How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones) - Transcript
Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, Steve, it's so great to have you on the podcast. You know, we've been friends for a while, traveled the world together, done a lot of cool stuff. We're both, you know, involved in two companies that I think are gonna change the landscape of health in America. One is Functional Health where I'm the co founder and chief medical officer. Another is Subco, which is something we're gonna talk about today, and it's something that's been desperately needed for decades to navigate the myriad of supplements out there on the market to find the quality that you want Mhmm.
To know that you're not getting crap in it, to know that it's made in a way that actually meets pharmaceutical grade standards Mhmm. To actually figure out what to do because it's a landscape out there that is fraught with all sorts of problems that I've tried to solve, but you've done a way better job. You see, you you, you've, you know, kind of started and exited many amazing companies like GroupMe and Blade and Splice. I think there's a there's this interesting personal story that you have about how you have sort of understood your own health challenges and used your own way of navigating it. And this is really coming out of your own struggles to figure shit out.
And now, you know, we have the opportunity to share this innovation around how to think about supplementation and whether you need them, why you should take them, what the landscape is out there, what the problems are with it, and how to solve that. So you, you know, you've, you're a sort of multiple serial entrepreneur, and you've tackled this problem in a way that I'm just so glad because for me as a practicing doctor, it's so hard for my patients to actually figure out what to take. And that's why I've spent decades researching the market, visiting supplement manufacturers, factories, going in there, doing quality control, looking for third party testing, making sure their ingredients were pure, that they had no contaminants or chemicals or additives, which often they do. Mhmm. Making sure that they're bioavailable, that there are forms of nutrients that work right, and also that they're digestible.
When you eat them, they don't just poop out. And that they're actually tested after for both potency and purity, so whatever it says on the label is what's on the label. And I spent decades doing this, and I've curated a small group of these supplements that I think work clinically for my patients. And we're going to sort of go into how you solve the problem at a much bigger scale, because, you know, there's I don't know how many products are in the market?
Steve Martocci
We have tracked we're tracking about 200,000.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Two hundred thousand products. So it's kind of I I you know, it's kind of insane to think about how much is out there and how much noise is out there and where is the signal and what's good and what's bad. So let's just sort of start by diving into your story because you you were, you know, a very overweight, unhealthy guy when you were in your twenties.
Steve Martocci
I mean, twenties, I I think it my journey probably goes back to my childhood. I was always the fat kid. I was a tall fat kid. And I would make all the sports teams because they'd be like, oh, he's six five, like he's gonna it's gonna we can make him good. Right?
He's gonna get better as time goes on. But honestly, think nothing I would do with playing football. You you do two a day practices and all nonstop and I I wouldn't lose weight. And it was pretty wild. My mom has hypothyroidism.
She took me to an endocrinologist. This is like nineteen ninety six, seven, something like that. And they did some labs and they just told me I was on the low end of normal and they couldn't do anything. Yeah. And it was completely disheartening.
I thought that medicine like completely let me down and things got worse. Like I got up to three hundred pounds in college. Two ninety nine, I never saw three hundred on a scale. I refused to get on a scale once it was two ninety nine. Like it just was not it was not good.
And then, you know, I'm a I'm a software engineer. I just love building. Code is kind of my canvas. It's just where I can lose days building and it's so much fun for me. Built a successful company called GroupMe.
It was a kind of pioneering group text messaging. And when we sold that, we sold it quickly to Skype. You know, I was two hundred and seventy pounds. I had just made some money. I wanted to live, but I was deeply unhealthy.
Yeah. And I found a functional medicine doctor. And this is like this is 02/2010, you know, like so ahead of the curve a bit.
Dr. Mark Hyman
So I've been doing it since '96. So that was like I
Steve Martocci
had a social media curve at least.
Dr. Mark Hyman
That was fourteen years later. Yeah.
Steve Martocci
Ahead of the curve of like the bio hacker trend
Dr. Mark Hyman
that I feel
Steve Martocci
like is now. We started doing lab work. Right? And we started experimenting and, you know, started with some thyroid medicine, kinda dialed in some hormones and built a supplement stack and it and it worked. And I and I committed to diet and exercise again, you know, with these, you know, helping me this time and and it worked.
And people would ask me, they'd they'd see my transformation and they'd asked what was what was I doing and no one wanted to hear diabetes.
Dr. Mark Hyman
And you lost almost a hundred pounds.
Steve Martocci
Yeah. I mean, at that point, I probably lost 70 pounds. Yeah. You know, they're they're they're asking me what I'm doing and this is ten years before Ozempic is a thing. Yeah.
This is this is not the the easy answer. And so I would share them my my stack which was the the list of supplements and medications I was taking. And it would be a ugly out of date Google spreadsheet. And honestly, people didn't really know what to do with it, you know, but a couple people would be like, cool. I talked to my doctor about this one thing.
And you know, then I went on with my my life happy. I started Blade and Splice and ran Splice for ten years. I was a little burned out leading through COVID and, you know, getting ready to have a kid and kinda wanted to step back and and hire a CEO there. You know, it was time to build again. I'm just the software itch is just always in me, and I wanted to do something in health.
I mean, had been a transformative experience for me. Yeah. And and it had become the zeitgeist, you know. Like, your book was just coming out on longevity and Peter Attia's book. It just seemed like like the dinner table conversation and the and the stack sharing on social media, like it was happening.
Like this wasn't just Yeah. About Yeah. It's like that's like What are
Dr. Mark Hyman
you taking?
Steve Martocci
Exactly. And so that was the the core concept was to bring back the stack sharing concept. You know, I saw what what you guys were doing with Function. I was so inspired by it. I'm a Function investor.
I, you know, I'm happy about that. But I wanted to tackle this space, which I found to be an incredibly gray area of understanding what to do. And so that's where it it formed. I remember the first day I had the idea in my head. Some, a friend of mine came over for dinner without me saying anything.
She said, I spent four hours today going through all my supplements, putting them in a spreadsheet, figuring out how to save money and take less pills. Yeah. It's like, oh, this is like a pretty good idea then. And then like, I had another friend in the first week say that their friend they knew someone who whose mom had taken so much vitamin d. They didn't know.
They had she had dementia early dementia like symptoms. Yeah. And she was like totally misdiagnosing vitamin d. And so I started to really like get in
Dr. Mark Hyman
Because it was it wasn't what it said on the bottle? Because I
Steve Martocci
I don't even too many pills. Get the I think it was too many pills or not understanding the like IU dosing versus milligram dosing Yeah. And was like, you know, that was the the story I was getting. And so we're we're really here to to to help you make sense supplements.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Let let's talk about the landscape of nutrition because I think, you know, most doctors, and certainly I was trained, that vitamins make expensive urine. Don't waste your Right. And your body gets everything it needs from food. Yep. You'll be fine, and don't worry about it.
You know, there's a big fallacy in that. First of all, if that logic was true, you shouldn't drink water because you pee out what you don't need. Right. Your body takes what you need. So if you drink an excess amount of water, your body will just get rid of it.
