87. Navigating the Supplement Maze: Balancing Health Claims and Truths

Do you ever wonder if you're getting the right nutrients from your diet or if you need all those supplements? Join me in this episode of Real Food Stories into the complex world of dietary supplements. I'll share what supplements I take (it's not a lot!), emphasizing the importance of balancing food and supplements. We’ll discuss the potential health risks of overconsumption, like those linked to calcium supplements, and underscore why consulting credible sources like nutritionists and dietitians is crucial.

Feeling overwhelmed by the slick marketing of vitamin supplements? You're not alone. We'll dissect the hype around celebrity-endorsed products, with a special focus on Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop brand and its "High School Genes" pack. By examining the claims and potential dangers of high doses, you'll learn why "less is more" can be a healthier approach to supplementation. Finally, we open the floor to your experiences with supplements, creating a community dialogue that continues beyond the episode. Tune in for an eye-opening discussion that aims to make you an informed and cautious consumer.

LINKS TALKED ABOUT IN THIS EPISODE
National Institute of Health ODS (Office of Dietary Supplements) click HERE
Consumer Lab click HERE

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:40

Hello everybody and welcome back to the Real Food Stories podcast. In my last episode I went on a deep dive about micronutrients those are our vitamins and minerals and of course I realized that in the world of food and nutrition there is so much information to share. And I was not done with the story of vitamins, minerals and other supplements, because it's one thing to talk about the micronutrients we need and quite another to realize that, of course, the industry has taken on a mind of its own and run with it. If you learn anything about micronutrients, remember this we need to get our nutrition from food first and while this is entirely possible, it does take a lot of thought and planning to get everything from food because, let's face it, not everyone is paying attention to how many milligrams of magnesium, for example, are in our food. But we do our best, and only after doing our best with food do we then fill in the gaps, as they say, with supplements. In my case, one supplement I do make sure I take is vitamin D, and I take a vitamin D supplement because I tested low in this vitamin and because I have multiple sclerosis and there seems to be a strong connection with MS and vitamin D levels. So I definitely make sure that I take a little extra of this in a pill form. I believe that food can be really confusing and when I hear people say to me, just tell me what to eat, then how do we know what foods we should eat to make sure we get all our macronutrients and our micronutrients in the right proportions? And, understandably, it might feel easier to take supplements as an insurance policy and as a backup to eating well. But, as I said last week in my micronutrient podcast, when you isolate nutrients and package them in a pill and expect them to do the job of food, you are missing the point of nourishing yourself. I know it's so tempting to just pick and choose supplements, especially when you see lists of what each of these nutrients do for you, like I gave in my last podcast. If you haven't gotten that link, please go back and take a listen to it and also download my vitamin and mineral nutrient chart.

Speaker 1: 3:19

If you want strong bones, for example, take calcium, vitamin D and vitamin K. But that's just not how it works. It's just buying pills off of shelves. Vitamins and minerals need and require all the other components that make up our foods fiber, water, phytonutrients, just to name a few. Our vitamins and minerals need these extras to assimilate in our bodies.

Speaker 1: 3:44

Also, the potential for taking too much of a vitamin or mineral in supplement form is definitely there. Calcium is a great example of this. Being deficient in calcium makes you more prone to osteoporosis and osteopenia, both which affect bones. Calcium also plays a significant role in heart health and heart disease, and the reality is, unless you're eating foods with high levels of calcium, you are probably not getting enough. Dairy products and soy foods are our very best sources. So are sardines and broccoli, but, honestly, how many of you are eating sardines on a daily basis? I mean you should be, since they are also amazing sources of vitamin D, another vitamin that's very hard to get through food. I mentioned last week that we get vitamin D mainly from sun exposure and less from food sources, and that's another thing to consider, since most of us are indoors most of the time and heavily wearing sunscreen and, as a result, most people are low in this vitamin.

