How To Choose The Best Supplements for Optimal Health

Mark Hyman, MD

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Mark Hyman
Nobody really needs supplements, but only under certain conditions. They need to hunt and gather their own wild food. They need to drink only pure clean water, breathe pure clean air, be exposed to known viral toxins, wake up with the sun, go to bed with the sun, have no chronic stress. And if that describes you, Then, no, you do not need supplements. Welcome to doctor's pharmacy, another edition of health bites.

I am Doctor Mark Hyman. Today, I'm giving you the ultimate supplement stack to complement your wellness routine so you can feel and live better every day. But before we get into that, we need to cover some ground roles for why I strongly advocate testing over guessing when it comes to dialing in your supplement staples. Here's the deal. Without testing, it's like throwing darts, blindfold.

You'll never hit the bull's eye, and you might end up wasting a lot of money on supplements you don't need, which could be like flushing money down the toilet literally. And that's why I should work closely with your health care provider to get this specific test done that you need. And this way, your doctor can tailor your supplement intake based on your body's individual guided by your unique biological makeup. Optimization is all about personalization. However, getting your doctor on board with getting a test you need can be a challenge sometimes.

Not all practitioners are open to suggestions from their patients. Often dismissing these requests for additional tests as unnecessary or too expensive or not covered by your insurance, but don't let that turn you away. There are a lot of options out there like function health. I co founded function to help put the power back in the patient's hands offering a comprehensive look and over a 110 biomarkers for less than 500 bucks a year We're talking about critical nutrients like vitamin D and magnesium plus detailed assessments, including omega 3 levels, ferritin, zinc, iron, selenium, 12 CRAC protein for inflammation, a lipid profile that's way deeper than you'd get at your average checkup, extensive panels covering sex hormones, thyroid hormones, immune markers, and lots more. So with that in mind, there's a lot of controversy around supplementation.

Should you supplement? Should you not? Is it a waste of money? Is it worth it? Can you get what you need from food alone?

Well, let's get into those questions. Why do we need to supplement? Well, there's a lot of reasons. Nice joke that nobody really needs supplements, but only under certain conditions. 1, they need to hunt and gather their own wild food.

2, they need to drink only pure clean water breathe pure clean air, be exposed to no environmental toxins, wake up with the sun, go to bed with the sun, have no chronic stress. And if that describes you, then, no, you do not need supplements. But everybody else, because of a lot of reasons, I'm into detail, we need to take supplements. Now not surprising, 95% of the US population and 2,000,000,000 people around the world have at least one nutrient deficiency mean, even if you're eating the perfect diet, and let's just define that as a whole foods, unprocessed diet, fruits and vegetables, and so forth. Now maybe if you eat only regenerative food from a regenerative farm, you might do better, but basically, that's very hard to get at this point.

You know, even if we ate completely perfectly, all organic whole foods, no natural processed food, basically finding nutritional quality of our foods and the stresses of our modern life and our toxic environment, it just increase the demands on our body for extra nutrients, and it makes it harder to get what we need from alone. So you need, you know, a lot to get the nutrients needed for optimal health, and people just don't wanna spend that much time eating or thinking about And that's where it's important to really supplement to fill any nutrient gaps, not just avoid deficiency diseases, but to achieve optimal health. By the way, most of the nutritional standards. The dietary reference intakes or what we call the RDA's are based on avoiding a deficiency disease. So how much vitamin c do you need to not get scurvy?

Not very much. How much vitamin d do you need to not get rickets? 30 units? How much vitamin need you need for optimal health and immunity, maybe 3000 or 5000, maybe 10 or a hundred times that, right, we need to kind of move our thinking from addressing deficiencies to optimizing health, not just basically taking that so you don't get scurvy. Right?

Deficiency systems look different for everybody. And it can depend on the person. There are unique genetic background, the nutrient, or combinations they're missing. Some people could show up as joint pain or migraines, like low magnesium or or depression. I had a guy who was, like, just very depleted in folate in V12, and he was severely depressed.

Supplement them and boom he's back. Doesn't mean that all cases of depression are caused by that, but, you know, it's it's one of the factors. So for other people like to show up as rashes or skin conditions, for example, if your loan free fats. You get patchy dry scalies, bits all over. If you have vitamin a deficiency, you get little bumps on the back of your arm.

