Essentials: Developing a Rational Approach to Supplementation for Health & Performance

Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science-based tools for mental health, physical health, and performance. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today, we're discussing supplements, or more specifically, a rational guide to supplementation. During today's episode, I'm going to give you a number of different, very specific questions that you can answer in order to decide whether or not you should be taking any so-called supplements or not. As we head into today's conversation, I want to emphasize something very important, not just as it relates to supplements, but as it relates to all aspects of mental health, physical health, and performance. And that is, I take the stance that behavioral tools, that is specific actions that we take and specific actions that we avoid, form the foundation of mental health, physical health, and performance. So things like viewing morning sunlight and exercise are behavioral tools. They don't require the ingestion of anything. Second to that, I would say the next layer is in fact nutrition. No amount of supplementation or non-prescription compounds or prescription compounds for that matter can ever compensate for poor nutrition, at least not for very long. Then on top of that, I would place what is typically called supplementation, although today I'm trying to expand that word to include not just things that compensate for food deficiencies, or that are layered on top of food as a way to enhance the amount of nutrients that you could get from food. But as I mentioned before, compounds that are non-prescription that can be for a variety of different purposes, and many of which are not available in food. So I would place supplementation right on top of nutrition. Then past that, I would say prescription drugs, obviously prescribed from a board certified MD. That said, there are many instances in which people can either reduce their dosages of prescription compounds, or can replace those prescription compounds with quality behavioral tools, nutrition, and supplementation. But there are many instances in which prescription drugs are the only route by which people can achieve the mental health, physical health, and performance goals that they wish to achieve. So I would place that as the fourth layer in this stack of layers directed towards mental health, physical health, and performance. Before moving further into today's episode, I want to emphasize a very important point, which is that I am not a physician. That is, I'm not a clinician. So I do not prescribe anything, nor am I going to do that today. I'm a professor. I review the research literature. I describe tools gleaned from the research literature and developed from the research literature. So I profess many things, but I do not prescribe anything. And I think it's vitally important that anytime you are thinking of adding or subtracting any behavioral protocols, nutritional protocols, supplementation-based protocols, and certainly prescription drug-based protocols, for whatever purpose, that you consult a trusted, board-certified physician. That's absolutely essential. The most important aspect of today's episode is not going to be that you discover one particular supplement or category of supplements or blend of supplements that is going to transform your mental health, physical health, and performance. No, the purpose of today's episode is for you to understand where you have needs that can be met by supplementation better than any other approach. And most importantly, how to think about supplementation. That is, how to think about the different categories of supplements that are out there and how those interact with your nutrition and your behaviors so that you can maximize your immediate and long-term health. And indeed, it may be the case that the ideal dosage of a given supplement for you is zero milligrams. For instance, if I ask you, are you sleeping deeply and enough each night? Do you feel rested throughout the day? Maybe you need a short nap and that's it, or maybe you don't. And you say, yes, I feel great. I sleep great. I wake up feeling great. I only need a short nap or no nap during the day to feel rested throughout the day. Well then, there's really no discussion about sleep supplementation to be had between you and me. However, if you are not sleeping well, then a big discussion opens up as to what the reasons are. Is it related to nutrition, or when you're exercising, or ingesting caffeine? In other words, no discussion about supplementation can be had in a vacuum. Rather, discussions about supplementation need to be considered in a larger context. So today, you're gonna learn how to place the discussion and thinking about supplementation in a larger context and think about how specific supplements, that is specific ingredients and combinations of ingredients can indeed be used to buffer and support your overall health and lead you to specific health and performance outcomes. So what is an ideal supplementation protocol? Well, there are foundational supplements. These are supplements that are designed to establish a foundation or provide insurance along with your nutritional intake to ensure that you're getting all the things that you need in order to have a basic level of mental health, physical health, and opportunity for optimal performance. This is the one category of supplements for which I think it's appropriate, and in fact, advantageous, to have multiple ingredients in a given supplement. So that raises a very specific question that you need to ask. Do you want to take a vitamin mineral supplement? Well, the answer to that