Speaker 1: 4:54

Anyway, back to calcium. I remember back in the 2000s, I believe, that it was thought that everyone should be taking a calcium supplement of at least 1,000 milligrams per day, which is about what we need for our daily allowance as adults. My pediatrician pushed calcium supplements on my kids. My primary care doctor did the same for me as well, and then, lo and behold, no shock. New studies came out that showed that too much calcium from supplements had many adverse effects. In about 2020, a few influential studies done found that too much supplemental calcium increased the risk of heart disease. Not calcium from food, but calcium in supplement form. Supplemental calcium also has a strong risk for kidney stones, too. Kidney stones are made from calcium, so this makes a lot of sense.

Speaker 1: 5:51

Okay, so maybe you don't drink milk or eat dairy and hopefully it's not because someone on social media or a naturopath told you not to but in any event, you don't eat dairy products or soy products, and it's not easy to get calcium through other foods. After all, a cup of broccoli has about 50 milligrams of calcium. Kale has about 90 milligrams in a cup, but that's really difficult to maintain and reach that 1,000 milligrams per day that you need for your bones and your heart. You then might want to, in this case, consider supplementing. We're filling in the gaps right in this case, with some calcium, but no more than about 500 milligrams per day. This is where we fill in the gaps, and so here's a good point that I'm trying to make and what I want to talk about today regarding supplements.

Speaker 1: 6:45

When you walk into Whole Foods or wherever you buy your supplements, how do you know what to take, how to take them and why? And depending on who you speak to be it your primary care doctor, the naturopath, your aunt goes to the functional medicine doctor, maybe you've seen ones who sold you their brand of supplements, or some wellness influencer on social media you will get wildly different opinions. This is why it's really important to go through credible sources like Nutritionist, dietitian, and credible websites like Consumer Labs or the National Institute of Health, which I will link both of these in the show notes. They are in the business of independent research. Okay, they don't have any skin in the game and they're not trying to sell you supplements.

Speaker 1: 7:40

It's also good to remember that less is more in the world of supplements, and particularly micronutrients. They are called micro for a reason, because we only need these nutrients in tiny amounts. But what about all the other things you can buy in a bottle of pills or powders or tinctures from Whole Foods or any other supplement shop? The same goes for all the other supplements that you can buy right off the shelf with no regulation whatsoever. These would include herbs tinctures again, essential oils, formulations of combinations of vitamins and herbs such as hormone balancing supplements or liver detoxes, or the millions of other types that promise weight loss, energy immune, boosting, sleep inducing. Herbs, oils, mushrooms and some hormones are no different when it comes to the non-existence of regulating them. So you want to be extremely careful with what you're taking. A lot of them can cause liver damage, can cause other side effects and interact with medications that you just don't even know about.

Speaker 1: 8:55

Let's take a look at turmeric as an example. Turmeric is a spice that is used primarily in Indian cooking. Turmeric, like all spices, has been shown to have anti-inflammatory properties, and turmeric is having its moment in the sun right now. It just seems to be the hot supplement of the moment. Don't get me wrong I love spices to flavor my food and for their anti-inflammatory effects, but as a supplement where I'm taking megadoses concentrated megadoses where you're getting many times the amount that you would get from having it in your food and mixed with food I would be very cautious. More is not always better when it comes to adding in supplements. A lot of these supplements and these herbs and tinctures, et cetera, have not been well tested. So taking too much turmeric can cause kidney stones. It can interact with certain medications, so make some Indian food this coming weekend and use turmeric as a spice, but use extreme caution when it comes to taking it as a supplement in large megadoses.

Speaker 1: 10:10

I wanted to give special focus to supplements and formulations that cater to women in midlife and menopause, because we are especially vulnerable and sometimes desperate for answers. There are literally hundreds of all types of supplements that cater to women that claim to help with hormone balancing, which honestly mystifies me, because I'm not sure exactly how you balance your hormones with a pill. Then there's hair loss, energy, hot flashes, gut health, weight loss, libido, anti-aging, moodiness, you name it. There is likely a supplement or formula that has been created that claims that they can help you that is, if they help you at all and the chances of you simply wasting your money are huge. These supplements are not cheap. They are very expensive most of the time. There's a lot of bells, whistles and mystique on websites that sell a lot of these supplements.

