insights into your biology, visit Function Health. You can also explore my curated doctor-trusted supplements and health products at drhyman.com. And if you prefer to listen without any breaks, don't forget you can enjoy every episode of this podcast ad-free with Hyman Plus. Just open Apple Podcasts and tap "try free" to start your seven-day free trial. I think it's important to know what are the foundational things that are going to protect you long-term,

• 1:06Dr. Mark Hyman?

  you know, for pennies a day that could actually save your life?

• 1:10Speaker 01

  Well, I want to start out with the multivitamins and vitamins don't do anything and they're expensive urine, which you also mentioned earlier, because this is a pet peeve of mine, I guess.

• 1:23Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Me too.

• 1:24Speaker 01

  And I'll tell you, I'll tell you.

• 1:27Dr. Mark Hyman?

  About right. It was funny that you, I just got interrupted. Sorry. I go to these medical conferences and I'm like, I ask, okay, doctors, you know, how many of you recommend supplements to your patients? And they're like, a few hands will go up, you know. I said, how many of you personally take supplements? And like, almost everybody's hand goes up.

• 1:43Speaker 01

  Oh, really?

• 1:43Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, it's very funny.

• 1:44Speaker 01

  It's a great question.

• 1:45Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 1:47Speaker 01

  So.

• 1:48Dr. Mark Hyman?

  There's no evidence, but I take.

• 1:49Speaker 01

  But I take. Here's, here's a big flaw with a lot of those studies that are cited by journals.

• 1:56Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 1:57Speaker 01

  Great journals like JAMA, for example.

• 1:59Dr. Mark Hyman?

  They're poorly designed.

• 2:01Speaker 01

  They're poorly designed, so, you know.

• 2:03Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Designed like drugs.

• 2:04Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 2:05Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Exactly, right.

• 2:06Speaker 01

  Exactly, so the problem is, when you have a drug trial, randomized controlled trials are the gold standard, right? You have a drug and then you have a placebo. But the thing is, is that with a drug, everybody has zero levels of that drug in the start of trial.

• 2:20Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That's right.

• 2:20Speaker 01

  Right?

• 2:21Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That's right.

• 2:21Speaker 01

  So you don't have to measure anything, right? Because there's nothing to measure until you take the drug.

• 2:26Dr. Mark Hyman?

  There's no, like, pre Ozempic level, although actually with Ozempic is true, you have a GLP-1.

• 2:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, bad example, but like scatins. So, you know, but when you're doing a...

• 2:34Dr. Mark Hyman?

  You don't have a normal blood level of lipitor, right?

• 2:36Speaker 01

  Right, exactly. When you're doing a study on vitamin D or omega-3 or fill-in-the-blank vitamin mineral, everybody has varying levels of these micronutrients in their body. And so you have to measure things. You have to measure things at the start of the trial. You might have someone that's already got sufficient levels of vitamin D. They may have 50 nanograms per milliliter level of vitamin D. And so you give them a vitamin D supplement, and it's not going to do anything because they're already sufficient, right? Or the converse is, they're so deficient, and you give them a supplement that's 400 IU's or 800 IU's, which doesn't raise their blood levels hardly at all, that it doesn't really do anything. And so you won't...

• 3:18Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Dose is wrong, you don't measure who's sufficient. Like, yeah, I mean, like, if you don't have a headache and aspirin doesn't do anything, right? So it's like if your levels are great of omega-3's and you add omega-3's, you won't see a change in your health, right?

• 3:29Speaker 01

  Exactly. So that's the fundamental flaw of clinical trials in nutrition. That right there, is that the MDs that are running these trials are running them like they're drug trials, and they're not. You have to measure things. With that said, there have been some well-done trials. And in fact, I remember...

• 3:49Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Just interrupting, the other thing, the other flaw is that they will use a single dose of a nutrient that usually works as a team, and that can actually make things worse. Like the beta-carotene trials in smokers show that it can cause cancer, but oxidative stress is managed by... Whole team of nutrients. So like I always say, you could be, you know, uh, you know, Michael Jordan. But if you're playing one against five on a basketball team, you're going to lose every time, right? Even if he's the best player in the world. So you need a team of, of, of these nutrients, particularly in terms of oxidative stress cascade to actually modulate three radicals. And if you give a high dose of one nutrient, you're going to kind of screw up the whole chain.

• 4:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, that is possible. Not to mention the, I, the fact that smokers, I mean, if you give beta carotene to non smokers, it doesn't cause cancer. But smokers are doing so much oxidative damage and they're getting DNA damage that a high dose of something like beta carotene, which can be an antioxidant, may then allow, you know, some of that, it's basically, um, it's, it's allowing some of the cells that would otherwise die from the oxidative stress, you know, not to die. Right? And so it's, yeah, it's a very complicated thing when you're doing things like that. But it, you know, I think like it was about 10 years ago, there was a huge study in the annals of internal medicine and it was called enough is enough. Vitamins and mineral supplements not only don't do anything that may be harmful.

• 5:11Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 5:12Speaker 01

  I think that was, do you remember that study?

• 5:13Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 5:13Speaker 01

  It was about 10 years ago.

• 5:14Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 5:15Speaker 01

  And, you know, I, I was, I just dug in and it was a meta analysis. And I went and looked at all those studies and I found that all these flaws again come.

• 5:23Dr. Mark Hyman?

  We looked at the actual studies that they made their conclusions from. So they do a review and they go, we're going to look at all these studies and we're going to make a sort of summary. And that's called a meta analysis. And then from that, you didn't just take their conclusions. You actually went and looked at the data itself from the original studies.

• 5:38Speaker 01

  Exactly. Yeah. And I put out a video about it like years and years ago. And again, all these flaws that we just talked about were there. And here we are 10 years later and the Cosmos trials was just published, right? So this is another meta analysis of a couple randomized controlled trials where older adults were given a multivitamin. They had about 20 or so essential vitamins, essential minerals, omega three fatty acids, vitamin D, right? Magnesium. This was all present in this multivitamin and they were given it for two years.

• 6:08Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 6:08Speaker 01

  What the study found, these are randomized controlled trials, placebo controlled, right? It, the, the, the multivitamin actually did improve brain aging. So they had, they were less, people taking the multivitamin mineral supplement were less likely to experience cognitive dysfunction, memory loss. And in fact, they experienced a improvement in their brain aging that was equivalent to reversing two years of brain aging.

• 6:34Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Wow. Wow. Yeah.

• 6:36Speaker 01

  Brand mice control trial, here we are 10 years later.

• 6:39Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, and there's many, many other studies that show the value of nutrients in many, many different conditions, right?

• 6:44Speaker 01

  Exactly, yeah. You know, I think that it comes down to, yes, you should try to get your micronutrients from diet. However, taking, you know, a multivitamin supplement, taking vitamin D, taking omega 3s, like, these are insurance, right? This is insurance to make sure you're getting your optimum levels. So you asked about deficiencies and what are some of the common ones? Well, omega 3, okay, so about 80% of the world's population and 90% of the US population does not meet the requirements for omega 3 fatty acids.

• 7:15Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 7:16Speaker 01

  That's a lot.