will be highly individual, but you really just need to address two things. First of all, is the cost within the range that you can afford and want to pay? And then you need to ask yourself, are you able to regularly ingest enough foods with enough variety to cover your vitamin mineral needs just from food? I would say for people that are extremely physically and or mentally active, and for people that perhaps are following a intermittent fasting schedule, so they are not ingesting a lot of food in general or restricting their food intake to specific times of day, well, then a vitamin mineral supplement likely makes sense for them. However, it's going to be very important to ingest that vitamin mineral supplement with food because otherwise they can cause some stomach upset. The so-called foundational supplements include, of course, vitamin and mineral supplements, but has expanded over the last decade or more to also include supplements that have vitamins and minerals, but also things like digestive enzymes. So this is why when people approach me and they ask me, if I'm only going to take one supplement, what supplement should I take? Rather than just give them one specific answer, I actually ask them three questions. How well are you sleeping at night? The second question I ask them is, how's your nutrition? And then the third thing that I ask, which is extremely important, is what's your budget? Once those three questions have been answered, assuming that somebody is able to spend about $100 or more on supplements per month, then my recommendation is that they not focus on any specific supplements directed towards sleep or toward focus or hormone augmentation, but rather that they focus on buffering and enhancing their foundational nutrition, adaptogens, probiotics, prebiotics, and digestive enzymes, because of the simple fact that if they do that, they're going to raise the tide on all the biological and organ systems that are going to lead to enhanced mental health, physical health, and performance, including sleep. But to sort of close the conversation on foundational supplementation, I think a broad spectrum supplement that has many, many ingredients is going to be the best route to ensuring foundational supplementation is covered. And I do think that should be the starting place for any and all supplementation regimens. That's going to allow you to feel better overall, sleep better overall, focus better overall, and support all the different systems in your brain and body that are going to allow you to be at your best while, of course, also paying careful attention to your nutrition, because you simply cannot abandon nutrition, nor can you abandon the behavioral tools, many of which we've discussed on this podcast over and over again, things like sunlight viewing, exercise, and so forth. Again, better living through chemistry still requires better living. That doesn't mean that chemistry doesn't help. It means that chemistry through supplementation should be an augment. It should be a support to the behavioral and nutritional factors in your life that you're already paying attention to and trying to optimize. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, Eight Sleep. Eight Sleep makes smart mattress covers with cooling, heating, and sleep tracking capacity. Eight Sleep just launched the Pod 6, which is their most advanced sleep system. The Pod 6 is half the size of their previous models. It's 20% faster with its cooling and heating, and it has nine times as many sensors for tracking your sleep. The reason why Eight Sleep is so effective at improving your sleep quality and duration is because it helps control your core body temperature. And the reason for that is that in order to fall and stay deeply asleep, your core body temperature has to drop by about one to three degrees. And to wake up feeling completely refreshed and energized, you actually want your body temperature to be increasing in the final hours of your sleep. Eight Sleep automatically regulates the temperature of your bed throughout the night and is monitoring your sleep and dynamically adjusting the temperature of your sleep environment so you get the maximum amount of deep sleep and rapid eye movement sleep. I've been sleeping on an Eight Sleep mattress cover for nearly five years now. And with each new iteration of Eight Sleep, it gets better and better at figuring out what my body needs in order to get the best possible night's sleep. If you would like to try Eight Sleep, go to eightsleep.com slash Huberman to get up to $200 off their new pod six. Eight Sleep ships to many countries worldwide, including Mexico and the UAE. Again, that's eightsleep.com slash Huberman to save up to $200. I'd like to now shift our attention to single ingredient formulation supplements that are designed to achieve specific endpoints. And the three categories that I'm going to cover are sleep, hormone support, and cognitive enhancement and focus. Cognitive enhancement and focus being the final third category. When thinking about supplementation for sleep, we need to ask ourselves a number of important questions. First of all, you should ask yourself how well, that is how deeply, and how much are you sleeping per night? If you are one of those people who is not sleeping enough, there are two questions you should ask yourself. First of all, are you ingesting caffeine after 2 p.m.? If the answer is yes, you want to limit or eliminate caffeine after 2 p.m. Second thing is, most people would do well to avoid food within the two hours prior to bedtime. But of course, you don't want to be so hungry that you can't fall asleep, all right? So those are the nutrition and behavioral tools that everyone