Right? And that's the way it is for most vitamins, not the fat soluble vitamins, you have to be careful. But but it's, you know, it's it's crazy because you have 37,000,000,000 chemical reactions in your body every second. And every single one of those chemical reactions requires a cofactor or helper, and those those are facilitated by enzymes. The enzymes need various nutrients to to activate that pathway so that one molecule can become another molecule, which is how your body works.
And those cofactors are vitamins and minerals. Right. Literally, the the grease, the lubricants that we also have your metabolism and your when I say metabolism, I mean your you know, from a medical perspective, is every chemical reaction in your body. And on top of that, you know, there's other compounds that are phytochemicals that are are also we're learning are so powerful and we've consumed, you know, 800 species of plants and foods with all sorts of phytonutrients. There's, you know, probably maybe 100,000 phytochemicals out there that have effects on the body.
You've heard of some of them like sulforaphane from broccoli or resveratrol from grapes or Yep. You know, curcumin from, you know, turmeric. Yeah. Turmeric. You know?
And so, basically, we we we've been consuming these things. Now we probably eat three main species of of plants, basically corn, wheat, and soy. And then maybe another total of 12, you had tomatoes, lettuce Right. Celery, carrots. Right.
Like, it's like 12 foods and you're you were missing all these important phytochemicals that also help regulate our biology and that we've co evolved with. I call it symbiotic phyto adaptation. So whether it's an actual vitamin, you know, that's essential or an omega three fat or essential fatty acid or it's a conditionally essential nutrient, there's many of those that you need more of depending on your state of health and what's going on, like CoQ10 if you're on a statin. And then there's all the phytochemicals. And and so there's supplements out there that contain all these things.
It's a kind of a morass of of a of a landscape that's poorly regulated that that is not well controlled. I mean, the the the Shea legislation in the nineties helped sort of set the stage for a supplement industry that you could, you know, kind of go wild and not make disease curing claims, which was good, but it kind of created a Wild West where the whole supplement industry grew. The question is, you know, do Americans need supplements? Do people in general need nutritional supplements? Because if you listen to most doctors, you don't.
Steve Martocci
I mean, I I think that is the the thing that is so hard as a consumer in this space is just the wildly different opinions. And like it's it's the doctor gap of people who say expensive urine to the ones who are like, this is exactly what to do for this. And it's also like the explosion on social media, you know. There's this whole kinda n equals one world right now where people are raving about, you know, this supplement is just changing my life. It makes me see in four k.
But but, you know, then they they also have their supplement store right behind it. So it's a it's an extremely difficult space to navigate.
Dr. Mark Hyman
I mean, there's a lot of snake oil sales by
Steve Martocci
the A lot
Dr. Mark Hyman
snake oil sales. Yeah.
Steve Martocci
Or or and look, there might be people who are having actual real great experiences, but they're not aggregating that data in a way that, you know, allows anyone to make sense of it. It's just their individual story. And I think we're going through such a big, you know, battle right now in America, around the individual and the institution. Right? And like who to trust in this?
And that trust is is really eroded. Institutional trust is, you know, continuing to go down. And, you know, 51% of Americans say that they have bought a health or wellness product from a social media influencer Yeah. From something they saw on social media.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, I buy you shorts and shoes. Bought supplements. Yeah.
Steve Martocci
Yeah. Fair.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Fair. I see. Well, can I dive a little bit deeper for us into what is Subco and how it works and why it's so important?
Steve Martocci
You know, we like to say that we're helping users make sense of supplements through our website and app. We're helping you figure out what supplements are right for your health, what products and brands you can trust, how you can save the most money and get results. To do this, we've cataloged over 200,000 supplement products that you can search in our app or by their scanning the barcode. And we've built an in-depth trust score rating from 29 different attributes that let you understand the manufacturing standards and quality of your supplements. For those looking to figure out what they want to take, we have 80 expert protocols that you can go in to find guidance on different health topics like brain fog or, heart health and women's hormones.
To get started, it's pretty easy. You enter a little bit of information, start scanning your supplements to to kinda catalog what you're already taking. We give you an analysis of your stack so that you can kinda get a score that's easy to understand how you can improve quality, how you can improve trust, and, and make changes to kind of improve that. You also then can share your stack with your doctor, your friends, kinda get feedback from different people, create a conversation around it. That helps you understand if you're taking too much or too little of something, which, you know, happens to a lot of people.
And then we have a smart scheduler that lets you make sure you're taking your products correctly. Are you taking them with food? Are you taking them at the right time? Which, you know, will then also start tracking to see whether or not you're getting results. We launched a beta in early October.
The response has been amazing. We're getting like nearly a thousand users a day right now. October 24. October '20 '4. Yeah.
And we're getting a thousand users a day without even having your protocols or excited to get your protocols and stack on the platform soon. And, you know, I think what's for us people to know, right now everything on sup goes free. And we'll launch a premium membership later this year, will have some premium features and eventually help people save money on their supplements as well. We don't sell any of your data. There's no advertisement on Safco either.
And, yeah, we want people to come in and be aligned with them so that we're just as excited when they stop taking something that doesn't work as when they start taking something.
Dr. Mark Hyman
So you're not selling supplements?
Steve Martocci
We're not selling supplements and, if we do, we will never profit from them. We want We're guiding people on how to
Dr. Mark Hyman
take the best products for them that are the cleanest that Right. That are actually matching their goals and needs and you're you're just providing this incredible service, which I think is such an important gap in the marketplace that you're filling. So what is the problem of of nutritional deficiencies today in America? What what do we know about the level of of insufficiency or deficiency of nutrients? Is it widespread?
Is it rare? I mean, look, I think
Steve Martocci
this is your world. I think this is the one that you particularly would talk best about. I know my own individual struggles, honestly, like you've got this data. This is this is your world.
Dr. Mark Hyman
I mean, data the data is so impressive. You know, when you look at the and I'll just sort of share a little bit to kind of set the stage, but, you know, NHANES is called the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, and it's conducted by the government. And every year they drive around, they get blood on a whole bunch of people, they test their levels, and they see what's going on, all sorts of things. And nutrient levels. And and what they found is, you know, ninety plus percent of Americans are deficient in one or more nutrient at the minimum level to prevent deficiency.
This is really an important concept for nutrients because if you if you look at, for example, vitamin D
Steve Martocci
Mhmm.
Dr. Mark Hyman
You need maybe thirty units so you don't get rickets. Right. Or you might need three thousand units Right. So you don't get osteoporosis or cancer or dementia or heart disease or autoimmune diseases or a whole bunch of things that we call long latency deficiency diseases. There's a guy named Robert Heaney who's a professor and brilliant scientist who wrote a paper called long latency deficiency diseases.
