If I Had to Start My Health Journey Over, I'd Take These 5 Supplements

Americans spent more than $69 billion on supplements last year, yet nutrient deficiencies are still widespread. Somewhere along the way, wellness became a cabinet full of pills, powders, and promises. But what if better health isn't about taking more? In this episode, I share the five supplements I would prioritize if I had to start over today. These aren't trendy products or quick fixes. They're foundational nutrients that support metabolism, hormones, muscle, brain health, and healthy aging, especially for women in midlife. You'll also learn why supplements should never replace a healthy lifestyle, how soil depletion and processed foods have changed the nutrient quality of our food, and simple ways to get more of these nutrients through whole foods first. If your supplement routine feels overwhelming, this episode will help you simplify it. Resources Mentioned Age Like a Girl https://bit.ly/alagbookNervous System Reset Guide https://resetacademy.drmindypelz.com/nervous-system-resetStandard Process Cod Liver Oil https://drmindypelz.standardprocess.com/products/cod-liver-oilBEAM Minerals https://www.beamminerals.com/?oid=4&affid=648LMNT https://www.drinklmnt.com/pages/mindypelz-gift?rfsn=5286941.eac439&utm_medium=affiliate&utm_source=mindypelz&utm_campaign=agwp&utm_content=&utm_term=Redmonds Real Salt https://glnk.io/oq72y/drmindypelzQualia Creatine https://www.qualialife.com/shop?rfsn=5237174.cd3714Qualia Magnesium https://www.qualialife.com/shop?rfsn=5237174.cd3714For more resources related to today’s episode, visit the podcast episode page: drmindypelz.com/ep348 https://www.drmindypelz.com/ep348 Connect with Dr. Mindy: Join Reset Academy https://resetacademy.drmindypelz.com/reset-academy?utm_source=libsyn&utm_medium=podcast&utm_term=&utm_content=loc-description&utm_campaign=reset-academyWatch the episodes on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@DrMindyPelz?sub_confirmation=1Follow Dr. Mindy on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/dr.mindypelz/Subscribe to Dr. Mindy’s newsletter https://www.drmindypelz.com/ Disclaimer: This podcast is intended for educational and informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical advice. Always consult a qualified healthcare professional before making changes to your diet, fasting routine, or lifestyle.

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

• 0:00Mindy Pelz?

  Hey, Dr. Mindy here, and welcome to the Live Like a Girl podcast, where I bring you icons, disruptors, educators, scientists, and doctors that show you what can be possible when you love and celebrate the female body you are blessed to live in. Let's dive in. Americans spent $69.3 billion on supplements in 2024, and roughly 55% of US adults now take them on a regular basis. Yet 60% of us are still low in magnesium, and the majority of us don't even get enough potassium.

• 0:43Mindy Pelz?

  We are spending more than ever and still running on empty. I think we've reached a breaking point with supplements. Somewhere along the way, wellness became a cabinet full of pills, powders, and promises. Put in the comments if you've noticed that. And many women are spending hundreds of dollars every month while still feeling exhausted, inflamed, and frustrated. Most people are just in an endless cycle trying to fix symptoms with almost any supplement they can come across when they most likely have a foundation problem, a lifestyle foundational problem. They are missing a handful of key nutrients

• 1:28Mindy Pelz?

  that support metabolism, energy, brain function, muscle health, and healthy aging. Yet, instead of fixing these gaps, they're chasing every new trend on social media. So today, we're going to simplify these things. If I could only recommend five supplements for women, you can throw the rest of them out. These are the ones that I would choose, and not because they are trendy, but because they consistently support the systems that matter most for longevity, hormone balance, metabolic health, and feeling your best, which is what we want to be doing, right?

• 2:12Mindy Pelz?

  So get ready, because I'm about to save you a whole lot of money and make life a lot easier.

• 2:25Mindy Pelz?

  And so, let's start with this thought. Why does the cabinet keep growing and nothing changes? I call it shiny object syndrome. Where we see something and we're like, "I want that. That's going to make my life a lot easier. That's going to be something that is going to give me a shortcut to a result that I am chasing." There are no shortcuts when it comes to health. So, we need to start with a foundation of eating well, and we need to start with a foundation of fasting. And then, when we go and we look at our supplements, there are three things that I think is really important for us to understand

• 3:09Mindy Pelz?

  on why we have so many nutrient deficiencies. The first one is soil depletion. That is a... Our food is being grown in soil that has no nutrients. The second is ultra-processed foods. They are devoid of nutrients. And the third is hyper-restrictive diet trends that quietly strip your nutrients out of your food. And why this matters for women 45 to 64 is these five nutrients that I'm about to lay out for you sit underneath metabolism, energy, brain function, muscle, hormones, and healthy aging. And you want to make sure that you have this stack. So, here are the five.

• 3:54Mindy Pelz?