needs to consider. If, for instance, you're somebody who falls asleep just fine, but wakes up in the middle of the night around 2 or 3 a.m. or any time for that matter, and has trouble falling back asleep, there are two categories of supplements that you might want to consider. The first is myoinositol, typically taken as 900 milligrams of myoinositol. Other people who wake up in the middle of the night will wake up because their dreams are very intense. Those people would do well to avoid certain supplements. So in a moment, I'll talk about the value of a supplement called theanine for falling asleep. But theanine, which typically is taken in dosages anywhere from 100 milligrams to 400 milligrams, theanine can be great for many people, but for people who have excessively vivid dreams, those excessively vivid dreams can lead to immediate waking and sometimes a little bit of anxiety upon waking in the middle of the night. So some people who wake up in the middle of the night sort of jolted mentally and physically out of sleep because of their intense dreams would do well to avoid theanine supplementation. Now, for those of you that are not waking up in the middle of the night or not having excessively vivid dreams, but are having trouble falling asleep, two supplements in particular have been shown to be effective for shortening the transition time to sleep and allowing people to ease into sleep more readily. And those are magnesium threonate, which is interchangeable with magnesium bisglycinate. Both have transporter systems that allow them to readily cross the blood-brain barrier, and they lead to a mild form of drowsiness, mild in the sense that it's not going to prevent you from operating a motor vehicle or kind of any conditions under emergency that might arise in the middle of the night. But people who take those often find that their transition time into sleep is much faster and their sleep is also much deeper. Incidentally, those supplements are also thought to be useful for cognitive support and neuroprotection, although there's less data on that. The other supplement is apigenin, A-P-I-G-E-N-I-N. Apigenin, which is a derivative of chamomile, I've talked about this in various podcasts before, also acts as a bit of a anxiety-lowering compound, which is essential prior to sleep for people to essentially turn off their thinking or to be able to reduce the amount of ruminating and problem-solving and future anticipation that they're doing, which is a requirement for falling asleep. So what's the rational approach to supplementing in a way that allows you to fall asleep more quickly and stay asleep? Well, would you immediately take magnesium threonate and apigenin together? Well, that depends. If you have the budget and you just simply want to fall asleep quicker and you don't care which of those two ingredients is going to be more effective for you, well, then you could try one, for instance, magnesium threonate, and try it for perhaps a week and see how that affects your latency to sleep time, that is how quickly you fall asleep, or you could try apigenin in the first week, or you could combine them both, or you could try magnesium threonate for a week, then switch to only apigenin for a week and evaluate which one works better for you. If neither works for you, I do recommend trying the combination together. Again, this is just the way that any scientist would design an experiment to try and understand which variables, that is, which ingredients are most effective for the result that you want, as opposed to just lumping them together and taking them. That said, a lot of people want excellent sleep so badly that they just say, okay, I'm just going to take magnesium threonate, I'm going to take apigenin, I'm going to take theanine. If my dreams are too vivid and I'm waking up in the middle of the night from excessively vivid dreams, I'll drop the theanine. And many people actually derive great benefit from that approach. I think one week's time of taking something, provided it doesn't induce any negative effects, if something induces a negative effect, I recommend ceasing taking it immediately. But if something does not produce any negative effects, then I think you want to try a single ingredient formulation for about a week while not varying anything else, not changing anything else in your overall protocols, and then see what works best and see if the combination works even better. Once you start to develop that intuition or sensitivity of sorts to how different ingredients impact you, it is an enormously powerful stance to have because you're going to keep your costs limited, you're also going to find the things that work particularly poorly for you, and more importantly, the things that work particularly well for you. toward your goals. Any discussion about supplementation for sleep? I feel has to include a discussion about melatonin. I've talked about melatonin before on numerous podcasts, mine and others. And I will say once again, I am not a fan of melatonin for a couple of reasons. Melatonin is a hormone known to induce sleepiness, but not keep us asleep. So oftentimes people will take melatonin, fall deeply asleep and then wake up and have trouble falling back asleep. The other reason is that melatonin supplements almost always include levels of melatonin or amounts of melatonin that far, far exceed the normal biological levels or so-called endogenous levels of melatonin that we would normally produce. And yes, it's true that as we age, we produce less melatonin, but it's very clear that melatonin can impact not just sleep but other systems in the brain and body. The next category of supplementation that I'd like to talk about is hormone