• 7:16Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Which is basically what your body's made of, you know, the cell membranes, your brain, you know, nervous tissue runs, regulates inflammation. I mean, it's critical to everything.

• 7:25Speaker 01

  Exactly. And there's been a lot of work by Dr. Bill Harris, so I'm an associate professor at the Fatty Acid Research Institute with Bill Harris, and so I'm involved in a lot of research on omega 3. And he's published just an array of studies that are quite convincing. So looking at the omega 3 index, so this is the omega 3 levels in red blood cells, which is sort of like a long-term marker for omega 3 because they take about what occurs.

• 7:53Dr. Mark Hyman?

  What does the index actually measure?

• 7:54Speaker 01

  It measures the EPA and DHA levels, along with a bunch of other fatty acids, if you're interested in that. But it's really the EPA and DHA level in the red blood cell membrane.

• 8:05Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Which gives you the index and you want a certain number.

• 8:07Speaker 01

  Exactly. So he's published studies using like the Framingham cohort, so these are large cohort studies with a lot of people. And he's looked at the omega 3 index and correlated with all-cause mortality, so dying from a variety of different causes. And what he's found is that people that have what is defined as a high omega 3 index, so this would be 8% or more. Have a five-year increased life expectancy compared to people that have a 4% omega-3 index, which is low. And actually, the average omega-3 index of the US population is about 5%, pretty close to that 4%.

• 8:44Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, that's why we actually measure that in Function Health Labs.

• 8:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:48Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It's great to see. We see that.

• 8:50Speaker 01

  Five-year increased life expectancy. If you think about Japan, Japan, who eat, they eat a lot of seafood in Japan. Yeah. Their omega-3 index on average is like 10%. So they're above the high, the 8%.

• 9:00Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, yeah. Their mercury levels are probably also very high.

• 9:03Speaker 01

  What's funny, it's funny that you say that, Mark. There's been studies like in pregnant women.

• 9:08Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 9:09Speaker 01

  You probably remember this, that decades ago, women were advised to stop eating fish because of the high mercury. And that actually had a detrimental sort of effect because omega-3 fatty acids, as you mentioned, they're so important for the brain, very important for neurodevelopment. And there have now been a whole host of studies that have come out showing that omega-3 fatty acids actually protect from any potential mercury toxicity in the developing fetus. And in fact, there's been studies looking at children that were born to mothers that had a high level of omega-3 and high mercury. Those children had, scored higher on intelligence tests, so IQ scores. Even, like, even if so, so high mercury was actually biomarking intelligence. It wasn't actually the mercury, it was high omega-3.

• 9:52Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That's crazy.

• 9:53Speaker 01

  But yes, you get, you get the.

• 9:54Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Although, in Japan, they eat a lot of seaweed, which seaweed is a chelator for heavy metals.

• 9:59Speaker 01

  Oh, is it?

• 10:00Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So is green tea, by the way.

• 10:01Speaker 01

  I think garlic, garlic, the beta, beta mercaptans in garlic as well. But back to the omega-3, and this study I was talking about from Bill Harris is so interesting because he also, this is a huge cohort of people, the Framingham, there's people that have all sorts of lifestyles, including smoking. And so he did a sub-analysis looking at smokers and non-smokers and their omega-3 index. And what Bill and his associates and colleagues found was that smokers with a high level of omega-3, so they had a high omega-3 index of 8%. They had the same mortality as non-smokers with a low omega-3 index.

• 10:39Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Okay, everybody, this does not mean you can smoke and take your own visual pills. I don't get any ideas.

• 10:45Speaker 01

  Or if you're not getting enough omega-3, it's like smoking, right? I mean, if you look.

• 10:50Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It's another way to look at it, right?

• 10:51Speaker 01

  If you look at the graph of this, I mean, it's incredible. The overlay is perfect.

• 10:56Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 10:56Speaker 01

  Perfect.

• 10:57Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Fascinating.

• 10:57Speaker 01

  So having a low omega-3 index had the same mortality risk as smoking.

• 11:03Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Okay, so we're talking about 90% of the American population is in that category.

• 11:07Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. And, you know, there's also been a whole host of randomized controlled trials looking at omega-3s being cardio-protective, right? So they're, they're very important for cardiovascular health, triglycerides.

• 11:20Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, there's actually prescription omega-3s, which you can pay much, much more than you would go get a basic omega-3 for lowering triglycerides as a therapies.

• 11:29Speaker 01

  Right, yeah. And you mentioned inflammation, you know? So this is another thing. They do, they play a major role in lowering inflammation. And so that's a driver of aging in many ways, brain aging, you know, cardiovascular aging. So omega-3s are, I would say, one of the most profound lifestyle factors that can play a role in, in negating inflammation, aside from exercise.

• 11:53Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, and they're just, they're so, well, like, the word I use is pleomorphic, but it's a big medical word, but essentially it means it does a million things, right? It's not just one thing. It's great for your skin, for your hair, for your nails, for your brain health, for preventing dementia, cardiovascular disease, cancer. I mean, it's, it's, it regulates inflammation. So these are, these are nutrients that do so many things in the body, then they're work differently than drugs and they're, they're essential, they're called essential because they are essential.

• 12:22Speaker 01

  Right.

• 12:23Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And, you know, one of the challenges is that we're looking for that, you know, quick fix and we're trying to diagnose a real disease that's directly connected to that particular problem. So I'm sure you're familiar with Robert Heaney, who was a vitamin D researcher, and he wrote this beautiful paper years ago called Long Latency Deficiency Diseases. And the basic thesis was that in the short term, if you're nutrient deficient at a severe level, like we used to see, you know, in the 1900s, if your vitamin D is super low, you'll get rickets. Or if you don't have vitamin C and you're a sailor. You get scurvy, right? Or if you don't have enough, be too much white rice and white flour, which they started to do in the third century,

• 13:08Dr. Mark Hyman?

  you get berry berry and pellagra and all these horrible B vitamin deficiencies. The thesis you had essentially is that you can correct those vitamin deficiencies in the short term to fix those deficiency diseases. Like if you're low in folate in the short term, it'll cause anemia, a form of anemia we call, which is big cells called megaloblastic anemia. But in the long run, it can cause cancer and heart disease and dementia. And same thing with vitamin D. You know, in the short run, you'll get rickets. In the long run, you'll get osteoporosis and cancer and die sooner. And so medicine hasn't really gotten that concept. It's like, yeah, if you're deficient, take a vitamin. But otherwise you don't need them, right?

• 13:45Speaker 01

  And that's also very much in line with Bruce's triage theory, right? Says these, these, these micronutrients are running our metabolism, which runs everything from our heart pumping blood to neurotransmitter function to repairing DNA. So there's a lot of, you know, you can look in the mirror and if you're, you're vitamin C deficient and your gums start falling apart, you can see, oh, I've got scurvy. I've got scurvy, right? But like when you're magnesium deficient, like you're not going to see DNA damage happening.

• 14:11Dr. Mark Hyman?

  But you might feel muscle cramps and you might have anxiety. You might have constipation. You might have muscle twitching or headaches or a million other things that are symptoms of magnesium deficiencies.

• 14:22Speaker 01

  Right.