Steve Martocci
Tell him about And
Dr. Mark Hyman
what it said she was talking about was like, yeah, there's nobody walking around really in America with rickets anymore or scurvy or beriberi or pellagra or xerophthalmia. These are these severe deficiency diseases that we we actually, found in the turn of the century when we started refining our diet and taking, you know, white flour and white rice. That's actually how they found it was in prisoners, they gave them white rice, they all became deficient and had these horrible diseases that were cured in a second essentially with miniscule amounts of nutrients. When you look at the amount of deficiencies, whether it's ninety plus percent deficient omega-three, eighty plus insufficient or deficient in vitamin D, and some people say even more, magnesium is about 45%, zinc is about 40%, iron. You know, we have a lot of efficiencies.
And with Function Mhmm. You know, we now have 150,000 members of Function Health. And and and now, by the way, there's no waiting list so you can just join. Go to functionhealth.com/mark. You can get in and go ahead and check your levels.
But we found that in looking at all the data, almost seventy percent of our members have a deficiency in a nutrient that is at the minimum reference range of the lab. Right. So in other words, for iron, this is an example, your ferritin level, which is your iron source, should be 45 or more to feel good, to not have fatigue, to not have hair loss, to not have insomnia. There's a whole bunch of things that come with low iron. The reference range goes 16 or lower, but it should be 45.
Or homocysteine is just like the levels 14, which should be more six to eight, which detects B vitamin deficiencies. Or vitamin D should be probably 45 to 60, not 30 or 20, which some lab reference changes are. And at the minimum level, which is how much you need to not get rickets or scurvy or any these diseases, not this is what the RDA is. It's not the amount you should be It's the minimum amount you need to be taking so you don't get some of these horrible diseases. We're seeing almost seventy percent of people are deficient in these nutrients in a cohort of one hundred and fifty thousand people, which is a massive amount of data that we've collected at Functional Health, we're learning about the kinds of things we're seeing in the population.
So it's a real issue where people are not getting the nutrients they need, and they don't know why they feel bad. They don't know why they have these low grade symptoms. Know, had one patient, she had she came in, she was a radiation oncology resident at Mayo and she had the most severe migraines. She was on narcotics, she was on major anti vomiting medication. And she could barely function.
And she came in and she said, Oh, I have terrible migraines. And I started taking her history. I said, Oh, do you have other symptoms like constipation?
Steve Martocci
Or do
Dr. Mark Hyman
you have muscle spasms or do you have anxiety or irritability or palpitations or, constipation? And she's like, yeah, I got all those things. I'm like, well, that's a magnesium deficiency. And it was so easy. I gave her she needed like one thousand or more milligrams of magnesium to get her going and to clear everything out, and then cured her migraines.
Wow. And you hear someone who was at Mayo Clinic, saw their best migraine doctors, did everything she could, they couldn't even diagnose a deficiency. And by the way, magnesium deficiency, test magnesium with function and we get your red cell magnesium, which is a better indicator. Sure. But to do a real magnesium loading test where you give people IV magnesium and you see what they keep and what they dump out Mhmm.
Is the best way to actually really tell. But but it but even so, just by history, could tell. And after doing functional medicine for thirty years, I can tell you without a doubt, and doing nutrition testing on tens of thousands of people and deep analysis of minerals and vitamins and antioxidant levels and oxidative stress and CoQ10, all the things that people normally don't look at, it's so widespread. Like, nutrient deficiency is so widespread in America. So, you know, that kind of then leads into the question of, well, if that's true, then,
Steve Martocci
you know, why is that true? By the way, what's shocking about that is seventy five percent of Americans take a dietary supplement, fifty five percent are regular users, yet seventy percent are still getting those lab results from you. Right. So like they're definitely taking the wrong things or not enough of the right things, you know. Like so I think that just speaks to a lot of the, you know, stuff we're trying to sort out, Subco, is giving people the ability to actually know what they're putting in their body.
One of the big features of being able to kinda enter everything that you're currently taking is you'll actually see your nutrient totals across all the different products. Vitamin d is coming from six of the products I take, you know. And like actually having a conversation with your doctor about what's actually going in your body Right. Doesn't really happen. I remember talking to a nutritionist in the beginning.
They're like, she was like very good. She said, yeah, spent four hours, you know, actually going over the nutrients that people are getting from the products they told me. But most people don't ever do that. I don't know who has a conversation with their doctor who knows actually what they're putting in their body. No.
Dr. Mark Hyman
I I think this is really important. So SEBCO is a is a is your company that you started to help solve this problem of what to take, quality Quality. Of, you know, how can you trust Are you taking your outcomes, yeah. You know, what's the total amount of nutrients you're taking? So people might be taking 10 different supplements and that they like I said, they all might have selenium in them Correct.
And then you're getting toxic dose of selenium.
Steve Martocci
One hundred percent.
Dr. Mark Hyman
And you don't know that because you're not adding it all up, you're not putting a spreadsheet, you're not doing the math, and you create a product that does this. Now I I believe in this so much because I it's it's what I tried to solve when I started my own sort of store for my patients, which was essentially trying to curate a small group of products that I personally had investigated, that I visited the factories, that I did the analysis, that I looked at the third party My god. I mean, I curated basically 300, four hundred products for functional medicine applications, for basically helping people with cardiometabolic issues, for hormonal issues, for gut issues, and so on and so forth. So that was a lot of work. And I've been confident that I can recommend these things to my patients or people who follow me, but I don't think it really solves a bigger problem of, like, how do you figure out everything altogether?
I I know personally that I don't have enough time to do this for myself even. Totally. You know, I'm buying different things or using things. Right. They're like, how do I how do I know?
So that that's really why I become an adviser Yeah. To Subco and I'm sort of helping you because I think this is such an important gap in the marketplace and it's such a need. When you look at the landscape today, tell us some of the problems in the supplement industry. Why why is this needed? Because people are just buying stuff and they don't know where it's coming from, where they get it.
Yep. They can buy it on Amazon, and often this stuff is sitting on a pallet for a long time or it's like the it's some sort of rip off product that doesn't have the nutrients in it. So tell us sort of unpack the the the real issues with the supplement industry as it is today.
Steve Martocci
As I said, we've got about 200,000 products. There's there's like a 95 already done and then a big queue of ones that have been submitted to us that we're going through. And that's up from 4,000 products in 1994. That's all there was. Right?
So it's been a Wait, 4,000 In 1994, there's 4,000 supplement products on the market. And now there's over 200. That's insane. And so, you know, we've kind of gone in and taken each one of the supplements, taken the supplement facts labels, kind of taken the data so that you can get an aggregate view of, you know, what you're actually putting your body. So that helps you understand what you're taking.
But addition to that, we've gone out and scored the top there's 8,000 brands which is insane too if you think about it. We've taken the top 500 which covers, you know, a a big percentage of it and and kind of expanding down the long tail now. And we've given them a trust score. And so we basically have gone in and done what you were doing kind of manually and doing all these individual reviews. Built a 29 system that goes in and, you know, checks what certifications, what kind of testing they're doing, and kind of breaks it down and gives them a score.
