I liken taking the greens blend to raiding the shelves at Home Depot when you’re trying to maintain your house. When the body is looking for something to repair itself, it’ll go to the shelves in search of the best tools, and if the right nutrients are available, it will make the proper repairs in the most effective manner possible. If it doesn’t, it will simply pull from the discount bin by the register and use a glue gun and duct tape and hope for the best. By taking in these greens, you’re giving your body the run of the store.

While every greens blend is different, and therefore not a lot of studies have been done, there is no doubt that supplementing with vitamins and minerals is beneficial. If you don’t get enough of these nutrients you are more likely to be sick, violent, and all other manner of unpleasantness. As stated above, the problem with some multivitamins is that the form of the ingredient used is sometimes dissimilar to those found in food. So when it comes to a “multi,” going green is usually the way to go.

MAGNESIUM

Just like calcium, magnesium supplementation has been shown in clinical research to assist with facilitating healthy bone mass, the performance of athletes, supporting men and women during exercise, even improving blood sugar regulation through diminishing insulin resistance. But what you are gonna notice is less. Less stress, less static, and less antsiness throughout your body. You’re gonna notice everything relax, and get a little more quiet. It’s probably why the most popular magnesium supplement in the world is simply called Calm. Magnesium is involved in thousands of chemical reactions. In the Home Depot of nutrient supplementation, magnesium is the hardware section. There’s something there that connects to every aspect of your body temple.

KRILL OIL: SUPPLEMENT OMEGA-3

The reason some of your breakfast options today contain chia seeds, flax, and grass-fed beef or dairy is that those are some of the simplest nutritional sources of omega-3 fatty acids. The other, and probably the best, is oily fish. If we lived in Japan, that would be in your breakfast as well, but instead we’ll save it for lunch.

Chia and flax are not the easiest things to find on the menu, and fresh, organic oily fish is equally difficult in many parts of the world. So in lieu of that, you can supplement your diet with fish oil or, even better, krill oil. I remember the first time I tried a higher dose of krill oil, somewhere in the 5-gram range. I took it at night, and it felt like the oil’s essential omega-3 fatty acids (EPA and DHA), along with its intrinsic antioxidant astaxanthin and its brain-healthy nutrient phosphatidylcholine, were running through my bloodstream like a fire hose, just blasting out all the inflammation in my body. It works because these hard-to-find fatty acids balance out the omega-3 to omega-6 ratio, and as a result reduce normal systemic inflammation.

In chapter 2, we learned about inflammation, but here we’re more concerned with how it feels. Simply put, it sucks. It feels like inner heat. It can cause your joints to ache and your brain to be a little fuzzy. Why krill oil and not fish oil? Studies show that with krill oil you get the same metabolic effects at lower doses. Translation: it’s just more potent. And as a bonus, krill oil has even been shown to help the ladies out on their menstrual cycle. Since I am clearly unqualified to discuss the menstrual cycle, the abstract of the study says that krill oil is “significantly more effective for the complete management of premenstrual symptoms compared to omega-3 fish oil.”

SUPPLEMENT VITAMIN D

Thanks to our friend the sun and our skin’s remarkable ability to make a ton of vitamin D out of its ultraviolet B rays, vitamin D is free for all. Usually all you need is twenty to thirty minutes of direct sun exposure to your skin. Unfortunately, not all sun or all skin is created equal. Twenty minutes of sun for one person in one place can be an entirely different (and potentially worse) experience than thirty minutes of sun for another person in another place. The sun puts us in a bit of a predicament that way: too much sun is bad for the skin, but not enough sun means we don’t get adequate vitamin D.

So how do we measure? How do we find the line? Typically, we don’t. We can’t. Even if we could, it would just confirm something we already know: more often than not we are significantly deficient in this critical vitamin that is important for over two hundred bodily processes, concerning everything from optimal mood to bone health. Vitamin D supplementation has been shown in clinical research to help reduce body fat mass, maintain muscle mass and reduce fractures, and correct mood-related issues.

Kevin Estrada, a professional hockey player, was in a devastating water plane crash that ended his career. He lives in British Columbia—where it rains all the time and there’s a lot of cloud cover—and began to feel run down. His body was still broken, he had low energy, and his mood felt off. Vitamin D fit all the criteria of a supplement that could really help him. When he got his blood checked for vitamin D, of course Kevin was deficient.