• 14:22Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I stimulate loud noises. And so like as a functional medicine doctor, I take a deep history to look at micronutrient deficiency symptoms that are not necessarily pure true deficiency, but more like insufficiency. And I think, I think people sort of don't make that distinction. And I think when you treat people, it's often a miracle. When you, when you get them complete and the nutrients are deficient, so many things get better.

• 14:45Speaker 01

  I like it is insufficiency because most, most people are not deficient. We do have a lot of fortification even in our ultra processed foods.

• 14:52Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 14:52Speaker 01

  Because of, you know, preventing neural tube defects, preventing pellagra, like all these diseases that were sort of cropping up, like you mentioned in the early.

• 15:01Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Fortified, but it's like junk fortified.

• 15:03Speaker 01

  It is, it is, but it seems to stop some of those deficiencies, right? But it's the insufficiency. And with vitamin D, it's a really big one because it is converted into a steroid hormone. So this is something that. Is going into the nucleus of our cell and binding and interacting with DNA. It has a little sequence of DNA called a vitamin D response element. It's so important that it's encoded in our DNA, right? So to not have enough vitamin D, so 70% of the US population doesn't meet the sufficient levels of vitamin D, which is about 30 nanograms per mil, 70%.

• 15:39Dr. Mark Hyman?

  30.

• 15:40Speaker 01

  Which would be.

• 15:41Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And if you add it up to 45 or 50, it's probably like 80 plus, 90%.

• 15:47Speaker 01

  Right, yeah, so and so that would be, there have been studies looking at all cause mortality and vitamin D levels. Of course, this is again observational, lots of meta-analyses out there, even dating back for like 30 years. And it seems as though having at least 40 nanograms per mil seems to be a sweet spot. You know, 40 to 60 is a really good place to be where you're having a good level of vitamin D. But again, it's a steroid hormone. It's not, it's regulating over 5% of the protein encoding human genome. That's like thousands of genes.

• 16:20Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 16:20Speaker 01

  You know, everything from immune function, it plays an important role in preventing autoimmunity, brain function. It regulates genes that are important for converting tryptophan into serotonin.

• 16:30Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 16:30Speaker 01

  Serotonin is an important neurotransmitter that regulates mood, cognitive function, impulse control, you know, so vitamin D.

• 16:37Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Maybe I need more of that then.

• 16:39Speaker 01

  Well, and the problem is, is that, you know, vitamin D typically you make it from UV radiation exposure from the sun.

• 16:45Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 16:46Speaker 01

  But.

• 16:46Dr. Mark Hyman?

  We're all told to shield ourselves from the sun and sun's locked. And so we live indoors, work indoors, and yeah, it's a problem. I mean, we're all running around half naked, hunting and gathering. We got a lot of vitamin D and we ate, and we're coastal areas and we ate, you know, fish, small fish like herring and so they're higher in vitamin D. Or if you're foraging mushrooms, you're high in vitamin D. So there's ways in which our historical population got it, the paleolithic ancestors, but we don't get that.

• 17:10Speaker 01

  Right, exactly, we don't. And so, you know, I do think, so people, the simple solution is a vitamin D supplement, right? And so about. 4,000 IU's a day will generally get someone from a deficient range, which is 20 nanograms per mil, up to a sufficient range.

• 17:25Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Okay, but you're just talking about 10 times what's normally in a multivitamin, or what doctors will recommend.

• 17:31Speaker 01

  I am, I am, because you, yeah, you really do, it's about 1,000 IU's of vitamin D will raise blood levels between 5 to 10 nanograms per mil. But it all, we have genes, we have different variations of our genes that are able to do this. And this again, comes down to these clinical studies showing that, you know, nothing happens.

• 17:50Dr. Mark Hyman?

  We're all different.

• 17:51Speaker 01

  We're all different. And so, some people actually have to take a much higher dose, right? Because they have genes that aren't doing, converting vitamin D3 into 25-hydroxyvitamin D, which is this circulating form of vitamin D, or the steroid hormone, 125-hydroxyvitamin D. You know, so.

• 18:07Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Well, let's put on this rabbit hole, because I think, you know, there's a paper, you just reminded me of, that Bruce Ainsley wrote, it was published in, I think, the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, years ago, about how 1/3 of all of our DNA codes for enzymes. And an enzyme is a catalyst. It converts one molecule to another molecule. The catalysts, or the coenzymes, or the helpers, are micronutrients. And so, what he said in that paper was that there's a huge variation in the population's need for different nutrients. So, some people might need 400 micrograms of folate, some people might need 4,000 micrograms of folate. And so, it's really about personalized nutrition. It's about testing, not guessing. It's about figuring out what your body needs, what your genetics are. And it gets really fascinating that you can actually

• 18:52Dr. Mark Hyman?

  start to customize your own diet and your own supplementation based on what your own particular genetics and your levels are.

• 19:07Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I think there's this, it was sort of a wake-up call for me, like, holy cow. When you think of our DNA and everything it does, if 1/3 of it is coding for enzymes, and all those enzymes require vitamins and minerals, if we don't have enough of those nutrients, it's like. It's like a, like an assembly line in a factory. If you don't have one station, the thing can't get made. Right? So you gum up the whole works of your metabolic machinery. If you don't have the right levels of nutrients to optimize the function of your body. And that's, that's why we call it functional medicine. Cause it's about how do we optimize function? Right?

• 19:41Speaker 01

  It's true. You know, these minerals and vitamins. So you're talking about magnesium, zinc, calcium, B vitamins. Like these are, these are co-factors for these enzymes, to make these enzymes run properly. And if you have, if you don't have, you know, sufficient levels of those vitamins and minerals, what happens is those enzymes do not work optimally. Right? So in the case of, we talked about DNA repair enzymes, they're not going to be repairing damage as well. Zinc is also involved in DNA repair as well. You know, so B vitamins are involved in serotonin production. Magnesium's involved in vitamin D production. Right? You were talking about, you know, nutrients working together.

• 20:21Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 20:21Speaker 01

  And it's, it's very true. So I think a really great way to think about eating, diet is what do I need to run my metabolism?

• 20:33Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 20:33Speaker 01

  Right?

• 20:33Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And when you say metabolism, like what do you mean by that? Cause like, it's not like my weight. You're talking about metabolism as sort of a bigger concept in medicine.

• 20:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. I guess when people hear the word metabolism, they think about weight loss.

• 20:46Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I got a slow metabolism.

• 20:48Speaker 01

  Right. Right. What I'm talking about is much more a biochemist definition of metabolism, which is all these enzymes. You're talking about, you know, one third of the protein encoding genome that are doing enzymatic reactions that have, that are making proteins function. So they are producing energy. They are, you know, running neurotransmitter synthesis. They are causing, you know, your, your liver to function properly, your heart to function, the lungs, everything.

• 21:18Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So every chemical reaction all the time.

• 21:20Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 21:20Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I don't know if, I heard, I read this somewhere and I, I can't find the original citation, but that there's 37 billion trillion chemical reactions in the body every second. It's just like an insane amount of activity is going on chemically and biochemically and converting one molecule to another. And if you, if you don't have enough of these nutrients, that whole 37 billion trillion chemical reactions may not work optimally.