That alone, that feature alone, you can you can scan any, you know, supplement for its barcode and
Dr. Mark Hyman
Basically, you just take the bottle, you put your phone on it.
Steve Martocci
And do it here while we're talking to you.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. It's pretty it's pretty it's a pretty cool thing. Don't have end don't to like manually enter it. Just scan your code and it You see
Steve Martocci
it pops up right away and, you know, you get the trust score and all the information about the product. It's it's super fast, it's super easy, and the hit rate is is really high. And if we don't have something, you immediately can submit it. You can AI scan the label and it'll it'll put it in the system and the queue is insane. Like the long tail here, there are 20,000 products in the system that only one person has taken.
There's a long tail here that is, you know, absolutely insane. And that's that's Even those unique products that
Dr. Mark Hyman
Unique Yeah. That are kind of not commonly taken. Yeah.
Steve Martocci
Yeah. The one person's taking. I don't know how they found it. I don't know if that's a trusted brand. And you've seen an explosion on Amazon of these kind of brands that are just quickly coming to market because there's no real thing stopping you from bringing a a supplement to market.
You know, there's a big difference in the FDA around the federal code between pharmaceuticals and supplements. Supplements are covered under federal code 21 CFR one one one. Right?
Dr. Mark Hyman
And what is that what is that?
Steve Martocci
And that's basically that, like, you know, for for pharmaceuticals, there's a whole process that they have to get preapproved following CGMP standards and all these different things That's good manufacturing standards. Yeah. Current, good manufacturing process. You know, with supplements, it's not something that gets, done upfront. You can be held to this standard retroactively, like in the if something comes up, But it's kinda up to you to just say It's self pleasing.
You can get retroactively. Someone can say they're having a negative experience reported with the FDA. They can come after you for not following the practice, but no one's checking upfront.
Dr. Mark Hyman
I mean, the amount of attention that the FDA pays this is very, little unless there's some serious adverse effect Correct. Or somebody has this problem with it. Right.
Steve Martocci
And those latent things you're talking about, the like ones that might be heavy metal exposure that take a long time to ever show up or you don't know the source of it, there's there's no Yeah. Guideline
Dr. Mark Hyman
there. Mean, a friend of mine was researcher and he actually analyzed Ayurvedic supplements Mhmm. And found extremely high levels of heavy metals in them. Totally. Totally.
So you're like, you're taking some Ayurvedic herb, which is some natural product and it hasn't been tested properly. When they actually tested it, it was full of heavy metals.
Steve Martocci
And if you even if you follow CGMP, you're supposed to occasionally test your lots. I think it's like once a year. And then even then, they don't provide the guidance on heavy metals. It's like kinda up to you to be like, well, for this type of product, what should the Yeah. Prop 65 helps a little bit, you know, in terms of making sure you don't have to put the label on there if you Yeah.
Exceed those numbers. But it's it's pretty it's a pretty wild west to be perfectly honest.
Dr. Mark Hyman
There is
Steve Martocci
are systems now that can say, come up with an idea and a brand and get a supplement and market in weeks. So that's why you're seeing the explosion. Yeah. So we've gone in and we've taken 29 different points and we've built a scoring system.
Dr. Mark Hyman
This is your trust score.
Steve Martocci
This is our trust score.
Dr. Mark Hyman
So basically, you're taking 29 different attributes Yep. You know, whether it's toxic
Steve Martocci
Plot testing, c, CGMP. If if whether the biggest one that makes a difference is whether or not you're getting a third party to certify your CGMP practices. Right? That's like kind of like the fundamental. So instead of you just saying, yeah, I'm good.
You know, I'm gonna self certify that I'm following these practices. There's NSF and UL, these two big, you know, firms that'll come in and do what you are doing, you know, go toward the facilities, kind of do make sure you're actually following, give you a certification. Yeah. That's like a fundamental big one and there's a surprising number of brands that don't
Dr. Mark Hyman
the fact that the manufacturing plant is clean Oh, yeah.
Steve Martocci
The way they get sourcing ingredients. They're testing each lot, you know, and like there's there's a lot, you know, to that to to figure it out.
Dr. Mark Hyman
When I started in this field in functional medicine thirty years ago, there were a handful of professional brands that were only marketed sold through professionals, doctors, nutritionists and so forth, chiropractors, and you couldn't get them otherwise. Interesting. Yeah. You couldn't get like Metagenics or Thorne or Pure Encapsulations. Only distributed Through the doctors.
Only distributed them through professionals because they were higher level, higher grade, a little more expensive, but you get what you pay for. So for example, Pure Encapsulations, they they actually test every single product, every lot, and and what we do it before they make the stuff with the ingredients, and they do it after. Yep. And if if it says, you know, it's supposed to say four hundred milligrams of, let's say, magnesium on the label, If it's three hundred and fifty, they throw it out.
Steve Martocci
Metagenics, who you brought up, is our, 10 out of 10. They're our highest scoring brand on the platform. Yeah. They do like one thing that is is is rare, but we we really we give some some points to it is, they make every batch test COA publicly available. So you can like look at your bottle, look at the lot number, go online, pull it up, and see the results from the test.
That's like a gold standard for us. Pure ranks very highly and there's but then there's a big spectrum, you know? I mean,
Dr. Mark Hyman
and the stuff that you get in the grocery store or Walmart or the drugstore is generally crap. Like, you sent me they texted me screenshot of Centrum Yeah. Which is, you know, massive advertising. It's really a big product out there. Everything's Centrum.
It's high quality. It's good. I mean, but they've got why do you take a blue pill or a red pill or have titanium dioxide or have dyes and chemicals?
Steve Martocci
That that was a super interesting thing about that Centrum pill in particular is that, like, the Centrum brand ranking is pretty high, but we just started exposing the excipients, the inactive ingredients. Yeah. And it had titanium dioxide, red 40, red five, like these things that I'm sorry, yellow five. These things that are that are not good. I mean, dioxide is not it's banned in Europe, you know, like it causes DNA damage and they don't need to be in your in your supplements.
So that's another thing we just rolled out was not just the manufacturing standards, but now we're going down to the product level. And actually going in, have like a forget how many, it's a couple thousand of these excipients that get added and bringing them out by, you know, how cautious you should be about. Yeah.
Dr. Mark Hyman
And and there's a lot of stuff in them that often are not known. Like it could be gluten or dairy, like lactose or other things that are in these in addition to all the other kind of excipients, fillers, additives, colors, chemicals, things that make it look good or stick together. And I mean, don't want that crap. You want the nutrient.
Steve Martocci
And I think it's gonna be interesting. We're we're starting to send out, you know, different, supplements for our own independent testing to do what you were saying. Just kinda like verify that even if they're highly rated, are they is it actually in there what they say it is. Right? So the precision of the nutrients that they're they're claiming are in there.
It it's a complicated market and I think that what we've done though by just making a simple score, like making it out of 10, is like it makes it really easy for people to understand. Right? The simple like red, yellow, green, like you can go deep and you can go look at each of the 29 points. Yes.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Like this is a nine, this is a two.