Speaker 1: 11:16

Now let's take Gwyneth Paltrow's website Goop. I checked it out the other day because even my 25-year-old daughter now follows her and I had to see what was the latest from a woman who has had to sit in congressional hearings for false marketing and advertising of her products, and it's really unbelievable that a lot of these products still are able to get sold. Gwyneth is great at branding and, as a great example of how she caters to women's fears of getting old, she promotes a supplement called High School Genes G-E-N-E-S, as in. Let's get back to how we were feeling when we were 18 years old. Genius, I wanna feel like I'm 18 years old again too. On the bottle it says quote we are bottling our doctor's advice.

Speaker 1: 12:09

Determining what vitamins to take can be overwhelming. Yes, that is very true. It's hard to choose from a wide array of products and there is a ton of conflicting information, absolutely. Plus, there are well-founded concerns about what is actually in them, which range from what supplements claim they do to ingredient quality. This is too bad, as the modern American diet often calls for extra vitamin and mineral support, and we all deserve products that actually work. I agree with Gwyneth Paltrow 100% on this. If her supplements actually worked, it goes on.

Speaker 1: 12:46

The bottle also claims that these supplements are geared towards women in peri and menopause who feel like their metabolism might be slowing down and are no longer responding to the exercise and diet levers that they always pulled. Okay, whatever that means I don't know what diet and exercise levers mean exactly and it goes on to say that this regimen addresses numerous systems in the body that may contribute to weight gain when not functioning properly, with an asterisk. And the asterisk then leads you to read at the end of the bottle, as they are required to quote this statement has not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, cure, prevent or treat any disease. So what that is really saying is that I am allowed to put whatever I want into a supplement, slap a label on it saying that this is going to make you feel like an 18-year-old and not have any evidence to really back it up. Gwyneth Paltrow and Goop, are we assuming that the ingredients in your high school genes supplement pack will actually help me boost my metabolism and address what exercise and dieting are not doing for me anymore? Far reach, I would say.

Speaker 1: 14:14

So I wanted to quickly just break down these pills to explain what I'm talking about. So to start, you need to take six pills a day. Pill number one is a multivitamin and mineral supplement. The pill has the usual suspects of vitamins and minerals, but you and I now know from tuning into last week's episode that there are fat-soluble vitamins that get stored in our bodies and that we do not pee out the excess. So why does this pill contain 167% of the daily value for vitamin A and 1100% of the daily value for vitamin E? Remember that more is not better. And for the water-soluble vitamins, vitamin C and all the B vitamins, you are simply going to pee out the 10,000% daily value for vitamin B12. And that's just a start. You are simply taking your money and throwing it in the garbage when you are taking excessive amounts of water-soluble vitamins and just peeing them out. Now, some minerals are hard to put into a multivitamin supplement because they are very large, like calcium, for example. So if you do take a multivitamin and mineral supplement, you might see that there's a very low amount of calcium in there. That's because it's just too big to put into one pill.

Speaker 1: 15:46

This pill that is in high school genes has no calcium whatsoever, but it has 250% of the daily value for selenium and 2000% of the daily value for chromium. Both of these are alarming to me because number one, selenium, is a mineral that most people get enough of in their daily eating anyway. Selenium is found in seafood, eggs, poultry, cereals, grains and, yes, not having enough selenium could definitely cause problems with your heart or your thyroid, but too much selenium can do worse damage. Now, according to the National Institute of Health and again I'll link their comprehensive database of micronutrients and other supplements in the show notes too much selenium over time can cause nervous system problems, nausea, diarrhea, irritability, hair loss, among other issues. The recommended amount for selenium is 55 milligrams for adults. Same goes for chromium.