• 21:40Speaker 01

  Exactly. So I, you know, getting. Getting the micronutrients you need from food and nature sort of color coded them in a way, right? I mentioned chlorophyll, that's magnesium, you have vitamin K, also the

• 21:56Dr. Mark Hyman?

  What color is that? What color is vitamin K?

• 21:59Speaker 01

  I guess it's green, too. I would say green.

• 22:01Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Green, green, green.

• 22:02Speaker 01

  Vitamin K1.

• 22:03Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And then the orange ones.

• 22:04Speaker 01

  The orange, right? And then you've got like the phytochemicals, right? So that would be the purples. But you know, you really do need to get a lot of vegetables and fruits and then you need your protein, right? And fiber. When you're getting your micronutrients, you're also getting the fiber because a lot of the micronutrients are coming from plants.

• 22:23Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 22:24Speaker 01

  Which are a great source of both fermentable and non-fermentable fiber, right? So I think it's a really simple way. There's so many fad diets out there, right?

• 22:31Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 22:32Speaker 01

  Carnivore, keto, vegetarian, paleo.

• 22:36Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 22:36Speaker 01

  And I do think paleo is the closest thing to what I'm talking about.

• 22:41Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 22:42Speaker 01

  But what I'm talking about is even simpler because what it really means is that you understand why you need food. What's the purpose of food, right? The purpose of food is to provide you with these essential vitamins and minerals and fatty acids like omega-3 and protein and fiber to improve gut health. That's the purpose of eating.

• 23:02Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And fuel.

• 23:02Speaker 01

  Right. And so that's, that means you don't need ultra-processed foods. That means, you know, if you're eating something like just carnivore diet, you're going to be missing out on a lot of micronutrients.

• 23:13Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Now, I want to talk about the importance of supplementation and why we need to use nutritional supplements to address nutrient deficiencies that are widespread. And as I mentioned before, 95% of Americans are deficient in at least one essential nutrient at the minimum level to prevent a deficiency disease. This is staggering. Not how much do you need for optimal health, but how much do you need just to prevent a deficiency disease like scurvy or rickets? And 2 billion people, as I mentioned, worldwide have at least one nutrient deficiency. It plays a huge role in infant mortality and chronic illnesses around the world. Now, let's talk about the difference between macro and micronutrients. Now, macronutrients, you're familiar with carbs, proteins, fats. It's very unusual in our modern society to have a deficiency in any of these nutrients.

• 23:58Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Protein is a common deficiency in developing world and you see kids with severe protein malnutrition. But it's really important to get a protein, uh, but although we might not have a deficiency, we still may not be optimal. And I've done podcasts on that, but well, that's another topic. Now micronutrient deficiencies like vitamins and minerals are far more common. And I want to explain just for a minute why nutrients are so important. Just to understand the context here, when you look at your DNA, one third of your entire DNA codes for enzymes. Now, what are enzymes? Enzymes are catalysts. They're basically a enzyme or catalyst that converts one compound or one molecule to another molecule in your body. They're basically the facilitators of all your biochemical reactions.

• 24:43Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And you've got 37 billion trillion chemical reactions happening every second in your body. Now just digest that for a second, right? 37 billion trillion chemical reactions every second. And every single one of those reactions requires an enzyme. And those enzymes require a cofactor or coenzyme. And guess what, folks? What are the cofactors and coenzymes? They're vitamins and minerals. Now drugs, they affect a single pathway to create a single outcome. For example, if you have a blood pressure pill, it's a calcium channel blocker. It does that one thing.

• 25:24Dr. Mark Hyman?

  However, vitamins and minerals, they might have the effect on hundreds and hundreds of different enzymes. So magnesium or folate or other, other nutrients may have the ability to affect the function of literally hundreds and hundreds of different chemical reactions. That's why they create such widespread problems. So just to understand that, that this is a super important thing. And based on these genetic differences we have, you know, I said, one third of our DNA codes for enzymes. Based on these genetic variations, different people may need different amounts of nutrients and may need different forms of nutrients. For example, If you have a gene that is called MTHFR, it means you can't convert the folate from your

• 26:08Dr. Mark Hyman?

  food very well into the folate that's active in your body, five methylfolate. So you need to take the preformed version as a supplement. For example, or let's say you are somebody who has vitamin D receptor issues and can't absorb vitamin D well, you might need not a thousand units of vitamin D a day, you might need 10,000. And so there are a lot of variations in the population. That's why it's important to test, not guess. And again, that's why I created with my colleagues and friends and co-founders, functionhealth.com to allow you to get all these nutrients we're talking about today, tested and many more. You know, functionhealth.com forward slash Mark, and you can find out what's actually going on. Okay, so let's get started. What are the most common micronutrient deficiencies?

• 26:48Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Well, iron, iron is the most common nutrient deficient globally, affecting about 25% of the global population. Now, the consequences include short term problems like anemia, particularly in preschoolers. We're nearly 50% are deficient if they're not getting iron fortified foods. Right? So the at risk groups particularly are vegans. Almost all the vegans I know and test are iron deficient. Vegetarians still menstruating and pregnant women because they use up a lot of blood in either menstruating or, you know, creating extra blood for the baby. Vitamin D deficiency also extremely common. And it may have, depending on how you look and define it, insufficiency or deficiency

• 27:31Dr. Mark Hyman?

  may affect between 80 to 95% of the population. And we're going to put all the references in here. I'm not making this stuff up. You just have to look at the show notes to get the scientific papers that are reflecting what I'm talking about here. Now, while frank deficiency symptoms like rickets are not common today, although they are sometimes in the developing world, suboptimal levels have significant health impacts. As I mentioned, suppressed immune system, muscle weakness, fibromyalgia, fatigue, depression, immune dysfunction, and even cardiovascular risk, cancer risk. I mean, all these things are related to low levels or insufficient levels of vitamin D. The next big one is magnesium deficiency. Now, this affects about 20% of the population based on the minimum amount.

• 28:14Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Preventive deficiency disease, that's 20% who have overt magnesium deficiency. That's quite serious. Subclinical deficiency could affect up to 80% of the population, which is very important because why? Magnesium is crucial for over 600 enzyme reactions affecting every single biological system, affecting overall health and risk of chronic disease. Literally everything from your mental health to your immune health, to metabolic health, diabetes control, muscle function, everything, pretty much everything. Vitamin B12 deficiency is also really common. About 80 to 90% of vegans and vegetarians may be deficient in vitamin B12 because there's not any vegetable food, basically. That's how it is, just fact of life.

• 28:57Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Now, over 20% of adults may be deficient in the vegans, because it's only about 2% of the population is vegan, but basically even the rest of the population, it can be deficient in vitamin B12. Part of it has to do with, you know, our drugs we're taking like acid blockers, part of it has to do with our digestive function and lack of absorption in some cases, or just lack of intake, right? Because we don't already eat B12 rich foods. Now, what about calcium deficiency? Not that common, because the body regulates calcium pretty well from the bones. But what happens is basically if you don't have calcium, because your blood levels have to be controlled really tightly, it just sucks it all out of your bones and you get osteoporosis. But a survey in the United States found that about 50% of teenage girls and about 10%

• 29:40Dr. Mark Hyman?

  of women over 50 and about less than 22% of teenage boys and men over 50 meet the recommended calcium intake. So, a lot of people don't meet it, and it depends on your age and your sex and so forth. But we need to make sure we have adequate calcium, but ideally you want to get it from food. Calcium rich foods are really common, greens, often seeds, sesame seeds are great, chia seeds are great. So, there's a lot of ways to get calcium. You can get it from bones, from a can of sardines, which I like, but anyway, you probably don't like that. I like to eat that. Can of salmon with the bones in. Again, that's how people that are on islands used to get calcium. Anyway, you can take a little calcium, but I don't think you want to overdo on a calcium because of problems with calcium affecting the heart and creating other issues.