Steve Martocci
That has been helpful for people to just like simply take a glance. Because some the the user base we have, you know, one thing I like doing in general when designing software is it's gotta be easy enough for for grandma to use, but powerful enough for, you know, the most hardcore user in the space to go deep on. Right? Did that with with Splice, making sure that 40% of top 40 music using it to create music, they're like the hardcore guys and the brand new music creators. Right?
So we're doing this in supplements. Right? There's a there's a a way to dive way deep into what those 29 points are and each one of the excipients and all that. Or you can simply look at the score at the top and be like, okay, that feels good. Because some people just we we gotta be meet the consumers where they are.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Because nobody's really doing that. There was a there was a company called Consumer Labs Yep. That that I used to kinda use to reference stuff where they would go and test products, and I would I would rely on on their independent analysis. But, you know, they weren't they weren't able to do the 200,000 products, so you basically, just with a simple scan of the barcode, the technology behind it, the use of AI, I mean, it's it's quite amazing now. You can literally see what is the problem or how good a product is and whether or not it actually says what it is on the label.
Steve Martocci
Yeah. And like I think the big thing too is like we're not out here to we just wanna kinda arc the the industry in the right direction. Right? Like some of our trust scores if you find a negative one, we're not all doing the big gotcha, you know, story on it. We're having conversations.
A lot of the brands have reached out to us. First, the the top end brands are like, thank you. Right? Thank you for simplifying and raising to the attention how much work we are putting into testing this. So like super appreciative, you know, sometimes they'll clarify a piece of data that we might not have right because we've collected it through our teams, you know, reaching out to them and they might provide something which is great.
And then we've had brands also reaching out one, they want their trust score because the consumers are are starting to care about this. And then how do we make it better? Right? And that's our big if we can just help the industry move in the right direction on this with the scores, I think we've done, you know, something really great.
Dr. Mark Hyman
I think I think what you're saying is also important because people are taking these things. There's a, I don't know, $4,050,000,000,000 dollar industry. Totally. It's not well regulated. No.
And it you know, nobody's sort of looking at quality or efficacy or bioavailability or Right. What form the nutrients are in. I mean, there's so many levels. Like, if you take, for example, magnesium oxide. Right.
A great example. I was in the hospital for a back surgery recently. And, you know, I I was taking painkillers, which can make you constipated, so I wanted magnesium. Yep. And I said to the the attending physician, I said, you know, I I wanna get magnesium.
He said, sure. And he wrote a prescription. What are you what are you ordering? He said, well, it's this is such a product. I said, that's magnesium oxide.
Yep. That's so poorly absorbed. And it's also something that doesn't work for constipation that well. And I said, but how about magnesium citrate? He's like, oh.
And he looked it up. He's like, oh, you're right.
Steve Martocci
I'm not I'm not kidding you, Mark. This is true story. My my fiance Kelly with her, her OB, her fetal medicine doctor, she was having restless leg syndrome and magnesium oxide was the only one the doctor less than a I
Dr. Mark Hyman
mean, at night. Usually, for me, when I learned nutrition, it was about all the deficiency diseases Right. That were happening in the developing world. So it was interesting, like, marasmus and quaeshyorcor and xerophthalmia, is vitamin A deficiency, has blindness, and beriberi and pellagra.
Steve Martocci
So this is preventing the disease at the very low end.
Dr. Mark Hyman
It's like, I'm like, okay, great. I I don't I've never seen any of these diseases. I probably never will. I I I think I remember when I was a kid, I I did know people who had had rickets and they had both legs. Right.
So I I had met them, but they were, you know, in the era before the vitamin Sure. Works fortified in in milk and in food. But, you know, these are things I didn't see, and that was my nutrition. My daughter just graduated is graduating now from medical school, I'm very proud of her. She got into orthopedic residency at garment, so I'm super happy about that.
But anyway, she she's like, I I ask her, what are you learning about nutrition? She's like, nothing, really. Like, zero. I mean, it's like, I mean, no acids, fatty acids, you know, sugar, whatever, like, basic stuff that's not I think, what do you have your patient eat for lunch? Right.
And then supplements, almost nothing, right? You don't really learn about them, what they do, how they work, you know, the assumption that the food is adequate, we're getting it from our food. But our food's depleted. I mean, we look at data back forty, fifty years, the the quality of the soil, the organic matter is depleted because of our farming practices, the interaction between the microbes and the organic matter and the plants is actually how the minerals and nutrients are extracted in from the soil and to get into the plant. So we're seeing between five to 40% decrease in in a lot of key nutrients.
And on top of that, we're seeing, you know, people eating more and more processed food and and so not getting nutrients and eating more and more. Know, part of the the one of the things that happens when you have a deficiency is you try to find more nutrients somewhere. Right. Like animals do this. There's I remember being in the Amazon, there was this mineral sort of deposit across the bank of the river, and there were all these birds that were flocking, just eating the dirt.
You know? And and I saw this I saw this also, yeah, in the Amazon a couple of times. And I was like, wow, this is fascinating. You got, like, thousands of birds of all species coming to get the nutrients they need. So animals know.
And kids kids will eat dirt if they're iron deficient because they wanna get iron from the dirt. Somehow the the body knows, but we're so eating such a shitty diet and so processed and it's so devoid of nutrients. Although some of it's fortified, it's like only fortified because it's so impoverished to begin with. Otherwise, wouldn't need to be fortified. And it's caused a lot a a lot of problems in in the population that we're seeing increasing nutrient deficiencies.
The problem is that people don't know how to diagnose it, they don't know what their symptoms are related to it, they don't know how it makes them feel. And so they think this is just how I'm supposed to feel. You know, I feel like crap or I have this symptom or that symptom. But often it's related to their diet and their new nutritional status. And this is the whole problem of, like, drugs and drug nutrient interactions.
There's a whole host of those. Totally. And so people are taking all these drugs like statins, for example, which is the number one prescribed drug. Know? A %.
It it it interrupts the enzyme that makes cholesterol. That same enzyme makes HMG CoA reductase. It makes CoQ10. Yep. So you're blocking CoQ10.
What is CoQ10? It's an essential nutrient for making energy from food and your mitochondrial function. So people get muscle injury and muscle pain and elevated what we call CPK, which is damaged muscle enzymes, of this. And doctors don't recommend usually CoQ10 with stents. Personal story on that.
So, you know, I got into this
Steve Martocci
kind of longevity movement young at 30 and I did a calcium score, at age 30.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Which is like a heart scan
Steve Martocci
Heart scan, see how much plaque I have. Zero at age 30. At age 35, I had eight. So that was something. And I was off the charts.
And so I went on a statin at age 35. It was not recommended to go on CoQ10 at the time. No. It ended up finding about founding it myself. Right?
Take MitoQ now. You know, it's just one of those things that feels essential It is. But can be totally missed It is. You know, in the doctor's office.