He started taking vitamin D supplements, along with its ride-or-die companion vitamin K₂, at 5,000 micrograms of D a day and sometimes even higher. That’s a relatively high dose, but it started to turn things around with his mood and his energy levels. It was as close to an instant fix as he’d ever thought possible, and it’s the kind of supplement most of us need if we want to consistently perform our best.

SUPPLEMENT PROBIOTICS

I take a lot of different probiotics for a lot of different reasons, but the one that saved my ass—literally—is a yeast-based strain called Saccharomyces boulardii. When I traveled to South America and particularly Peru, I’d spend my time in the Amazon rain forest. As much as I enjoyed those trips, there was one factor that sucked some of the joy out of it—from the back. I’d return from each trip and spend the next two weeks getting reacquainted with the finer points of porcelain toilet production as traveler’s diarrhea made its way through my system. As careful as I was with the water, inevitably I’d consume certain foods and vegetables, and some nasty bug would get into my GI tract.

At one point, I’d had enough. I loved, and maybe even needed, those trips to the jungle, but I didn’t want to come back and have to count steps to the bathroom. I started researching probiotics to support my gut, and I came across S. boulardii. I brought some with me on my next trip to Peru—and it was miraculous. I had no issues while I was down there, and no issues upon return. The studies back it up: whether it’s Crohn’s disease, or irritable bowel, S. boulardii is the shit for problems with your shit.

Napoleon once said, “An army marches on its stomach.” He wasn’t just talking about what went into soldiers, he was just as concerned with the amount coming out. And while we are not locked in a land war with Russia (yet), and you are probably not regularly contending with Montezuma’s revenge, we are at war against nutrient deficiency. I can assure you that you are only going to make it as far as your gut takes you. Not only is the gut largely responsible for our immune system, and perhaps even our personality, through the regulation of hormones and neurotransmitters, more simply it is responsible for digesting and disseminating our fuel source from food. A lot of weight-management issues have to do with the gut. A meta-analysis of studies showed significant improvements in obesity with probiotic supplementation. If you want to feel more like yourself again, and get that human machine humming from the inside, this supplementation regimen is essential.

There are also important impacts on regulating mood. The burgeoning field of psychobiotics, in which targeted gut treatments are being explored to assist with all sorts of medical conditions, is one of the hottest fields in medicine. It is my personal opinion, along with that of the psychiatrist Dr. Dan Engle, that the role of gut biome transplants, in which a healthy person’s microbiome is transplanted and seeded into another person, is one of the frontiers of medicine.

It’s why you’re seeing the increasing use of probiotics, yogurts advertising the cultures they have, the trend toward fecal transplants, and the chatter about the gut … everywhere. Bestselling books. Blogs. News stories. The gut biome is hot—and with good reason.

ACTIVE B VITAMINS

When Kobe Bryant or LeBron James—or a young Aubrey Marcus, starting shooting guard for Westlake High School—needed to play a basketball game with the flu, there was one vitamin to reach for: B₁₂. B vitamins are involved in everything, from the conversion of nutrients into neurotransmitters like serotonin to proper mitochondrial function. You can feel it when you take a good B vitamin: there aren’t any questions. You will have more energy, more resilience, more bounce in your step. Think of it like this: “I’ve got your back, B.”

Not everyone handles the absorption of B vitamins well, however. A good portion of people, for instance, struggle to uptake the essential B vitamin folate, or folic acid, and supplementation with a methylated version, like 5-methyltetrahydrofolate, can make a huge difference. One study showed that people suffering from major psychiatric conditions like schizophrenia or depression were deficient in folate, and benefited from methylfolate supplementation. Generally speaking, the methylated form of vitamin B, methylcobalamin, is more easily absorbed by the body, so pay attention to your body and make sure you supplement with B vitamins that are packaged the best for your system.

Pro Tip: IV Vitamin Therapy

IV vitamins have been used in emergency-room care for years. Ask any medical student or young ER doctor how they deal with a bad hangover, and they will give you two words: banana bag. They are referring to a standard IV solution bag that contains many of the vitamins and minerals you need. The advantage of the IV is that it bypasses the gut, ensuring that the vitamins are delivered into the blood. A lot of places have popped up extending this service, not just to the sick but to the healthy (or the hungover). One of the best is a program developed by functional medicine wizard Dr. Craig Koniver called Fast Vitamin IV. It offers not only the usual suspects, but a whole host of amino acids to further assist with recovery.