• 30:24Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So I'd be careful about that. Anyway, omega-3 fats, the next one. This is a big one. We don't eat the foods we used to eat as hunter-gatherers, which are wild foods or a lot of sea-based foods for coastal people. Those are very rich in omega-3s, but our modern industrial diet and our lack of intake of wild fish has really dropped. And so 90% of Americans are not meeting the recommendations for omega-3 intake, which is one serving of fatty fish at least two times a week. I think that's a bare minimum, right? And I'm talking about like sardines, herring, mackerel, maybe some wild salmon, anchovies, you know, small fatty fish. Now, there's a lot of other deficiencies, and this is from a large national study. It's called the NHANES, or National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. It's a big

• 31:09Dr. Mark Hyman?

  mumbo jumbo. It's a government, ongoing government study that's been going on for a long, long time, that tracks people over decades, tracks their blood work, their health issues. And basically, they found that 45% of the population is deficient in vitamin A, 46% in vitamin C, 84% in vitamin E. Why? Because it comes from whole grains and nobody eats those. 15% are deficient in zinc. And why this matters is that these subclinical deficiencies, or just frank deficiencies, can lead to really serious health consequences. And they may not have initially obvious symptoms, but they will ultimately. So what's the truth about supplements? Well, getting enough vitamins and minerals is not just about preventing deficiency diseases. Well, that's part of it. They're also essential nutrients to power

• 31:53Dr. Mark Hyman?

  every aspect of our biology, as I said, right? Vitamins and minerals and amino acids play key roles in a whole set of biochemical reactions in the body. As I mentioned, they act as cofactors. I'm just saying this again because it's so important to understand. They literally are the grease that lubricates the wheels of our massive metabolic and biochemical machinery, right? They power metabolism, our detox systems, our energy production, our antioxidant systems, which are important for overall health. I mean, your antioxidants need nutrients to work. For example, you need zinc and copper to activate, and magnesium is one of the most important intracellular antioxidants called superoxide dismutase. So nutrients are key for everything, right? For example, you can't make ATP for energy for your cells without magnesium.

• 32:35Dr. Mark Hyman?

  If you want to turn tryptophan from your turkey into serotonin, which is good for your mood, you need B6 for that chemical reaction. And you need magnesium and you need folate. So if you have low in those and they're really common to be low in, of course, you're going to be depressed. You want to make thyroid hormones, right? To make thyroid hormone T4, you need iodine. And then to make T3, you need selenium and zinc and vitamin A and vitamin D to make the thyroid hormone work at the cellular level. So without optimal levels of these essential nutrients, our biochemistry just can't function properly. And that leads to these low level functional imbalances. And they manifest as just feeling crappy, right? Now, like we call it feel like crap syndrome or FLC. Or worse, they can lead to these long latency deficiencies,

• 33:19Dr. Mark Hyman?

  diseases, accelerated aging, heart disease, cancer, osteoporosis, depression and, and, and worse. And also they lead to immunodeflection. That's why the elderly often having higher risk of illness, infection, because they tend to, you know, have poor diets. They tend to have trouble absorbing nutrients in their stomach as they get older. And so they tend to have more deficiencies. Now, a new study published in the European Journal of Nutrition studied blood levels of magnesium, really important, my favorite mineral, and homocysteine, which is a measure of B12 folate and B6 function in the body. And they looked at these levels in about 172 healthy, middle aged people from Australia. And they found that low levels of magnesium and high homocysteine

• 34:05Dr. Mark Hyman?

  were linked to an increase in DNA damage. Now, what is the minimum RDA for magnesium? It's about 400 milligrams, which is fine. That's a pretty good, good amount. But here's the deal, in order to get that much magnesium, you'd have to eat 115 almonds, seven avocados and 12 and a half bananas to meet that amount of magnesium. And that's why supplementing is so important in today's modern world. The question is, you know, do Americans need supplements? Do people in general need nutritional supplements? Because if you listen to most doctors, you don't.

• 34:39Speaker 02

  I mean, I, I think that is the, the thing that is so hard as a consumer in this space is just the wildly different. Opinions and like it's it's the doctor gap of people who say expensive urine to the ones who are like, this is exactly what to do for this. And it's also like the explosion on social media, you know, there's this whole kind of N equals one world right now where people are raving about, you know, this supplement is just changing my life. It makes me see in 4K. But, uh, but, you know, then they they also have their supplement store right behind it. So it's a it's an extremely difficult space to navigate.

• 35:10Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I mean, there's a lot of snake oil sales.

• 35:11Speaker 02

  A lot of snake oil sales. Yeah. Or, or, and look, there might be people who are having actual, real great experiences, but they're not aggregating that data in a way that, you know, allows anyone to make sense of it. It's just their individual story. And I think we're going through such a big, you know, battle right now in America around the individual and the institution, right? And like, who to trust in this? And that trust is really a road. Institutional trust is, you know, continuing to go down. And, you know, 51% of Americans say that they have bought a health or wellness product from a social media influencer, from something they saw on social media.

• 35:42Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Well, I bought shorts and shoes.

• 35:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, fair, fair.

• 35:46Dr. Mark Hyman?

  All right, see, we'll kind of dive a little bit deeper for us into what is Subco and how it works and why is so important?

• 35:52Speaker 02

  You know, we like to say that we're helping users make sense of supplements through our website and app. We're helping you figure out what supplements are right for your health, what products and brands you can trust, how you can save the most money and get results. To do this, we've catalogued over 200,000 supplement products that you can search in our app or by their scanning the barcode. And we've built an in-depth trust score rating from 29 different attributes that let you understand the manufacturing standards and quality of your supplements. For those looking to figure out what they want to take, we have 80 expert protocols that you can go in to find guidance on different health topics like brain fog or heart health and women's hormones. To get starting, it's pretty easy. You enter a little bit of information, start scanning your supplements to kind of catalog

• 36:37Speaker 02

  what you're already taking. We give you an analysis of your stack so that you can kind of get a score that's easy to to understand how you can improve quality, how you can improve trust and and make changes to kind of improve that. You also then can share your stack with your doctor, your friends, kind of get feedback from different people, create a conversation around it. Helps you understand if you've taken too much or too little of something, uh, which, you know, happens to a lot of people. And then we have a smart scheduler that lets you, uh, make sure you're taking your products correctly. Are you taking them with food? Are you taking them at the right time? Which, you know, will then also start tracking to see whether or not you're getting results. Uh, we launched a beta in early October. Uh, the response has been amazing. We're getting like a nearly a thousand users a day right now.