Dr. Mark Hyman
And it's and there's actually a book, a textbook, medical textbook on on drug nutrient interactions because there's so many that go The next kind of one of the class of drugs, I think it's third after, two or third most prescribed drugs on the planet are acid blockers for reflux. Yep. Or heartburn. Mhmm. Which is because our diet's so crappy, you know.
I mean, if I if I get stuck somewhere and I have to eat something crappy because I'm starving, I'm in an airport or whatever, and I try to do it, I will get immediate reflux. Yeah. Yeah. Totally. And I'm like, it's because of what I'm eating, it's not because I have some defect that causes me to have reflux.
And you take this drug for a long period of time, it inhibits mineral absorption like zinc and calcium, you get It inhibits b 12 absorption, which is critical for so many functions that can cause depression, dementia, neurologic issues. People don't know this, and we don't know how these all are interacting. And and so we see another layer of problems in terms of nutrient deficiencies that's not being addressed.
Steve Martocci
Yeah. That's one of the things I think together, as we keep navigating the space and increasing the functionality on SEPCO, the interactions, I think they're gonna be really important to have on there. Right? And there's like the ones that you should be aware of like St. John's wort reducing effectiveness of birth control and antidepressants.
Yeah. Vitamin K interacting with blood thinners. Like there's there's a lot. It's legit stuff. Yeah.
And that's a layer that we want to get into as we as we keep going. We think that getting people stacks on there now knowing what they're taking and then giving them the jumping off points to to improve things and find the warnings.
Dr. Mark Hyman
It's huge. It's huge. Like, like, if you're on a diuretic, which many people are for, blood pressure, it causes you to leach out minerals. Like, so you leach out magnesium and you pee them out. Right.
You know? And and so we we've seen massive symptoms of magnesium deficiency, which are sort of doctors don't know how to diagnose, and it's pretty easy. But there's this moment where I think where you're creating with Subco, this company, there's going to be a sort of a realization that one, you know, with a partnership with Function, which we're working together, which is testing. So I say test, don't guess. You know?
Yes. We check your magnesium level. We check your level of B vitamins, homocysteine and methylmalonic acid, which measure B12, folate, B6 effectiveness. We measure omega-3s, we measure vitamin D, we can measure zinc, we can measure copper, we can measure iodine, we can measure so many different nutrients, minerals that are commonly deficient in people. And then people can actually then go figure out what to do.
Right. Because we don't actually, with function help, you know, recommend any particular brands. Right. But we want some way to help people navigate what's going on there in the in the landscape and actually come up with a coherent strategy of what to take and where to find the products and how to trust trust them.
Steve Martocci
And that's kind of a future for us. Right? There's a there's an evolution of where. So we launched our beta in October. It was kind of an early beta that to just, you know, I had to update my LinkedIn, say I was working on something new, we launched, you know, in beta.
And it's going great. But what exactly what you're talking about, why we're working together, why we have the function partnership is, you know, we really do wanna incorporate more data. And and there's a there's kind of a church and state mentality too around the product recommendations and the like nutrient supplement recommendations. The product side feels like the things we were talking about. The trust score that's based on manufacturing, like quality Yeah.
Cost. Yeah. And then some of the dietary preferences like, are you want vegan? You know, that kind of stuff. But the nutrient recommendations, you know, right now they're kind of generic.
We ask you basic questions, height and weight. We have 80 protocols you can go in for different health goals and kind of see the general recommendations there. But we really need to up the game there, right? And people want our number one most requested feature as a personalized supplement plan. And so that's what we're working on.
Right? It's a big thing to take in as much data as we can, and help people understand what they need to take. Once they understand that need, we the the the how you get it in your body, you know, the the cost, the which, brands, all that, that can become an independent thing. That might even change over time. Right?
New products might come out, lower cost options might come up, higher trust scores may change. But we need to make sure you have a really good nutrient plan and that eventually you're also gonna need to track whether or not you are hitting your goal. And so like one of the things we talk about a lot is being aligned with the customer to be just as excited when they stop taking something that's not working as we are when they try something new. And so, you know, it's a big part of our overall kind of ethos is is being your companion to navigate this space.
Dr. Mark Hyman
It's like it's almost like Consumer Reports that the mag that that, you know, magazine that tests products Yeah. And sort of checks quality, but it it doesn't really exist for the supplement industry,
Steve Martocci
which is And it's not integrated into a flow. Right? Like there are some websites that you can go to and look at some lab results and things like that, but there's not like action to take. There's buy. Mhmm.
But like that's not really the thing we're looking about. We wanna make sure that you can have a conversation with your doctor about what you're actually putting in your body. Look for alternatives, you know, that might be cheaper cost than the thing that you found through some influencers website. And that you're tracking results. Like alone, our scheduler, you know, thirty to fifty percent of supplements don't get finished, the bottle that you buy.
People just stop.
Dr. Mark Hyman
They stop, they forget, they A lot
Steve Martocci
of things. They forget is the one thing. Right? And then I don't know, some people have just very much the wrong expectations upfront. Like they think they're gonna feel something immediately.
They don't understand what the protocol is to actually getting the results they want. They don't know that they should be actually checking their vitamin d levels in six months or, you know, three months. And so
Dr. Mark Hyman
You might notice the absence of something. Right? Like in other words, I I talked to this woman the other day who did her function test and she had a vitamin D level of 20, which is extremely low. And I said, gee, if vitamin D is low, you could have more frequent infections, you could have seasonal affective disorder, you could have muscle pain and aching. And she looked at me and she was like,
Steve Martocci
I have all those Yeah, right.
Dr. Mark Hyman
So when you take something, you go, well, I'm not noticing something, I'm noticing the absence of I'm not getting sick all the time. I'm not having muscle aches.
Steve Martocci
You don't have muscle pains while I'm, you know, taking a high dose of statins, you know. So so that's the thing. We we really wanna set people's expectations right and also that they're dosing it, they're taking it the right time. You know, people don't follow it's very rare that people follow the with food without food.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Because you you know, talk about that for little bit in terms of different nutrients and how you need to take them with or without food.
Steve Martocci
Yeah. Mean the fat soluble vitamins like a d e k, you know, should be taken with a meal to help improve absorption and it can impact it by up to 50%. With fatty foods. Fatty foods, particularly. Right.
Let let alone any food. Right? So
Dr. Mark Hyman
if take your vitamin d, you have to have it
Steve Martocci
with some fat. Right. Right.
Dr. Mark Hyman
As opposed to vitamin c, which So we have
Steve Martocci
a scheduler in the app too that lets you, you know, takes all your different products and then helps you build what time of day you should be taking it at, set reminders for it, and soon track whether or not you're experiencing side effects or, the results that you're looking for. So we've got to kind of close that loop then feed that data back in, help you optimize, make changes, and kind of keep improving things and it it'll be a journey.