support. So the discussion about hormone support and augmentation has to include some nod toward or understanding of the fact that nutrition and the way that nutrition impacts hormones and the way that hormones such as insulin impact other hormones such as free testosterone, that all has to be acknowledged. It's also important to remember that behaviors matter for hormone status. Getting morning sunlight increases cortisol levels. Cortisol levels are very important to have elevated early in the day for focus and alertness and for immune function and to make sure that cortisol levels are low at night and thereby levels of growth hormone and testosterone, which is secreted mainly in the early morning, can be elevated at night and in the early morning. So you want to get your behaviors and your nutrition correct before you start thinking about supplementation for hormones. Now, with all that said, I'd like to provide some examples of supplements that work directly on specific hormone pathways aimed at achieving more specific goals such as elevated testosterone or elevated free testosterone. I always like to remind people testosterone and estrogen are present in both males and females, okay? And both are important for things like libido, muscle growth, and so on. Phytogia agrestis, this is an herb that I've talked about before on the podcast that when taken at dosages of 600 milligrams per day, many people, not all, report elevated levels of libido, elevated sperm production, elevated testosterone, in some cases, elevated estrogen, a bunch of hormones downstream of luteinizing hormone. Now, are you going to be a phytogia agrestis responder or a non-responder? There's simply no way to know except by trying it. If you are going to go down this route, there are two very important considerations. First of all, there's a fairly extensive literature on the fact that phytogia agrestis can be toxic to testicular cells and perhaps other cells when taken at very high dosages. So obeying the particular dosages of phytogia agrestis that are recommended on various product labels and cycling phytogia agrestis can be important. Some people need to cycle it eight weeks on, two weeks off. Other people opt for 12 weeks on, a month off. Stay within the recommended dosage ranges. You can go lower, but certainly don't go higher. And I think it is wise to cycle every eight weeks or so to come off it for two weeks and then going back on if that's your choice, if you feel it benefited you, or taking it for 12 week periods of time and then cycling off for a full month before repeating again. Just because there's a recommended dosage of phytogia agrestis of say 600 milligrams per day, first of all, that is not an invitation to take twice as much and expect twice the positive effects. That is not a good approach, especially with something like phytogia agrestis, which can at high dosages be toxic. But it's also important to perhaps consider taking a lower dosage and seeing how that affects your hormones. That approach requires a bit more patience. I know most people are thinking, I want the effect and I want it now. I think it's very important when thinking about exercise or nutrition or supplementation to really play the long game, to think about what's going to work for you in the immediate end in the longterm and to ease into any kind of supplement regimen. So phytogia agrestis is a good example of a supplement that is known to have potent effects, but you need to approach it with the appropriate, I would say respect for the fact that the dosage ranges in which it works have to be kept pretty narrow without causing issues. There are other supplements, in particular Tongkat Ali, which is known to increase free testosterone by reducing sex hormone binding globulin. Tongkat Ali can be beneficial both for men and for women in dosages anywhere from 200 milligrams to 600 milligrams per day. To my knowledge, Tongkat Ali does not need to be cycled, meaning you don't have to take periods of time off from it. I should note that the effects of Tongkat Ali can take a little bit longer to experience. So perhaps blood work should be done eight to 12 weeks after initiating the Tongkat Ali protocol as opposed to earlier. And it does seem to have sort of cumulative effects on libido and that points to the likelihood that it's having some impact on neural pathways as opposed to hormone pathways. Hormone pathways can be slow, but in general, neural pathways are the ones that are going to explain slow rising shifts in any kind of physical or mental aspect that then remains stable over time. As a final note on supplements for hormone augmentation and supplementation, I want to make a brief mention of something specifically related to female health, which is of course the menstrual cycle. And across the menstrual cycle, different hormones are present at different levels. Follicle stimulating hormone is very high during the so-called follicular phase, right? And then you have your luteal phase. The point I'd like to make now is that for women, they should fully expect that certain supplements, not all, but certain supplements, because of the way they impact different hormones would have different effects, maybe even opposite effects at different phases of the menstrual cycle. And for that reason, I believe it is especially important to have tight control over dosage and individual ingredients in your supplement regimen. So again, this speaks to the critical importance of single ingredient control, dosage control, and the ability to cease taking individual or multiple ingredients according to the backdrop of your health generally. And obviously the menstrual cycle is a profound shift in the hormones and thus the entire biological and psychological milieu that exist in the body. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, AG1. I'm excited to share that AG1 has just launched their newest formulation, AG1 Pro. AG1 Pro takes the clinically backed AG1 formula, which is a blend of vitamins, minerals, probiotics, and adaptogens, and adds three important new ingredients, creatine monohydrate, calcium HMB, and zinc carnosine. Each serving has five grams of creatine monohydrate to support muscle strength and performance, as well as brain health. Calcium HMB to support muscle recovery and reduce muscle breakdown, and zinc carnosine to support and improve the lining of your gut. All three of these ingredients have compelling science to support them, and therefore I love seeing them added to the existing AG1 formula. As most of you know, I've been taking AG1 every day for nearly 14 years now. I started taking it long before I even knew what a podcast was. It's a great product, and it's now made even better with the new AG1 Pro formula. If you would like to try AG1 Pro, you can go to drinkag1.com slash Huberman to get a special offer. AG1 is giving away a free bottle of omega-3 coenzyme Q10 with your first subscription. Again, go to drinkag1.com slash Huberman to get a free bottle of omega-3 coenzyme Q10 with your first AG1 subscription. The next category of supplementation that I'd like to address is supplements related to cognitive enhancement and focus. Anytime we're having a discussion about supplements for enhancing cognitive ability and focus, a major category of those supplements is going to fall into the stimulant category, and that's going to include most often caffeine, although there are other sources of stimulants. I'm not going to touch on those for the moment. Just talk about caffeine. If you want to increase alertness and focus, caffeine is a potent way to do that. It works. The other category of stimulant that can work in terms of enhancing alertness and focus are going to be things that increase adrenaline in some other way that are going to touch into or augment the so-called adrenergic and adrenaline systems. And there are things like yohimbine and different forms of yohimbine, like alpha-yohimbine. There are multiple forms of these things. Now, I would go to examine.com to explore the different forms of yohimbine. There are certain forms of yohimbine that act as stimulants that are effective. One particular form is called alpha-yohimbine. It sometimes goes by the name Rawolsine, and that's spelled R-A-U-W-O-L-S-C-I-N-E. Again, that's alpha-yohimbine, and it's used as a stimulant often to also promote fat loss and alertness. I have to say that it's a very potent and somewhat precarious supplement. Some people experience a lot of anxiety on it. That could also be because they tend to take it on either an empty stomach or in combination with subcaloric diets. It's sort of getting out on the edge of things that for some people can work not so well. For other people, they might actually find it to be a very effective stimulant. In general, in terms of supplement-based approaches to increase cognitive function and focus, caffeine, either in coffee or tea form or in tablet or capsule form, but at lower dosages than you would find in coffee and tea, I think is actually a reasonable way to explore the stimulant-based approaches for enhancing cognitive function and focus. I mention all that not because I think that you probably already didn't know that caffeine can enhance alertness and focus. Most people already know that, and I acknowledge that, but rather as a contrast point for the other supplement-based approach for increasing cognitive function and focus, which is to increase certain neurotransmitter pathways that are not stimulant-based. So for instance, alpha-GPC, which is essentially a choline donor, acts in the pathways related to the neuromodulator acetylcholine and can enhance focus. So at dosages of anywhere from 300 to 600 milligrams, people experience heightened levels of focus for sake of mental work or physical work. The half-life of alpha-GPC is about four to six hours, so it's relatively short-lasting, although you wouldn't necessarily want to take it right before bed. I don't recommend that. It is not a stimulant. It tends to enhance focus by augmenting acetylcholine and acetylcholine pathways specifically. Now, it does create a little bit of an increase in alertness. So some people actually perceive it subjectively as an increase in overall stimulation, but it's different than a caffeine-type stimulant. So for instance, 300 milligrams to 600 milligrams of alpha-GPC taken alone will allow people to be more focused, but doesn't tend to make people feel jittery or overstimulated. Similarly, 500 milligrams to 1,000 milligrams, or somewhere in between, of something like L-tyrosine, which is an amino acid precursor to dopamine, a different neuromodulator, taken alone or in conjunction with, again, I believe in separating these things out by product, but I suppose you could take alpha-GPC and L-tyrosine together if you had already tried them separately and decide they worked well for you. Then you decide to combine them. What people tend to experience is that the cholinergic stimulation from alpha-GPC and the dopaminergic stimulation from L-tyrosine or simply L-tyrosine alone or alpha-GPC alone leads to increased levels of focus without the kind of overall feelings of stimulant-based alertness that one would experience with caffeine. And indeed, or I should say, of course, there are products out there and there are people out there that combine all three of these things together, caffeine, alpha-GPC, and L-tyrosine. And while