• 37:18Dr. Mark Hyman?

  October 24.

• 37:19Speaker 02

  October 24. Yeah. And we're getting a thousand users a day without even having your protocols or excited to get your protocols instead on the platform soon. And, you know, I think what's for us people to know, right now, everything on Subco is free. And we'll launch a premium membership later this year, which will have some premium features and eventually help people, uh, save money on their supplements as well. Uh, we don't sell any of your data. Uh, there's no advertisement on Subco either. And, uh, yeah, we want people to come in and be aligned with them so that we're just as excited when they stop taking something that doesn't work as when they start taking.

• 37:52Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So you're not selling something?

• 37:53Speaker 02

  We're not selling supplements and, um, if we do, we will never profit from them.

• 37:57Dr. Mark Hyman?

  We're guiding people on how to.

• 37:59Speaker 02

  Guiding people on how to.

• 38:00Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Take the best products for them that are the cleanest, that are actually matching their goals and needs. And you're, you're just providing this incredible service, which I think is such an important gap in the marketplace that you're filling. So what is the problem of nutritional deficiencies today in America? What, what do we know about the level of, of insufficiency or deficiency of nutrients? Is it widespread? Is it rare?

• 38:25Speaker 02

  I mean, look, I think this is your world. I think this is the one that you particularly would talk best about. I know my own individual struggles, but honestly, like you've got this data. This is, this is your world.

• 38:35Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I mean, the data, the data is so impressive, you know, when you look at the, and I'll just sort of share a little bit, it's kind of set the stage, but you know, NHANES is a, called the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, and it's conducted by the government. And every year they drive around, they get blood on a whole bunch of people, they test their levels and they see what's going on of all sorts of things. And nutrient levels and, and what they found is, you know, 90 plus percent of Americans are deficient in one or more nutrient. At the minimum level to prevent deficiency. And this is really an important concept for nutrients because if you, if you look at. At, for example, vitamin D, you need maybe thirty units so you don't get rickets. Right. But you might need three thousand units. Right. So you don't get osteoporosis, or cancer, or dementia, or heart disease, or autoimmune diseases,

• 39:20Dr. Mark Hyman?

  or a whole bunch of things that we call long latency deficiency diseases. There's a guy named Robert Heaney, who was a professor and brilliant scientist, who wrote a paper called Long Latency Deficiency Diseases. Right. And what essentially he was talking about was like, yeah, there's nobody walking around, really, in America with rickets anymore, or scurvy, or berry berry, or pellagra, or xerophthalmo. These are these severe deficiencies that we actually found in the turn of the century when we started refining our diet and taking, you know, white flour and white rice. That's actually how they found it, was in prisoners, they gave them white rice, they all became deficient, had these horrible diseases that were cured in a second, essentially with minuscule amounts of nutrients. When you look at the amount of deficiencies, whether it's, you know,

• 40:05Dr. Mark Hyman?

  ninety plus percent deficient omega three, eighty plus insufficient deficient in vitamin D, and some people say even more, magnesium is about forty five percent, zinc's about forty percent, iron, you know, we have a lot of deficiencies. And with function, you know, we now have one hundred and fifty thousand members of Function Health. And now, by the way, there's no waiting list, so you can just join, go to functionhealth.com/mark, you can get in and go ahead and check your levels. But we found that in looking at all the data, almost seventy percent of our members have a deficiency in a nutrient that is at the minimum reference range of the lab. Right. So in other words, for iron, this is an example. Yep.

• 40:45Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Your ferritin level, which is your iron source, should be forty five or more to feel good, to not have fatigue, to not have hair loss, to not have insomnia. There's a whole bunch of things that come with low iron. The reference range goes sixteen or lower, but it should be forty five. Sure. Right? Or homo sixteen, it's just like the level's fourteen, which should be more six to eight, which detects be vitamin deficiencies. Our vitamin D should be probably forty five to sixty, not thirty or twenty, which some lab reference changes are. And at the minimum level, which is, you know, how much you need to not get rickets or scurvy or any diseases, not, this is what the RDA is. It's not the amount you should be taking, it's the minimum amount you need to be taking so you don't get some of these horrible diseases.

• 41:30Dr. Mark Hyman?

  We're seeing almost 70% of people are deficient in these nutrients in a cohort of 150,000 people, which is a massive amount of data that we've collected at Function Health and we're learning about, you know, the kinds of things we're seeing in the population. So it's a real issue where people are not getting the nutrients they need and they don't know why they feel bad. They don't know that why they have these low grade symptoms, whether, you know, I had one patient, she had, she came in, she was a radiation oncology resident at Mayo and she had the most severe migraines. She was on narcotics, she was on, you know, major anti vomiting medication and she could barely function. And she came in and she said, oh, I have terrible migraines. And I started taking her history. I said, oh, you have other

• 42:15Dr. Mark Hyman?

  symptoms like constipation or do you have, you know, muscle spasms or do you have anxiety or irritability or palpitations or constipation? And she's like, yeah, I got all those things. I'm like, well, that's a magnesium deficiency. And it was so easy and I gave her, she needed like a thousand or more milligrams of magnesium to get her going and to clear everything out. And that cured her migraines. And you hear someone who was at Mayo Clinic, saw their best migraine doctors, did everything she could. They couldn't even diagnose this deficiency. And by the way, magnesium deficiency, you can, we test magnesium with function and we get your red cell magnesium, which is a better indicator. But to do a real magnesium loading test where you give people IV magnesium and you see what they keep and what they dump out is the best way to actually really tell. But, but even so, just by history, I could

• 42:59Dr. Mark Hyman?

  tell. And I, and after doing functional medicine for 30 years, I can tell you without a doubt, and doing nutrition testing on tens of thousands of people and deep analysis of minerals and vitamins and antioxidant levels and oxidative stress and CoQ10, all the things that people normally don't look at, it's so widespread, like nutrient deficiency is so widespread in America. So, you know, that kind of then leads into the question of, well, if that's true, then, you know, why is that true?

• 43:23Speaker 02

  By the way, what's shocking about that is 75% of Americans take a dietary supplement, 55% are regular users, yet 70% are still getting those lab results from you. So like, they're definitely taking the wrong things or not enough of the right things, you know, like, so I think that just speaks to a lot of the, you know, stuff we're trying to sort Sort out SEPCO is giving people the ability to actually know what they're putting in their body. One of the big features of being able to kind of enter everything that you're currently taking is you'll actually see your nutrient totals across all the different products. Vitamin D is coming from six of the products I take, you know, and like actually having a conversation with a doctor about what's actually going in your body.

• 43:58Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Right.

• 43:59Speaker 02

  Doesn't really happen. I remember talking to a nutritionist in the beginning. They're like, she was like very good. She said, yeah, I would spend four hours, you know, actually going over the nutrients that people were getting from the products they told me. But most people don't ever do that. I don't know who has a conversation with their doctor who knows actually what they're putting in their body.

• 44:14Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I think this is really important. So SEPCO is your company that you started to help solve this problem of what to take, quality.

• 44:21Speaker 02

  Quality.

• 44:21Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Of, you know, how can you trust where you're taking?

• 44:23Speaker 02

  Outcomes. Yeah.