Dr. Mark Hyman
And then you get feedback from people about how they responded so you get sort of data on
Steve Martocci
That's that's gonna be the key, right? Like to me the that like right now we have the protocols you can you can and the products you can see how many people are taking them but how many people are actually hitting their results. Right? And I and I really struggle when I look at reviews like on Amazon reviews for supplements. It's usually like one of three things.
This changed my life. This did nothing. The package came damaged. Like that's all that's all the that's all that's happening on these Amazon reviews. There's no one actually seeing whether or not they're hitting results with it.
You know, we definitely aspire to do that. We talk a lot about the creating that closed loop experience. And I think that's when the n equals one data starts to become really valuable. So what does n equal one mean? N equals one is like one of what it is my data.
I am an individual in this. It is not the clinical result. It is not the aggregate. It is just my personal, you know It's your testing
Dr. Mark Hyman
your your own biology against
Steve Martocci
It's just your own story. Right? It's your own it could be subjective, but it's it's the n equals one is the the sample size is me. And that is the, you know, as we talk a little bit about the battle of the institution and the individuals, you know, there's so many people on on Twitter. If you if you get caught up in your algorithm on kinda the supplement health Twitter, you just see people making some pretty outlandish claims about the impact of supplements, certain supplements on their life.
And we need to start feeding that back into a system that can aggregate whether other people are having those experiences or just the loud voices on on Twitter are having those experiences on x. Because you know, those people stand out and people make decisions as I said before, like 51% of people buying, health or wellness product because they saw it on social media. That's real. Even though the trust with them is not necessarily high, they are making these decisions. And, until we can really find out whether or not these are working, because some of these things are in complete contrast to what the medical world thinks, we need to we need
Dr. Mark Hyman
to build better data sets. And then and you're also helping solve the problem of of, you know, quality in the sense that there's so many products in the market that have stuff in them that should be in them, whether it's, you know, performance enhancing kind of male male enhancing drugs for sexual function might have Viagra in it or you could have
Steve Martocci
That came out recently. That was a FDA, went after a brand for having a bunch of these natural supplements having, Viagra in them and and all that. And there was a there was a scandal even in the kind of Amazon basics world where they had tested some of their products and they weren't hitting the the numbers that they said. There was a Ginkgo Biloba test that, the FDA, I think, did where there was zero of the product. There was zero Ginkgo in the actual So you buy
Dr. Mark Hyman
products for Ginkgo, but there's, like, nothing in
Steve Martocci
there There's nothing active in it.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. And so you're you were you were kind of in a Wild West out there, and you're trying to help people solve it for many levels, like helping understand what they're taking, whether the dosing is right and that you're taking too much or too little of something, whether the quality is there, whether there's contaminants. These are things that are so important. And what was really interesting to me, Steve, is when I talk to doctors, you know, one you know, would kind of ask a group of doctors, how many people recommend supplements to their patients? And very few hands go up, or it's more and more now.
If you ask that same group, how many of you are taking supplements? Seventy or
Steve Martocci
80 It's crazy.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Hands go up. Mhmm. And when I got to Cleveland Clinic over ten years ago, we did a survey of the physicians there, 3,000 physicians. Okay.
And it was so fascinating because we wanted to know whether they were interested in having a source of trusted brands Uh-huh. That were verified and certified in sort of the similar way that you've done and what what what their uses, recommendations are. So it's like, how many are actually recommending? It was very few. How many I would like to actually have a source where you could trust?
And it was like almost universal yes. Right. 70% of the doctors were actually recommending stuff already. And, you know, the cardiologists were recommending fish oil or Yep. Totally.
The gastroenterologists were recommending probiotics. The OBGYNs were recommending prenatal vitamins. And, you know, the endocrinologists were recommending vitamin D for osteoporosis. And so but they didn't know what brand. Totally.
They didn't know what to take. You know, for example, vitamin D is a great example because when I learned in medical school, there was a prescription of vitamin D, which is vitamin D2 Right. Which isn't really the optimal vitamin to take. You wanna take vitamin Yeah. And it doesn't work as well for many reasons.
And so but that's what we learned in medical school, that this is what you do in your residency. And so it was really interesting to see the number of physicians at Cleveland Clinic, which is one of top institutions in the world, who were taking them, recommending them, wanting to have a quality source, and there was just nothing. And so I think, you know, despite doctors being a little bit negative on it, it's partly because it's so It's partly because people don't know what they're getting. It's partly because they don't have a sense of quality control or how to actually recommend stuff they know is gonna be safe and effective and not problematic unless it's a prescription vitamin. And there are a lot of prescription vitamins.
Yeah. A lot of prescription vitamins.
Steve Martocci
I mean, is this is what I'm so excited about about us working together. Right? I remember when I showed you the the platform initially and it was like, woah, I've wanted this for thirty years, but like, I'm a tech guy. Right? Like, I love to build The initial version of this is built out of the product that I really wish I had, and for stack sharing and and and creating all that.
And then my co founder Nick came up with the trust score rating. And the other thing we have is this sup score rating, which is take everything that's in your stack, grade it against the the brand qualities, price, does it hit your demographics, are you aligned with your health goals and kind of give people an easy score to iterate on. Right? So these are some of the the core functionality you have. But getting into the mind of the people in the clinical world and what they need and how to kind of interface with them where this this really focus more on the self directed health journey.
Mhmm. But it seems like there's just so much with your guidance that we're able to kind of tap into the mentality of the doctors and how patients can kind of interact and show them their actual supplement list right now. Like you can actually share it with your doctor, which you go to those intake forms and it's just like
Dr. Mark Hyman
Oh my god. I don't feel like How do
Steve Martocci
you even fill them out? Yeah. Know. They get
Dr. Mark Hyman
so mad at me when I try
Steve Martocci
to not fill them out. Here's a spreadsheet. Exactly. Right? And so now it can be a link to us, and you can actually analyze it, we'll see what doctors really wanna wanna take the time to to kinda take action on it.
But we're gonna navigate this.
Dr. Mark Hyman
It's a pretty exciting moment with this sort of innovation in the industry that's been a gap for so long. It's been an area that's just been self directed Yeah. Blindfolded, trying to find what's good Right. Hoping, you know, that the company that you buy the product from has got integrity
Steve Martocci
Right.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Hoping that it's gonna work. Think it's a lot of money people spend on this stuff. Yeah. How do you how do you actually find the quality? And I think I
Steve Martocci
think the money side though is a big one. Right? So one of the things that we really wanna do over time is drive down the cost of supplements. There's a big problem in the industry is that they're really not designed like, in my mind, when you think about taking a supplement especially some of these like, you know, core ones, you should be thinking about your customers lifetime value in years or decades. But so many because of that, you know, thirty to fifty percent of people not finishing the supplement, not reordering, The way the margin structures are and how much they're costing to acquire customers keeps the price really high
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Steve Martocci
For people who are on stuff for a long time. I remember I was on year five of taking Elysium and I was like, guys, I sent customer support an email. I was like, you've made all your money back on me. I wanna take this for my whole life. Can I get like a discounted rate on this?