Whether it is a dose of vitamin B₁₂ to give you additional energy and pep, or glutathione to help restore your liver, or just a plain old banana bag to cover your bases, IV therapy is only going to get more popular. And as the price goes down, the only question you really need to answer for yourself is: Is the juice worth the squeeze?

The Emptor-iest of All Caveats

If you’re not taking supplements, you’re missing an opportunity, plain and simple. But taking the wrong supplements is just as bad, and sometimes it’s worse than taking no supplements at all, because not all supplements work. We have all tried some that didn’t do shit. Some are not strong enough; some have herbs that don’t do what they say, or vitamins that won’t absorb. You can spend hundreds of dollars on things that basically create more expensive pee, with no performance gains to show for it. The key is to find a good company that makes quality products.

I personally take products from several other places besides Onnit, including Sunwarrior, Healthforce Superfoods, NuMedica, and LivOn. Unfortunately, our industry is full of brands peddling a ton of garbage, so it is extra critical for you to choose wisely when it comes to supplements and the companies that sell them. Believe me, I understand the potential for elephantine bias in those words, as a supplement maker myself, but it doesn’t make them any less true or the need for me to say them any less urgent. This isn’t Supplement Supermarket Sweep, after all. We can’t have you just running down the aisles of your local GNC with your arms out, scooping bottles into your basket without reading the labels and figuring out who made what’s inside.

Here’s what you need to know and look for when you’re shopping around for each of the supplements we’ve just recommended:

Avoid supplements that make medical claims. Supplements are technically categorized as a food, not a drug, by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Foods can benefit your health, but drugs treat medical conditions. Therefore, a supplement company cannot advertise that its product is able to fix a medical condition or a disease of any sort without the bitch slap of justice eventually finding its mark upside their head. Remember that product Airborne, which was supposed to keep you from getting sick while flying or teaching elementary school? Well, those exaggerated promises cost its makers to the tune of $23 million.

If a supplement is claiming a miracle cure for a real medical condition, you know at least one of two things. The company making it is either about to get sued, or run by amateurs too small to get noticed by the FDA and too insignificant to be penalized by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Both of those are red flags, especially the latter. Amateurs can produce supplements and get them on the shelf without actually following the rules. It’s kind of like those unlabeled cookies wrapped in cling film at the counter of the gas station. Who makes those things? While this informality occasionally results in delicious cookies, it’s not what you want for supplements. Supplements must be controlled by a variety of FDA checkpoints during the development and production process.

First of all, every ingredient needs to have something called GRAS (generally recognized as safe) status. If it’s not on the GRAS list, it shouldn’t be in the formula. Second, there are strict laws concerning how the food/supplement is produced. This is called good manufacturing practice (GMP). Every supplement needs to be produced in a GMP-compliant facility until it is fully packaged and sealed, preventing contamination. These facilities are regularly audited by the FDA and additionally audited by the manufacturing brands. Finally, every supplement is tested for microbial and metal contamination twice before it is released to the public: each ingredient is tested individually, then the finished batch is tested. You can be fairly confident that supplements making medical claims have not cleared these rigorous regulatory hurdles on their way from some dude’s basement to your kitchen counter.

Avoid companies that don’t perform randomized clinical trials on their own products. If a company hasn’t performed any clinical trials, it is a sign that either they are cheap or they don’t believe their stuff works. As a point of reference, we spent over $400,000 to get our nootropic formula tested twice by the Boston Center for Memory against placebo. There was plenty of research on the ingredients already published, and in chapter 6 you’ll read about one in particular. But we wanted to do more than just suggest that our product would work. We wanted to test it in the most rigorous method possible—randomized clinical trials, run by someone who had no stake in whether Alpha Brain worked or not. That’s important: it’s so easy for great marketers to convince you that a product will help your memory or help you lose weight; it’s a lot harder to show—with evidence, data, and testing—that it actually does so. While it usually isn’t feasible to run tests on every single product, if a company hasn’t run independent clinical trials on any products, they are not for you.