Your metabolism will slow down for the amount of iodine or zinc or selenium, for example, might be able to make your thyroid properly and a brain fog from just how do you make neurotransmitters? So there's There's a lot of things that go wrong that we think are just normal symptoms, but they're really be because of nutrient deficiencies. Now there's some basic supplements that I talk about a lot no matter your age, your race, your sex, your health goals, you wanna add these to routine, and you will notice a difference. So what is the basic supplement plan I recommend? Well, it's a multivitamin.

I'm technically a multivitamin and multi mineral, like a safety net and ensures you receive a baseline of the essential vitamins and minerals every day. It supports your overall nutrient adequacy especially in populations with deficiencies, which is pretty much overseeing everybody or increased needs that are based on particular issues, maybe pregnancy or if you're older, vegetarian or vegan, those with chronic disease, severe dietary restrictions, you know, as far as being older would mean absorb things as well. You know, low stomach acid, not get B12. If you're vegan, for example, I see university, B12, iodine, often zinc, vitamin a, omega threes, all low. And vitamin d, iron, it's it's kind of a a disaster for most vegans if you actually check under the hood.

Now if you're taking supplements, fine. Great. But if you're vegan, you make sure you take plenty of the right supplements and you check your levels. And I encourage you to do a function of health panel because you might be surprised at what you find. I've been treating, you know, people for 30 years testing everybody's nutritional status.

And this is not an anomaly. This is pretty much standard. And even if you're trying to be a healthy vegan, still hard. So research shows that basically multi vitamin every day can help support brain health, low cognitive aging boost memory. The study, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition Justice year, reports that a daily multi vitamin supplementation over a period of 2 years significantly improved global cognition and episodic memory.

Now the study authors estimated that daily supplementation had delayed cognitive aging by about 2 years compared to those who just received a placebo. Now this is a randomized controlled trial of a multivitamin and a placebo. This is the best kind of study. It's not a correlation study. And, you know, a lot of doctors say, oh, well, you know, it's helping us not work, or there's no data, there's no evidence, depends where you look.

Right? I would say that's not that there's no evidence. They just haven't looked for it. You know, they say, oh, it costs expensive urine. I'm like, well, yeah, you pee out what you don't need, but tell me you shouldn't drink water because you're urinating.

You just pee out what you don't need. I mean, that doesn't make any sense, right, or that you shouldn't eat because you poop out stuff you don't need. Well, no. Your body takes up what it needs and gets rid of Now what about women? Well, if you're a woman, you you might be either deficient or anemic, especially if you don't eat red meat or you're vegan or you have heavy periods.

And you probably gonna need iron in your in your, menstruating years. Yeah. There might be 7 year multi, but mostly if you're not and you're, you're, you should get your levels checked. You wanna make sure you get enough, through the supplement. Probably iron bisglycinet is the most bioavailable form.

And again, you know, you can test one of the most important things to know is your fair not just your iron level, but your ferritin, which is your iron stores. And then most doctors wanna check that, but it's important because if you're Your level's under 45. It's gonna affect your health. Even though the reference range on the labs is 16 or above is normal, 45 or above should be the normal range or the optimal range. Because under 45, you get hair loss, you get fatigue, you get sleep disruption, and many other things.

So really important to get your fear and levels up. This is really important. Why? Because you need to make your blood from that, your hemoglobin, energy production, cognition, immune function, all are dependent on iron. And most multivitamin brands really don't contain enough iron, even the good ones.

So it's because, you know, you can get iron overloads. You don't wanna take too but you wanna take enough. So I would supplement with iron disc glycinate, which, as I mentioned, the most valuable form, there's great versions from thorn and pure encapsulations. If you're not getting enough fruits and veggies, by the way, 90% of people aren't in America. They're missing out on powerful benefits of something called polyphenols.

Now there's also other stuff we need that we're not getting from our modern industrial food supply, and that's phytochemicals. You know, if you're not even at fruits and veggies and 90% of Americans are not, you're probably missing out on the most powerful healing benefits of polyphenols. And now conventional produce has much fewer phytochemicals than organic produce. And obviously, regenerative produce has more than organic and wild has more than regenerative. So wild strawberries are amazing.