  Let's go into them. And first, don't forget, these are not a supplement for food. We gotta nail your food. Please keep paying attention to the quality of food that you eat. So, first one is vitamin D. Vitamin D is the master regulator, and it behaves more like a hormone than a vitamin. And it's involved in over 1,000 processes across the body and brain. So, your body needs it to make normal cellular processes. For midlife women, vitamin D supports mood and serotonin production. It protects bone and muscle, and it eases common menopause symptoms.

• 4:38Mindy Pelz?

  So, there was a meta-analysis of several random-controlled trials that found vitamin D supplementation did actually improve hand grip strength.

• 4:51Mindy Pelz?

  In post-menopausal women, and what they found was, yeah, you need vitamin D for muscle. Think about that. How many people are like, lift more weights? You're in post-menopause, and then we lift weights, and it's just exhausting, and we hate it. Maybe if you up your vitamin D, you might have more muscle strength. So there was an interesting study on vitamin D and menopause in the frontiers of physiology. It's a 2023 review. And it said that raising vitamin D, just what I had told you, I just want you to see that there's science here, relieved mood, it helped with bone health, muscle health, and sexual symptoms in menopausal women. Second nutrient, magnesium.

• 5:34Mindy Pelz?

  Magnesium is the nutrient that most women are missing. It is the calm the system down nutrient. And it will help with stress, with sleep, with blood sugar, and with nervous system regulation. But honestly, here's the rub, is that stress depletes magnesium. And so, low magnesium makes you more reactive to stress. So it's a vicious cycle. But if there was one nutrient, I would tell you to make sure you are having, as a midlife woman, it's magnesium. Make sure you are getting plenty of magnesium.

• 6:14Mindy Pelz?

  And a nutrients review in 2018 shows that 60% of US adults have low magnesium, and 45% of us are clinically deficient. So please work on upping your magnesium. And the higher the magnesium intake, the better your metabolic health too. So those of you that are trying to lose weight. Number three, trace minerals.

• 6:43Mindy Pelz?

  Minerals are funny. They're little like energizers for the cell. And if we don't have any minerals in our soil, as our fruits and vegetables are growing in our soil, we're not going to have minerals in our food. And if we don't have minerals in our food, then we're not getting minerals in our body. And if we don't have minerals, then these are like spark plugs for cellular processes. And then the cell starts to get lethargic and wear itself out. So that is not what we're going for. So we need to make sure that you get more minerals into your body. There are a lot of different ways. There are a lot of different supplements. I'll leave all of my favorite supplements for all of these. I'll leave them in the notes.

• 7:28Mindy Pelz?

  And if I have discount codes, I'll give them to you if that's attractive to you. But the important thing with minerals is that this is one of the ones, I talk about this a lot with fasting, that this is one of the ones I think you're going to have to supplement in, unless you're eating from a regenerative farm. I can tell you one thing that I've replaced is I've gone to microgreens because the nutrient and the mineral density in there is so profound. So you might try some microgreens, grow some microgreens. Otherwise, we need to lean into things like B minerals that I've talked a lot about,

• 8:08Mindy Pelz?

  or any kind of electrolyte or element T. The better quality mineral supplement you get, the more improvement in your health you will get. Okay, number four is omega-3s. So this is really your anti-inflammatory foundation. And I've talked about this here too, and I really want to point this out, that when we look at omega-3s, we want to have an omega-6 to omega-3 ratio, that is 1 to 1. Most Americans have an 18 to 1 ratio. And so what's happening is that we have a challenge

• 8:52Mindy Pelz?

  with too many omega-6s to omega-3s.

• 8:57Mindy Pelz?

  And so we go into an inflammatory state. So there's two ways you can work with that. You can bring your omega sixes down. This is like canola oil, cottonseed oil, all those kinds of things. Or you can bring your omega threes up. And this is why supplementation can be helpful. I personally do cod liver oil by a standard process. Again, I'll leave that in the notes for you guys. But I like olive oil. I like MCT oil. I like wild fish. I like sardines. Those are great ways to bring your omega threes up. Having this ratio, this one to one ratio is critical for brain health, for metabolic health, and for aging.

• 9:40Mindy Pelz?

  The more inflammation you have in your body, the harder it is, the more signs of aging that you're going to see. And I've been talking about this ratio for a while now. And I found something interesting that a UK biobank analysis said a higher omega six to omega three ratio was correlated with all-cause mortality, cancer, and cardiovascular disease. This is no joke. That is a ratio you want to make sure that you go after. Number five. This is a big trendy one. And I gotta say, I'm hopping on the trend, and it's creatine.

• 10:25Mindy Pelz?

  And creatine isn't just for bodybuilders. I wrote about creatine. I have a whole section on it in Age Like a Girl, in this book, my most recent book. I have a whole section on movement and what we need to know to be able to, it's called Exercising the Menopause Way. And I have all the creatine protocols in here that you might find helpful. But as estrogen goes down, creatine follows. And creatine is really about muscular health and muscular support. It fuels muscle strength and recovery, but it also helps cognition.