Watch out for supplements filled with caffeine. One of the big ways those great marketers make you think that what you’re swallowing is doing what they say it will is by juicing it with caffeine. The caffeine gives you an instant hit when you take it, and you end up saying to yourself, “Well, it’s definitely doing something!” And it is: it’s sinking its little hormonal claws into your adrenal system and memorizing your credit card number. There are plenty of good ways to take caffeine. They usually don’t involve supplements. So avoid most supplements that contain heavy caffeine; it’s there to cover up the weaknesses of the core product.

Prescription

Since all supplements are different, and you are different, I’m not going to give you specific amounts to take here. The first step is to supplement your lifestyle in the most natural way possible. Get more sunshine, spinach, and fish, and eat all the weird foods you can. We’ll talk about more of that in chapter 8. Then when it comes to dietary supplements, the best practice is to talk to a health-care practitioner, dietitian, or functional medicine specialist.

It’s also important not to expect miracles or dramatic overnight changes. Your problems weren’t built in a day; the solutions may not come so quickly either. Since I am acutely aware of how my body functions and feels (hey, it’s my job!), I can usually feel a difference the same day I take a supplement, but I have also learned that sometimes it takes weeks before you accrue the whole-body benefits. Track how you feel over time. Do that however you like: use an app, keep a journal, send yourself an email at the end of each day. Just make sure to get a sense of whether and how something you’ve taken is affecting you.

Pro Tip: Don’t Make Me Think

Sourcing all these things can be intimidating, but I encourage you to see what’s out there. We’ve done a lot of the work for you, though, with formulas that pack all the key vitamins and minerals, along with greens and krill oil, plus a host of herbal nutrients in convenient day and night packs. We also offer a complete care kit for your gut that includes probiotics you can take with any meal. All the packs are sleek, easy to travel with, and absolutely comprehensive. I could pretend that I don’t think ours is the best solution, but that would be withholding information from you just to avoid seeming biased. It’s what I use, and it’s the starting point for our pro team and many of the customers we serve.

Now Do It

What is a supplement really going to do for me? That’s the question you were probably asking as you worked your way through the material in this chapter. It’s definitely the question I get most often when I meet new people and tell them what I do. If it’s the right supplement, the answer is … something. The clinical research backs that up.

Suppose your mood is a little better from the vitamin D. When your daughter asks you “Why, Daddy?” for the tenth time, instead of getting snippy you can answer her with a tickle and a smile.

Suppose you have more mental energy from the B vitamins. Instead of surfing Facebook at work because your brain is too tired, you actually start working on the long-term project that is going to take your career to the next level.

Suppose your joints don’t ache after the krill oil. Instead of sliding onto the couch when you get home, you go for a nice long run to clear your head.

Suppose you can relax better after mineral supplementation. Instead of being stressed all night, you read a book that changes the way you think about some aspect of your world.

Suppose you don’t have to worry about getting diarrhea when you travel that world. Maybe you book that trip to Peru and come back a different person.

Small things have big consequences. Over time, those consequences compound. We are the accumulated momentum of all our choices. Some of those choices are binary. Go to the gym or not: that choice in that moment is going to change your day. Over time that choice will change your life. We tend to ignore the importance of fractional benefit because we lose sight of the concept of the tipping point—the little benefit that tips the cup to release a flood of benefit. It may be a 2 percent difference in force or momentum that flips the coin from heads to tails, or yes to no.

Supplements stack the odds in your favor. You will survive without them. But will you thrive without them? Will you be your best? Probably not. You’re likely leaving some level of performance on the table. What is that costing you? That’s for you to find out. Whether that means scheduling time in the sun, eating mad greens, taking Epsom salts baths, or purchasing some supplements from a reputable source, the key is to treat yourself like a pro. Because you are a pro … you are professional at being you. You get paid for it, right? So be the best fucking you that you can be.

THREE POINTERS

There are two primary reasons to supplement: to remediate potential deficiencies, and to gain access to unusual or hard-to-find nutrients. You don’t need to think of supplements as something that comes in a capsule, either. Getting the right amount of sun, sleep, and food is itself a kind of supplementation, and the first line of defense.

The key things to consider supplementing are greens, probiotics, B vitamins, krill oil, vitamin D, and additional minerals.

While dietary supplements are generally safe, and more regulated than you might have heard, they are not all created equal. Look for companies that engage in clinical research on their products and use natural forms of ingredients when possible.

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