Speaker 1: 16:52

Goop supplement, like I said, has 700 micrograms in it. The daily value is 20 micrograms for women older than 50. Chromium doesn't actually have an upper limit to it because there's been very little reported on taking too much. But according to the National Institute of Health, when it comes to weight loss which I'm assuming is why Goop is overloading you with chromium, they say. Quote overall research suggests that supplementation with chromium, mainly in the form of chromium picolinate, reduces body weight and body fat percentage to a very small but statistically significant extent. However, these effects have very little clinical significance. No vitamin or mineral has been found to boost metabolism and cause weight loss. Believe me, if this was the case, you would know about it because it would be yelled at from the rooftops in social media. Everybody would be taking it. But companies can put on their labels things like boost metabolism, metabolism support, weight loss support, because there is no regulation around it.

Speaker 1: 18:08

The next pill that GOOP promotes for its metabolism boosting efforts is fish oil 1,000 milligrams of it. I have yet to find a study or research that positively links a fish oil supplement to higher metabolism, and you know from my podcast on fats that fish oil is high in essential fatty acids and we definitely need to get these from our diet. The very best way to do this is by making sure you eat seafood at least twice a week. You can get other essential fatty acids from nuts and seeds, like flax and chia seeds, and from those social media scary seed oils like canola oil and olive oil. Fish oil supplements should only be taken if you do not eat any of these foods. But as far as metabolism and boosting metabolism, sorry goop, that just doesn't fly.

Speaker 1: 19:05

Next is a metabolism support pill, as they call it, that contains cinnamon, green tea, alpha lipoic acid. There are other herbs and compounds in some of the pills too, that it's almost like too much to list here. I mean, there's just a never-ending amount of little dribs and drabs of other things that they put in these pills. Cinnamon, green tea and alpha lipoic acid, though, have very little evidence for boosting metabolism. Acid, though, have very little evidence for boosting metabolism. Then there's the free radical scavenger that has the antioxidant alpha lipoic acid, again to help protect against oxidative stress from, quote, life's indulgences, and also aids in the art and science of aging gracefully while helping you feel younger. Again, marketing genius Scoop. I mean, give me a pill that makes me feel younger and it makes me age gracefully. I'm happy to take it if it works.

Speaker 1: 20:04

Again, the National Institute of Health states also used for obesity, altitude sickness, aging skin, high levels of cholesterol or other fats in the blood and many other purposes. There is no good scientific evidence to support many of these uses. And then, finally, there is my favorite pill called the gut balance, which claims to support a healthy microbial balance and remove unwanted compounds from the gut. It encourages the body to, quote purge unwanted compounds. Berberine, licorice, ginger and rhubarb are among the many that are in this pill, and none of them have been shown to help purge compounds from the body, whatever that means. I don't even know exactly what that means to purge compounds from the body, but it sounds good if you feel like you need to balance your gut. I personally, I am so confused, and I'm sure you are too.

Speaker 1: 21:08

There's lots of other ingredients in their pills, such as prune skin extract, citrus fruit extracts, blueberry extracts and more cinnamon. My first thought when reading this list was just eat the foods every day. Eat some berries, eat an orange, put some cinnamon in your oatmeal. Get these things from foods, not supplements. That cost $90 a month yes, $90 a month. $90 a month? Yes, $90 a month.

Speaker 1: 21:43

Here's a couple of ways that you can tell that your supplements are not worth your time. Number one they claim to use a proprietary blend of nutrients. Goop and Gwydith Paltrow uses a proprietary phytonutrient blend, they say. But proprietary is nothing fancy or scientific, but it sounds like it is. Proprietary simply means that the people who work at Goop simply created it. That's it. Phytonutrients relate to the healthy compounds in the blend.