• 44:24Dr. Mark Hyman?

  You know, what's the total amount of nutrients you're taking? So people might be taking 10 different supplements and that they, like I said, they all might have selenium in them.

• 44:30Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 44:30Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And then you're getting toxic doses of selenium.

• 44:32Speaker 02

  100%.

• 44:33Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And you don't know that because you're not adding it all up. You're not putting a spreadsheet. You're not doing the math. And you've created a product that does this. Now, I believe in this so much because it's what I tried to solve when I started my own sort of store for my patients, which was essentially trying to curate a small group of products that I personally had investigated, that I visited the factories, that I did the analysis, that I looked at the third party testing.

• 44:53Speaker 02

  My God.

• 44:54Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I mean, curated basically three, 400 products for functional medicine applications for basically helping people with, you know, cardio metabolic issues, for hormonal issues, for gut issues and so on, so forth. So that was a lot of work. And I've been confident that I can recommend these things to my patients or people who follow me. But I don't think it really solves a bigger problem of like, how do you figure out everything all together? And I know personally that I don't have enough time to do this for myself even.

• 45:24Speaker 02

  Totally.

• 45:25Dr. Mark Hyman?

  You know, I'm buying different things or using things.

• 45:26Speaker 02

  Right.

• 45:27Dr. Mark Hyman?

  They're like, how do I, how do I know? So that's really why I've become an advisor to SEPCO and then sort of helping you because I think this is such an important gap in the marketplace. And it's such a need. When you look at the landscape today, tell us some of the problems in the supplement industry. Why, why is this needed? Because people are just buying stuff and they don't know where it's coming from, where they get it. They can buy it on Amazon and often this stuff is sitting on a pallet for a long. Time or it's like it's some sort of ripoff product that doesn't have the nutrients in it. So tell us sort of unpack the the real issues with the supplement industry as it is today.

• 46:00Speaker 02

  As I said, we've got about on 200,000 products. There's like 195 already done and then a big queue of ones that have been submitted to us that we're going through. And that's up from 4,000 products in 1994. That's all there was, right? So it's been a

• 46:13Dr. Mark Hyman?

  4,000

• 46:14Speaker 02

  In 1994, there's 4,000 supplement products on the market and now there's over 200.

• 46:18Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That's insane.

• 46:18Speaker 02

  And so, you know, we've kind of gone in and taken each one of the supplements, taken the supplement facts, labels and kind of taken the data so that you can get an aggregate view of, you know, what you're actually putting in your body. So that helps you understand what you're taking. But addition to that, we've gone out and scored the top, there's 8,000 brands, which is insane too, if you think about it. We've taken the top 500, which covers, you know, a big percentage of it and kind of expanding down the long tail now. And we've given them a trust score. And so we basically have gone in and done what you were doing kind of manually and doing all these individual reviews, built a 29 point system that goes in and, you know, checks what certifications, what kind of testing they're doing and kind of breaks it down and gives them a score. That alone, that feature alone, you can, you can scan any, you know, supplement for its barcode.

• 47:03Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Basically, you take the bottle, you put your phone on it.

• 47:05Speaker 02

  We can do it here while we're talking too.

• 47:07Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, it's pretty, it's a pretty cool thing. You don't have to like manually enter it. You just scan your code and it

• 47:12Speaker 02

  You scan it, it pops up right away and, you know, you get the trust score and all the information about the product. It's, it's super fast. It's super easy and the hit rate is, is really high. And if we don't have something, you immediately can submit it. You can AI scan the label and it'll, it'll put it in the system and the queue is insane. Like the long tail here, there are 20,000 products in the system that only one person is taking. There's a long tail here that is, you know, absolutely insane. And that's

• 47:38Dr. Mark Hyman?

  There's unique products that are kind of not commonly taken.

• 47:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're like one person's taking. I don't know how they found it. I don't know if that's a trusted brand. And you've seen an explosion on Amazon of these kind of brands that are just quickly coming to market because there's no real thing stopping you from bringing a supplement to market. You know, there's a big difference in the FDA around the federal code between pharmaceuticals and Supplements. Supplements are governed under federal code 21 CFR 111, right?

• 48:07Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And what is that?

• 48:08Speaker 02

  And that's basically that like, you know, for pharmaceuticals, there's a whole process that they have to get pre-approved following CGMP standards and all these different things.

• 48:17Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That's good manufacturing standards.

• 48:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, current good manufacturing process. You know, with supplements, it's not something that gets done upfront. You can be held to this standard retroactively, like in the, if something comes up, but it's kind of up to you to just say.

• 48:31Dr. Mark Hyman?

  You're self-pleasing.

• 48:32Speaker 02

  You can get retroactively, someone can say they're having a negative experience reported with the FDA. They can come after you for not following the practice, but no one's checking upfront.

• 48:40Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I mean, the amount of attention that the FDA pays this is very, very little unless there's some serious adverse effect.

• 48:45Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 48:46Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Where somebody has this problem with it.

• 48:48Speaker 02

  Right. And those latent things you're talking about, the like ones that might be heavy metal exposure that take a long time to ever show up, or you don't know the source of it, there's, there's no guideline.

• 48:56Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I mean, a friend of mine was a researcher and he actually analyzed Ayurvedic supplements and found extremely high levels of heavy metals in them.

• 49:04Speaker 02

  Totally.

• 49:05Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So you're like, you're taking some Ayurvedic herb, which is some natural product and it hasn't been tested properly. And when they actually tested it, it was full of heavy metal.

• 49:11Speaker 02

  And if you, even if you follow CGMP, you're supposed to occasionally test your lots. I think it's like once a year. And then even then, they don't provide the guidance on heavy metals. It's like, kind of up to you to be like, well, for this type of product, what should the prop 65 helps a little bit, you know, in terms of making sure you don't have to put the label on there if you exceed those numbers. But it's, it's pretty, it's a pretty wild west, to be perfectly honest. And there is, there are systems now that can say, come up with an idea and a brand and get a supplement and market in weeks. So that's why you're seeing the explosion.

• 49:40Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 49:40Speaker 02

  So we've gone in and we've taken 29 different points and we've built a scoring system.

• 49:46Dr. Mark Hyman?

  This is your trust score.

• 49:47Speaker 02

  This is our trust score.

• 49:47Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So basically you're taking 29 different attributes, you know, whether it's toxic.

• 49:51Speaker 02

  Lot testing, CGMP, if, whether, the biggest one that makes a difference is whether or not you're getting a third party to certify your CGMP practices, right? That's like, kind of like the fundamental. So instead of you just saying, yeah, I'm good, you know, I'm going to self-certify that I'm following these practices. There's NSF and UL, these two big, you know, firms that'll come. And do what you are doing, you know, go tour the facilities, kind of do, make sure you're actually following, give you a certification.

• 50:16Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 50:16Speaker 02

  That's like a fundamental big one. And there's a surprising number of brands that don't.

• 50:19Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And that means that the manufacturing plant is clean.

• 50:22Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 50:23Dr. Mark Hyman?

  The way they get sourcing ingredients.

• 50:25Speaker 02

  They're testing each lot, you know, and like, there's, there's a lot, you know, to that to, to figure it out.