They're small, but, you know, they are full of phytochemicals because also flavor follows phytochemical richness. The more flavorful of food is, the more phytochemicals it has and the better it is for you. So now even if you were close to the recommended 5 servings a day of fruits and vegetables, which is barely enough. Like, that's just bare minimum. It should be more like 10 to 18 servings, not 5 to 9.

If you you sort of do follow the guidelines, which is the dietary guidelines of 2020, 2025, it's too low. Polyphenols are important because they support that got microbiome, your immune system, inflammation, their overall health, healthy aging, all the longevity switches I talked about in my book young forever. All a lot of them are controlled by these phytochemicals, whether it's green tea, compounds, burbering, from different plants, or all the weird things that can have profound effects Bittermelon is a weird Chinese vegetable, but that's great for regulating blood sugar, for example. Make sure you get your multivitamin. What else should you be taking?

Well, omega 3 fatty acids. 90 plus percent of Americans are low on this, and this is a critical thought that makes up your cell membranes, your brain that regulates community, inflammation, gut microbiome health, pretty much everything because it's it's it's, you know, there's not many essential fats, and we don't need them in larger amounts. But but omega-three fats are essential, meaning we cannot get them unless we get them from our diet. Right? There there there are things we have to eat, as opposed to fats we can make ourselves.

90% Americans, as I mentioned, are not getting the recommended amounts of omega threes, which is 1 or 2 servings of fatty fish a week. Or not eating enough fish or seafood. And our ancestral diet used to be really different in the ratio of omega 6 to omega threes. We need omega 6s too. But, you know, we used to be having a ratio of 2 to 1 of omega 6, omega threes.

Now we're probably 20 to 1, and that's pretty scary. Omega 6 fats are really essential for the neurodevelopment of the brain and cognitive health and cellular health. We're eating way too much of those because all the process seed oils that are in our ultra processed food and a sad diet. And these are these are bad. Right?

These refined oils that are things that are relatively new to nature in terms of how we're processing them, how we grow them. They're full of, you know, toxins, glyphosate, hexane, oxidized unstable. We all soybean canola, sunflower. Doesn't mean that you can't have some of these omega sixes or use some of these in your in your kitchen. But you wanna you wanna use the right forms and you don't wanna use too much.

Psychosis, Alzheimer's, dementia, all connected to low levels of omega threes and higher omega sixes. Fish oil supplementation is actually associated with a lower risk of dementia. Omega-three deficiency is also common in skin conditions, like eczema, psoriasis, just even just dry patchy skin, thinning hair, cracked nails, all kinds of stuff. Like, just having healthy skin is amazing. So I I take omega threes.

My nails are really hard. They're not like soft and brittle and cracky. And if you're low, it can even, you know, accelerate other inflammatory conditions like arthritis. So You wanna increase and maintain your levels of omega threes. You have to eat at least 2 servings of small, low mercury, cold water, fish a week, and that's macro, anchovies, sardines, and herring, which are not people's favorite.

Sometimes Sam is okay, but, again, that can be a little big and have Amy Metals. You're not sure where you get them if it's harm raised or not. They're plant based omega threes, ALA, which is a plant form of omega threes. It's a great source of, ala is like walnuts and chia seeds and so forth, but they don't really work to get to the full needs that we need for omega threes because they don't get converted as well as they should. Now if you're vegan or vegetarian, you wanna supplement with high quality algal oil, but allergy only has a DHA.

So there are other forms of EPA that are plant based that I've seen. I've tested people who've been using them. I don't see them reflected in their blood work. So I'm a little kind of dubious about it, but the, you know, there are a lot of there's a lot of options for you out there. Make sure you look for ones that are carotene and free carotene it talks into the gut lining.

It's made from seaweed, but it's definitely an emulsifier that makes your gut leaky. And you wanna stay away from Alright. What else do you need? You got your multivitamin, your fish oil, vitamin d. Now vitamin d is critical for 100100 of biochemical reactions and gene expressions lots of things.

And in fact, almost every system in your body, it's more of a pro hormone than a vitamin. Another pandemic helped shine a light on how crucial this macronutrient is for overall health and immunity. Now severe vitamin D efficiency, you get this. That's less than 25. And often at some labs still have 20 as a reference range or most are 30.