Speaker 1: 22:14

But please get these from your foods. You could absolutely get more benefit from eating these foods than taking them in a pill form. You don't need a pill for that. Number two they put herbs and foods that are from different countries like China, chinese licorice, chinese cinnamon, indian gum tree, arabic. Sounds fancy and exotic, but it's really not. It's just cinnamon, licorice, gum tree, arabic. I don't even actually I'm not clear on exactly what that means, but you don't need fancy things from foreign countries. Number three they charge a ton of money for their products. Psychologically, the more money they charge, the more you think it's an exclusive product. I hope you know now that you can almost get all of these nutrients from food, that almost all of them are not well studied and that if you do need a multivitamin and mineral supplement, that I can recommend one to you that will cost you pennies a day, not dollars a day.

Speaker 1: 23:21

There's nothing fancy or mystical about Goop's supplements, but they want you to think that they are. And number four they speak in a language that makes you feel heard. Goop gets you and speaks to your pain points of having a hard time losing weight and menopause. They're here to help and I understand this. Anytime we're not feeling our best, it's natural to want to find help, especially if it's as easy as taking a pill. The supplement industry is a multi-billion dollar business and it can feel very complicated. Just be careful of slick marketing and wellness influencers, and that includes medical doctors, naturopaths, chiropractors and functional medicine professionals selling their pills, powders and supplements on their websites. They make a lot of money off of you.

Speaker 1: 24:20

When it comes to menopause and supplements, I'm not going to go too in-depth about this because I'm planning a whole podcast on treating menopause naturally and, if this is even possible, can you treat menopause through taking certain herbs and supplements? We'll get to that in another podcast episode, but for right now, I want you to also be aware of the word natural. Natural is an unregulated word that is honestly meaningless in the world of health, and here's a really great example the herb kava, which is a natural herb. Kava is an herb that's used for anxiety, insomnia, sometimes symptoms of menopause and other ailments. Some studies have shown that it might work for anxiety, but kava can cause severe liver damage. The FDA has even stepped in and issued a warning against its use.

Speaker 1: 25:21

Maca powder is another one as an example. Maca is a plant that grows on the high plateaus of the Andes Mountains. It's been cultivated as a root vegetable for thousands of years, and this root vegetable is used to make medicine, but there's not enough reliable information available to know exactly how maca might work. I mean, yes, it's high in phytoestrogens, which can mimic estrogen, but if you are hormone sensitive, like you have had breast cancer, uterine cancer, ovarian cancer, endometriosis or uterine fibroids you definitely want to stay away from maca. Extracts from maca might act like estrogen. So if you have any of these conditions that might be made worse, do not use these extracts.

Speaker 1: 26:11

Herbs are not benign and just because they are natural does not make them safe. I mean, arsenic is natural, but we all know that it can kill you. So please talk to a trusted health professional before starting any new herbal regimen. Okay, I think I'm going to end there, because I am going to have an additional podcast about all of these supplements related to menopause and perimenopause, and hopefully that will take this conversation a little deeper and help explain more.

Speaker 1: 26:47

I think you probably get the sense now that I am here to tell you to be very, very cautious about what you take, what supplements you take, and that they can have side effects. They can interact with medications that you don't know and they can cause liver damage, which would be really very sad and dangerous. So we really don't want to get ourselves into a position where we're taking something that's not known or not well researched and studied. On top of it, we don't want to waste our money either, because a lot of these supplements can start to add up and cost a lot of money that you are just spending unnecessarily and are not, in the long run, helping you at all.

Speaker 1: 27:35

I would love to hear feedback. I would love to hear what supplements people have tried, what they are taking, what they no longer take, if they've had side effects. I would love to hear about this and continue the conversation. So please send me an email. If you have a story around supplements that you would love to share with me, I'd be happy to hear that. I will put my email in the show notes and you can simply just send me an email. As always, I hope that you have a great day and a beautiful weekend and enjoy summer. Talk to you next week.