I'm not suggesting that's a good or a bad thing, I would suggest that anytime you start to explore the cognitive enhancing effects and the focus enhancing effects of any supplement that you ask which ones are stimulants, so for instance, caffeine and alpha-uhimbine, which ones tend to tap more into neuromodulator systems like alpha-GPC and L-tyrosine. And to separate those out conceptually, because whereas things like alpha-uhimbine and caffeine will mostly serve the role of increasing levels of alertness but not tightening your focus, things like alpha-GPC and L-tyrosine tend to serve the role of less elevation and alertness but more tightening of focus. And this, of course, is why people often stack these and take them in combination. So I think it's a very important distinction that most people aren't aware of. So I'm not here to tell you that the stimulant-based approach or the neuromodulator-based approach is better or worse. They are simply different from one another. Although, I will say that I think it is important to explore them separately if, indeed, you're going to explore any of them before you would start to combine them in a single formula. Again, individual ingredients are going to be the way to go in terms of figuring out what's best for you. I will routinely take 300 milligrams of alpha-GPC prior to some cognitive work or prior to a workout. I do often combine that with some caffeine, not in capsule or pill form, but rather in the form of a cup of coffee or yerba mate. And it turns out that for me, just by way of example, L-tyrosine is something that works very powerfully to elevate my level of focus, but that I tend to crash pretty hard afterward. And so I tend to err away from L-tyrosine, but some people tolerate it really well and actually really like it. I rely on something else for dopamine augmentation, which is phenolethylamine, which is a little bit more short-lasting. Again, I arrived at these protocols for myself by mixing and matching, but mostly by trying individual ingredients alone before combining them into any sort of cocktail before taking them before a workout or before a cognitive work bout. And I suggest that you explore them in the same way because that's going to deliver you to the best possible protocols for you, which only you can determine. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, Matina. Matina makes my absolute favorite zero sugar cold brew yerba mate. In fact, I helped create the newest flavors. Listeners of this podcast know that yerba mate is my preferred caffeine source and has been for a long time. That's because yerba provides a smooth energy lift without giving you the jitters and it has many other potential benefits, such as helping to regulate blood sugar, improving digestion, mild appetite suppression, and more. And I can tell you that having tried all the different brands of yerba, hot and cold, Matina is my absolute favorite. So much so that I became a partial owner in the company. And the flavors we developed together, I have to say, are fantastic. Raspberry yuzo is probably my favorite, but I also like the mint flavor and I love the peach flavor. So I really can't pick just one. I love them all. In fact, I drink at least three cans of them every day. and you'll often see them on the table during my podcast recordings. If you wanna try Metina, you can go to drinkmetina.com. You can also find Metina at both Whole Foods and Sprouts Market nationwide. And Metina is now being sold at all Earth Bar locations nationwide. So be sure to check out Metina nationwide at Whole Foods, Sprouts, and now Earth Bar as well. I do think there's a category of supplements that can greatly enhance the probability of offsetting depression and maybe even improve mood directly or indirectly. There's evidence for what I'm about to tell you within the scientific literature and improve metabolic function, cardiovascular function, and also enhance our ability to do focused work. And here I'm referring to the so-called omega-3 essential fatty acids, in particular the omega-3 form of the essential fatty acids. There's now a lot of data showing that ingesting one to three grams of EPA in particular in the form of either fish oil capsules or liquid can be beneficial for a number of different aspects of brain and body health and can enhance focus and cognitive ability. The point here is that if somebody has a limited budget to purchase supplements and cannot afford a foundational supplement in the sort that we talked about earlier, athletic greens are similar, but they do have a budget that would allow them to purchase a high-quality omega-3 fatty acid fish oil and to ingest it in quantities sufficient enough to get above that one gram of EPA per day. Again, this is really important. If you look at the product labels, you'll often see 1,500 or 1,600 milligrams of essential fatty acids, but the key is the EPA to make sure that you're above that one gram per day EPA threshold. But if I were to be asked, what is the one supplement that is a single ingredient supplement that serves the greatest role in increasing mental health, physical health, and performance? So again, this would be single ingredient supplement. I would say it's going to be a high-quality omega-3 fatty acid, typically taken in the form of fish oil. Again, you have to decide based on your budget, et cetera. I do want to touch on this vast category of supplementation that includes food-based or food-mimic type supplements. So this would be, for instance, whey proteins, or milk proteins, or egg proteins, or plant proteins. That's a discussion that in and of itself deserves an entire episode. If you want to understand which types of protein and source of