When you had a vitamin deficiency of 25 or less, it was associated with an increased severity of COVID disease, a higher rate of ICU admission, a high rate of death, more likely to get infected and more likely to be hospitalized. And guess what, folks, an estimated 1,000,000,000 people worldwide are living with vitamin need efficiency. Again, all the references are in. If you wanna check my facts, go ahead. Now 95% of US adults are division of vitamin d from, the journal nutrients.

And We're talking about deficient. We don't necessarily mean deficient according to the reference range of a lab, but what's optimal. Right? Although probably 80% or low at the level that the labs has to, if you're not taking anybody in the end, you're not in the sun. Now it does us so much.

Right? It functions not just like the vitamin, but more like a hormone affects the expression of more than a 1000 genes. It's critical for bone health or bone density for skin health or motile health. Muscle function, cognitive health, mental health, depression, you heard of it as sad or the seasonal effect of disorder. That's because of low vitamin d in the winter.

Your gut health and protecting its chronic disease. We used to eat a lot of these small fatty fish because most of us lived in the long coastal areas, or you can get them from wild mushrooms. But we don't eat those fish or those things that much anymore. So you can get it from salmon, mackerelsardines, and herring, cod liver oil, egg yolks, beef, liver, mushrooms, like, Porcini is the highest. The body makes also vitamin D internally on its own, but not enough.

Right? But I mean, depending on you and your genetics and your absorption, your your dose should be between a 1000 to 5000 units a day. Some people need 10,000. You can take a lot more if you're deficient to load up the tank, rather than just sort of slowly increasing. You can take, you know, 10000 a day or 20000 a day for a week or 2 or 3.

They did a study with young men who were healthy, gave him 10000 a day for 3 months, and there was no adverse effect The form you wanna take is vitamin D3. That's the the right form, and a lot of doctors prescribed the wrong form, vitamin D2, which isn't as well utilized or converted. You need to take with fat to boost absorption, so don't take it on empty stomach. You wanna go for quality. Right?

You don't want ones that are just off the shelf from your grocery store or your average pharmacy, you know, maybe Whole Foods and you know, health food stores have higher quality brands, but you wanna make sure you get the right products. A lot of the supplements in the market are just crap, and there's no regulation. What else? Magnesium. Magnesium is so important, and so many of us are low or deficient, and maybe between 50 to 70% depending on how you look.

Magnesium is involved in over 600 enzymatic reactions in the body. So every chemical process requires the enzyme, and this just keeps the wheels of your biochemical machinery going. If you're low, you're not not not working out. 60% of Americans are deficient, meaning that 600 enzymatic reactions can't function optimally every day in these people. Magnesium is an important electrolyte gatekeeper of ourselves.

It lets, for example, potassium and calcium in the cells to conduct electrical currents that are responsible for everything, like our heartbeat at the contraction and relaxation of our muscles, our nerve, firing, neuroplasticity, ATP production, the production of energy in our cells, DNA repair, and lots more. It also plays a critical role in hormone and neurotransmitter synthesis. Including GABA, which is an anxiety preventing neurotransmitter serotonin, which is for depression, for example, happy mood chemical, dopamine for focus. It also regulates sleep, relaxation, mood, behavior, blood sugar, critically, needs magnesium to be properly regulated. It also activates vitamin d.

So if we don't have magnesium, we can't use vitamin d and lots Type 2 diabetics tend to be more magnesium deficient than non diabetics, and supplementation can actually help prevent diabetes and improve blood sugar control. I mean, studies showing that supplementing with just 250 milligrams of magnesium daily can have a big impact on hemoglobin a1c, which is the average blood sugar, your insulin resistance, and your blood sugar control just that for 3 months. Now because magnesium is involved in so much, deficiency puts a service for a lot of problems, anxiety, insomnia, headaches, hormone imbalances, constipation, high blood pressure, painful, PMS with cramping and mood swings, vitamin D deficiency. Right? My my mentor, Sydney Baker said anything that twitches or cramps is a magnesium to whether it's constipation, palpitations, anxiety, irritability, muscle twitching, I mean, name it.