• 11:06Mindy Pelz?

  So what's interesting about creatine, and I did a creatine masterclass on this channel too. But what's interesting about creatine is you want to give it in five gram doses throughout the day. Because your muscle will take it in first. And then when it hits a threshold, it will go to the brain. We also know that creatine has been great for jet lag. So those of you who are looking or traveling a lot, we really want to look at adding creatine in. Now, some new science that's kind of interesting is that creatine fuels both muscle strength and recovery. So those of you who are having really intense workouts, you're upping your strength and you can't,

• 11:50Mindy Pelz?

  what's happened, and then the next two days, you're just so sore, try some creatine. And it's a well-established that it will help with recovery. And there was a 25 systematic review that found five out of six studies linked creatine to not just better muscle recovery, but to better memory and attention in older adults. This was a fairly large study. Is that we have to start to look at creatine as a necessary resource as we age. Not just for muscle, but also for cognition.

• 12:31Mindy Pelz?

  Okay, now, I just want to talk about the fact that more supplements doesn't equal better. I think one of the greatest things you can do for your health is to try to build a lifestyle that never needs a supplement. I'm not joking. Look at what you like magnesium, you can get magnesium in chocolate. Get a high-quality chocolate. You can get trace minerals in microgreens. Start to get those microgreens. You can get creatine. In, in a lot of meats and cartilage meats, especially like skin on a chicken. So start eating more of those. Vitamin D you can get in sardines. So I want to just say if you can go after the food first, that's phenomenal.

• 13:16Mindy Pelz?

  But if you find you're doing supplement after supplement after supplement, that is not wellness. That is, that is money going out that you are wasting. It is always your lifestyle first. So if you have 12 items, start to work on bringing them down. Here are your five action steps. Okay, first, let's just get some sunlight so we can get vitamin D. 20 minutes in the sun, midday, as much skin exposure as possible. And how about we start building, this is all in the first one, how about we start building a foundational food plate that gives you these nutrients?

• 13:58Mindy Pelz?

  So take 10 to 15 minutes every, I like 20, in the sun. And then when you are building a meal, make sure you're building meals around color. I've talked a lot about protein. I've talked a lot about, about fat and, and fiber. But let's talk about color. Look at the color on your plate and see how that, if you have, the more color, the more nutrients, right? So if you have two red pepper, a red pepper and a yellow pepper, even though they both are yummy in my book, they're going to have very different nutrients. So eat the rainbow is still a thing. Number two is upgrade your salt and water.

• 14:42Mindy Pelz?

  So this is interesting because switching to an unrefined trace mineral salt and adding a pinch of it to your morning water may be all the minerals you need. So get yourself, we like Redmond sea salt. It doesn't have plastics in it. Again, we'll leave links down here. Sprinkle a little bit in your water and that addition of salt, well, salt to your water when you drink it actually helps you hydrate better, better than just a glass of water. Okay, number three is we want to lean in to the magnesium-rich foods. So magnesium is such a powerful one. You're getting, I just mentioned sunlight, I mentioned salt, but let's talk about magnesium.

• 15:27Mindy Pelz?

  Magnesium-rich foods are leafy greens, pumpkin seeds, and dark chocolate. And we want to start to add those in especially at night because it tells your body to wind down. Okay, number four, let's get your omega-3s up. And I talked about that. We can do this through olive oil, we can do this through sardines and anchovies. And even salmon, wild salmon is incredible. Cod liver oil, if you want to just take it straight, otherwise I have pills that I take it with. But we want to get your omega-3s up so it balances those out. And number five, add creatine and lift.

• 16:09Mindy Pelz?

  So I've heard a lot of people say, "Oh, creatine made me bloated, made me gain weight." Well, it's just like eating too much protein. If you don't use all those amino acids, if you don't use all those nutrients that you're putting into your body, your body will store it. So make sure if you're upping your creatine that you're also lifting weights. So you don't end up with, you know, a puffy face or some bloatedness, which is something that I've heard over and over again. So those are the five nutrients that I'm going to continue to say we keep an eye on. I'm also going to say you can get it in food. But if you know you're just one of those people that won't, get it in supplements and throw the rest of the supplements out in your house. Let's keep it down to five.

• 16:52Mindy Pelz?

  You may even send this, if you're like me, I've got, I've got a mom that really loves her supplements. She's got, her whole countertop has got supplements on it. I've had this in the past where I've had too many supplements. I have pared back on supplements. The more I understand food, the less I want to reach for supplements. So send this video to somebody who you know needs to pare down their supplements. But most importantly, wellness isn't in a supplement. It should be supplementing a really strong lifestyle. And put in the chat if you've been able to get off your supplements and you're using these five and have seen results, I'd love to hear about it. Most importantly, don't give up on yourself and I hope that helps.

• 17:37Mindy Pelz?

  If you like this video, you're definitely gonna want to check out the next one.