proteins are going to be the most bioavailable, the best for protein synthesis, for recovery from exercise, building muscle, et cetera, I'd like to refer you to a segment within the episode that I did with Dr. Lane Norton, where he talks about total protein needs per day. It's about one gram per pound of body weight per day for most people, although there's some variation depending on activity, et cetera. And the quality of sourcing of those various proteins is extremely important. And that, of course, leads to a discussion about the quality and type of protein that would be present in a supplement, like a whey protein supplement or casein, which is a milk protein-based supplement. That discussion is segmented and timestamped in the episode that I did with him. You can find it at hubermanlab.com. He actually pointed to some interesting data on potato protein as perhaps being a great plant-based substitute for those that don't want to take whey-based protein, but the fact that whey-based proteins can be very useful for getting to and above a protein threshold for all sorts of reasons, not just for muscle building, although it's great for that, but for other purposes as well. And that's but one category of food-based or food-mimic type supplements. There's a huge landscape of this, far too much for us to get into in any kind of reasonable detail, but I do want to acknowledge that those all exist. The key thing to understand is that while they can serve a great role in providing replacement for meals that you perhaps couldn't have consumed otherwise, and while they often are very convenient because you can drink as opposed to eat your calories, I think that most people would agree that getting some significant fraction of your nutrition from whole foods is going to be useful for a variety of reasons, in particular, the fiber that comes along with it, the bulk of the food that tends to make us feel sated, and of course, the fact that a lot of vitamins and minerals and other things that are contained within foods, as well as essential fatty acids in foods like animal-based proteins are not going to be present in most, if not all of those kind of food-mimic type powders and replacements for food. There are a couple of themes that we've talked about a few times during today's podcast that I'd like to reiterate now because they are so crucial to developing a rational supplementation protocol, the most important of which is unless we're talking about foundational nutritional support, that is coverage of vitamins, minerals, digestive enzymes, probiotics, prebiotics, and adaptogens, we should really be focusing on single ingredient formulations. Foundational supplements that include all those things I just listed off, all combined in one supplement are fine. I simply don't see any other practical or reasonable way to get each and every one of those things through single ingredient formulations. However, when you want to start thinking about and actually practically exploring things like supplementation for sleep or hormone health or cognitive function, the single ingredient formulations are going to give you the most power and control. They're going to make sure that you can find the minimal effective doses, that you can rule out things that are not effective for you or that may be detrimental for you in whatever fashion. And it's not just about cost-effectiveness, it's also about arriving at small kits or cocktails of supplements that you can really manage and work with that you're not dependent on, but that you really feel can augment the various aspects of your health that are important to you. So that's really what today's episode is about. Even though we had coverage of specific supplements and their functions in these different domains of mental and physical health and performance, today's episode was really geared toward giving you resources and a framework to think about how to approach supplementation, how to navigate sticking points and pain points in supplementation, how to get the most out of your supplementation regimen without spending an excessive amount of money. And if you don't have finances to allow for a lot of exploration of supplements, how to narrow in on the most effective supplements the most quickly and derive all the benefits that you can from them. And as a final point that is redundant with a few of the themes we talked about today, but that I don't think I ever really explicitly stated is that while the word supplement makes it sound like these compounds are something just to add on top of or compensate for deficiencies in nutrition or other areas of your life, many of them are actually quite potent compounds. These are potent non-prescription molecules that really can move the needle in terms of your ability to think more clearly, sleep better, support your hormone function. But as always, they are just one element within an ecosystem of other factors, such as your behaviors, which includes do's and don'ts, such as your nutrition, maybe even such as prescription drugs that you also might happen to be taking or hoping to be taking less of or removing completely. Again, that has to be done in discussion with physicians if you're going to do it at all. But the real point here is that what we call supplements are actually a powerful gear within a larger system aimed at each and every one of us customizing tools for our mental, physical health and performance. So thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion, all about supplementation and more importantly, how to develop a rational and especially effective supplementation protocol for you. And last but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science. Thank you.