It's probably Magnesium Efficiency. Actually, there was an article in the New England Journal. Reviewing magnesium efficiency just last week, which is great. And I encourage you to check it out, but it's, thank god that at least me and major medical journals are now recognizing what a big issue this is. And when, by the way, when when we look at our culture, it's a magnesium losing society.

Right? It's a magnesium losing culture. When when, we do things like drink caffeine or alcohol or eat foods, high in sugar, or starch, or have chronic stress, which I'm sure no one out there listening has, you lose magnesium. There was one study where they took, victims of the, sort of the Bosnia war in Kosovo, and they went to a really, you know, stress. They actually measured their urinary magnesium and found that they were much higher levels of urinary magnesium than average people who weren't stressed.

That means you're when you're stressed, you pee out magnesium. And the magnesium efficiency makes you more stressed because it's the relaxation mineral. One of my hacks is taking some salt bath. You can absorb your skin that helps you relax. But there's a lot of foods that have magnesium pumpkin seeds, almonds, spinach, cashews, avocado, dark chocolate, now it's hard to get enough magnesium from food.

Why? Well, as I mentioned before, our declining soil quality. It's bound to anti nutrient center die like phytase from beans, and some grains. And there's a lot of different forms of magnesium. So, you know, depending on what your needs are and what your issues are, I'd recommend different forms.

For example, magnesium glycinate by pure encapsulations is great. And you can take, you know, about, you know, 120 milligrams in a pill. You can take, you know, 2 to 4 of those a day. That's a good one. It doesn't just sort of generally applicable and also helps to sleep.

What else? Okay. Multivitamin, fish oil, vitamin d, magnesium, and a probiotic. Is the next group. Now our gut health is so tied to your overall health.

We know we've talked about a lot of the podcasts, but your gut microbiome is comprised of trillions of different bacteria. That work together to support or to inhibit your overall health. Right? Good bugs are good for you. Bad bugs are bad for you.

Bad bacteria cause something called dysbiosis which is an imbalance in the gut flora where you grow too many bad bugs, not of good bugs. That leads to inflammation to a leaky gut to systemic inflammation to food sensitivities to all kinds of stuff and increase the risk for chronic diseases across the board. From heart disease to cancer, diabetes, to obesity, as well as allergy, asthma, autoimmunity, and lots, lots more. Now good bacteria promote a healthy immune system. And they lower inflammation, and they protect against chronic disease.

So you wanna get a probiotic. And a probiotic can introduce good bacteria into your gut, and that helps support digestion, regular pooping, immunity, a lower, lowering your inflammation state, reduce bloating, although if you do have bacterial overgrowth, you wanna be careful because probiotics can make it worse temporarily until you fix it. But it overall improves GI health. Other other nutrients that you might wanna add in here and there, one of them that I I totally think is helpful as you get older and, when you need to build muscle is creatine. Creatine is one of the most well researched safest and most effective supplements on the market.

So what is it? Well, creatine is a compound that our bodies naturally produce. It's also found in certain foods like animal proteins, meat, and fish. It's primarily stored in mussels and in smaller amounts in the brain and heart. Creatine is well known for helping soul.

And when paired with resistance training, meaning strength training, it's super beneficial in preventing muscle loss or sarcopenia. Reducing falls and fracture risk as you get older. Now create team may help enhance insulin sensitivity. It can improve the function efficacy of glucose transporters in the muscle, meaning it's better to regulate your blood sugar, and you also your fat tissues, which is great for people with metabolic issues. And studies have shown that supplemental creatine could benefit sedentary people or those with metabolic dysfunction by enhancing insulin sensitivity, which something we mostly have.

I think probably 93% Americans have a problem with their insulin regulation. Evidence shows that a high intake of creatine is linked to a 50% lower risk of depression, improved mood, particularly in populations that consume less meat. Those are my top supplements. Right? Multivitamin, fish oil, vitamin d, magnesium, probiotics, and creatine.

Those are the ones, I certainly take every day. And I think everybody needs to take on a regular basis. I have links to all the supplements in the show notes. If you're interested in what supplements I take for longevity, check out. My episode on diet supplements and lifestyle routine for myself.

The link will be in the show notes, and I'll catch you next time. If you love that last video, you're gonna love the next one. Check it out here.