• 50:29Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That's true. When I started in this field in functional medicine 30 years ago, there, there were a handful of professional brands that were really marketed and sold through professionals, doctors, nutritionists and so forth, chiropractors. And you couldn't get them otherwise.

• 50:46Speaker 02

  Interesting. Yeah.

• 50:47Dr. Mark Hyman?

  You couldn't get like Metagenics or Thorne or Pure Encapsulations. They only distributed, they only distributed them through professionals because they were higher level, higher grade, a little more expensive, but you pay for, you get what you pay for. So for example, Pure Encapsulations, they, they actually test every single product, every lot. And, and what we do it before they make the stuff with the ingredients and they do it after. And if, if it says, you know, it's supposed to say 400 milligrams of, let's say magnesium on the label. If it's 350, they throw it out.

• 51:16Speaker 02

  Metagenics, who you brought up is our 10 out of 10. They're our highest scoring brand on the platform.

• 51:21Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 51:21Speaker 02

  They do like one thing that is, is rare, but we, we really, we give some, some points to it is they make every batch test COA publicly available. So you can like, look at your bottle, look at the lot number, go online, pull it up and see the results from the test. That's like a gold standard for us. Pure ranks very highly and there's, but then there's a big spectrum, you know?

• 51:43Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I mean, and the stuff that you get in the grocery store or Walmart or the drugstore is generally crap. Like you sent me, they texted me a screenshot of Centrum.

• 51:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:54Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Which is, you know, this massive advertising and it's really a big product out there. Everything's Centrum. It's high quality. It's good. I mean, but they've got, why do you take a blue pill or a red pill or have titanium dioxide or have dyes and chemicals?

• 52:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, that, that was a super interesting thing about that Centrum pill in particular is that like the Centrum brand ranking is pretty high, but we just started exposing the excipients, the inactive ingredients.

• 52:18Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 52:19Speaker 02

  And it had titanium. Dioxide, red forty, red five, like these things that, I'm sorry, yellow five. These things that are, that are not good. I mean titanium dioxide is not, it's banned in Europe.

• 52:30Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 52:30Speaker 02

  Like it causes DNA damage and they don't need to be in your, in your supplements. So that's another thing we just rolled out was not just the manufacturing standards, but now we're going down to the product level.

• 52:40Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 52:40Speaker 02

  And actually going in, we have like a, forget how many, it's a couple of thousand of these excipients that get added and bringing them out by, you know, how cautious you should be about.

• 52:49Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah. And there's a lot of stuff in them that we often are not known, like there could be gluten or dairy, like lactose or other things that are in these, in addition to all the other kind of excipients, fillers, additives, colors, chemicals, things that make it look good or, or stick together. And I mean, you don't want that crap. You want the nutrient.

• 53:09Speaker 02

  And I think it's going to be interesting. We're, we're starting to send out, you know, different supplements for our own independent testing to do what you were saying, just kind of like verify that even if they're highly rated, are they, is it actually in there what they say it is, right? So the precision of the nutrients that they're, they're claiming are in there. It, it's a complicated market and I think that what we've done though, by just making a simple score, like making it out of 10 is like, it makes it really easy for people to understand, right? The simple like red, yellow, green, like you can go deep and you can go look at each of the 29 points.

• 53:38Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Your trust score is one to 10, like this is a nine, this is a two.

• 53:41Speaker 02

  That has been helpful for people to just like simply take a glance. Cause some, the, the user base we have, you know, one thing I like doing in general when designing software is it's got to be easy enough for, for grandma to use, but powerful enough for, you know, the most hardcore user in the space to go deep on. Right. I did that with, with Splice, uh, making sure that 40% of top 40 music using it to create music. They're like the hardcore guys and the brand new music creators, right? So we're doing this in supplements, right? There's a, there's a way to dive way deep into what those 29 points are and each one of the excipients and all that. Or you can simply look at the score at the top and be like, okay, that feels good. Because some people just, we gotta be, meet the consumers where they are.

• 54:17Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Cause nobody's really doing that. There was a, there was a company called Consumer Lives.

• 54:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:21Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That, that I used to kind of use to reference stuff where they would go and test products. And I would, I would rely on, on their independent analysis. But you know, they weren't, they weren't able to do the 200,000 products. So you basically, just for the simple scan of the barcode, the technology behind it, the use of AI. I mean, it's, it's quite amazing. Now you can literally see what is the problem or how good a product is and whether or not it's actually says what it is on the label.

• 54:47Speaker 02

  Yeah. And like, I think the big thing too is like, we're not out here to, we just want to kind of arc the, the industry in the right direction. Right? Like some of our trust scores, if you find a negative one, we're not all doing the big gotcha, you know, story on it. We're having conversations. A lot of the brands have reached out to us. First, the, the top end brands are like, thank you. Right? Thank you for simplifying and raising to the attention how much work we are putting into testing this. So like, super appreciative. You know, sometimes they'll clarify a piece of data that we might not have, right? Cause we've collected it through our teams, you know, reaching out to them and they might provide something which is great. And then we've had brands also reaching out. One, they want their trust work. The consumers are, are starting to care about this. And then how do we make it better? Right? And that's our big dream. If we can just help the industry

• 55:31Speaker 02

  move in the right direction on this, with the scores, I think we've done something really great.

• 55:36Dr. Mark Hyman?

  When it comes to supplements, you only want the best for your body, the kind with the highest quality, cleanest and most potent ingredients you can get. That's exactly what you'll find at my supplement store, where I've hand selected each and every product to meet the most rigorous standards for safety, purity and effectiveness. These are the only supplements I recommend to my patients and they're also what I use myself. Whether you want to optimize longevity or reduce your disease risk, or you're looking to improve your sleep, blood sugar, metabolism, gut health, you name it. Drhyman.com has the world's best selection of top quality, premium supplements, all backed by science and expertly vetted by me, Dr. Mark Hyman. So check out Drhyman.com because when it comes to your health, nothing less than the very best will do. That's Drhyman.com, D R H Y M A N dot com.

• 56:20Dr. Mark Hyman?

  If you love this podcast, please share it with someone else you think would also enjoy it. You can find me on all social media channels at Dr. Mark Hyman. Please reach out. I'd love to hear your comments and questions. Don't forget to rate, review and subscribe to the Dr. Hyman Show wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to check out my YouTube channel at Dr. Mark Hyman for video versions of this podcast and more. Thank you so much again for tuning in. We'll see you next time on the Dr. Hyman Show. This podcast is separate from my clinical practice at the Ultra Wellness Center, my work at Cleveland Clinic, and Function Health, where I am Chief Medical Officer. This podcast represents my opinions and my guests' opinions. Neither myself nor the podcast endorses the views or statements of my guests. This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor

• 57:02Dr. Mark Hyman?

  or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided with the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, please seek out a qualified medical practitioner. And if you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, visit my clinic, the Ultra Wellness Center at ultrawellnesscenter.com, and request to become a patient. It's important to have someone in your corner who is a trained, licensed healthcare practitioner and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health. This podcast is free as part of my mission to bring practical ways of improving health to the public. So I'd like to express gratitude to sponsors that made today's podcast possible. Thanks so much again for listening.