And they said no. And I was like, cool, I'm out. Like
Dr. Mark Hyman
But why?
Steve Martocci
I'm just you know, that was Why do they say no? They their customers they said they don't have that yet. And I was like, cool. Like there's not a there's not a real reward for the people who are in this for the long haul who are taking there's not a system designed for people who are in it for the long haul with their health. I mean, we should be measuring their LTV in decades not months.
Lifetime value. Lifetime value. Yeah. About the customers. So we're trying to find the right intersection between capitalism and health and help drive that down for people.
Like, can see that from us later.
Dr. Mark Hyman
And what's kinda cool about SEPCO also is you can put in what you wanna be taking, let's say function, health recommends Yep. Not products, but ingredients or nutrients you need. You could put that into the system and then it'll come up with a ranking of which products are the optimal ones, the best price, the best quality
Steve Martocci
Take the rest of the Like, that'll be
Dr. Mark Hyman
reasonable amount of pills. You know, so you you solve so many problems with this. I I think one of the challenges that that the the the regulatory environment has got to change. So I don't know if it will or not.
Steve Martocci
I mean, I'm I'm curious. You're so you you've done so well on the policy front. And, you know, I think a lot of change for things that you've been carrying about for a long time are starting to come, into to taking action. What do you think of the regulatory side of this space?
Dr. Mark Hyman
And I think the Dichet regulation was a necessary set of regulations at the time because it was kind of the Wild West and there was nothing guiding what people could say because you could literally say, you know, take this pill, it'll make your penis grow six inches longer or it'll cure heart disease or it'll and people were just so it kind of came up with some kind of limits on what you could market it as, which I think was good because they can create, you know, structure function, that's why you say it supports healthy blood sugar. Right. Supports a healthy immune system, but you can't say it treats diabetes, right? Even though it might help like bitter melon or, you know, certain compounds actually can help with blood sugar regulation, Yep. Or like, berberine and so forth.
You can't say that it actually but it they do. It works. Berberine's a good one. Yeah. I think there's a lot of kind of messiness that kind of left got left over from that regulation, was in the '90s, which helps sort of set a level of standards.
You know, the FDA can't police it all. And right now, know, know, you're you're kind of Subco is kind of like the police, so the FDA supplements in in my mind because you're basically doing a lot of the work that they should be doing. Right. Right, you've actually done the homework, kind of look at all the products, look at what's in them, kind of find the sources. How do you actually find like when you look at a product whether there's contaminants or fillers or excipients or things that shouldn't be there?
Steve Martocci
For us, it's about bringing the awareness to what we have found. Right? So their manufacturing process, you know, do they have the COAs that show this? Are they doing their lot testing? So there's like, you know, are they following the guidelines that they should be?
And then the excipients list that we have in there is is helpful too so they can see, you know, the inactive ingredients. But then we're gonna we're gonna try to do a bunch of our own independent testing as well to verify these things. Personally, I like the edge of medicine where we have a lot of agency over what we're doing. Like we don't necessarily need prescriptions for things. We can make our own decisions.
But there does need to be something that's giving consumers guidance. And that's kind of what we're trying to be. Yeah. So in the absence of new policy, you know, we're gonna keep trying to up the standards and push the industry in the right direction.
Dr. Mark Hyman
It's so important because, you know, as a practicing physician who's been doing functional medicine, using food as medicine, using nutrients, using herbs, it's a challenge because how do you how do you actually find the right product for your patient that's gonna work? And, you know, it's sort of the one of the when I first started out, I would call the sort of elders in the field and say, Well, which probiotics should I recommend? Or which magnesium product? Or which this herbal product is good? I mean, I did there was no way to know and I began to see what was working clinically and what wasn't working clinically.
And when you start to apply these clinically, you see changes in people's biology, see changes in their biomarkers, you see changes in their health and their well-being. And this is kind of what what's been missing is a way to sort of have a a independent verification system that analyzes everything, that integrates with your product easily, and that you can use your phone and your, you know, your camera to basically track everything in two seconds. You have to add everything into a spreadsheet.
Steve Martocci
Right. And we want to be customer aligned. Right? We want to find that intersection between capitalism and health that really looks out for the consumer. A big thing is we don't ever want to profit from supplement sales.
Right? We need to be just as aligned when you stop taking something as you are when you try something new. From the stories that we're hearing too, supplements for doctors, the doctors who are prescribing them and getting involved in the products, it's becoming like a bit of a revenue stream for them. Mhmm. And you know, I had a a friend who said their doctor came up to them in the grocery store, didn't ask anything about how they were doing or whatever and said, why'd you stop buying your supplements for me?
And that just doesn't feel that doesn't feel right. That left a really bad taste in their mouth. So, you know, we're gonna keep evolving in the direction that we think is gonna best look out for customers and be their advocate. It's okay.
Dr. Mark Hyman
And what's also good about it is you're you're layering a lot of the science that it's hard to get. What are the interactions between different nutrients? What are the interactions with drugs? What are the you know, there's drug nutrient interactions and nutrient drug interactions. Because sometimes a nutrient will affect the drug function, right?
Like you mentioned St. John's Wort, which can affect medications. So you have to kind of be aware of all that. Even if you're a smart doctor, it's really hard to kind of figure this out. There was a big nutrient supplement database where it did a lot of this, but it was I had to pay $3,000 a year for the prescription.
Right. Subscription to this platform, I had to actually be able to go in and search and read monographs that were like 30 pages long on each nutrient and talk about the issues. I mean, it was really it was really dense and it's hard.
Steve Martocci
What's crazy is you you're getting that, right? But like the consumers are so much making their own decisions about the supplements, so they're never even touching a doctor that knows that. So there's just so much risk out there with them not, you know, having that information at their fingertips in a self directed way. And, you know, it's one of the things we aspire to get on the platform. You're gonna help us with that.
You've already sent me some resources. And, you know, we think it's a it's a it's a big opportunity to help consumers not make a mistake when they're doing things on their own.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. I think it's important. And you also, you know, created something called stacks. We just touched on it briefly, but I don't think
Steve Martocci
we should I wanna talk about our stacks.
Dr. Mark Hyman
What do stacks mean?
Steve Martocci
What So stacks is like to me, a stack is like the when you're taking a bunch of
Dr. Mark Hyman
things
Steve Martocci
together that, you know, have a for either an individual effect, like this is my, you know, muscle growth stack or this is my daily stack. This is the stuff that I'm taking every day and this stuff that's meant to be taken together. And so, you know, one of the as I said in the beginning, the kind of core offering here was the ability to share your stack and see other stacks that people are taking. You know, my stack is on there in public. Your stack is gonna be on there in public.
And, you know, I think you can learn a lot from, people like you or people, facing the same challenges. Right? You know, one of the things I love that I came across, you know, a year or two ago was the the effects of taurine on longevity. Yeah. You know?
Right? Two grams of taurine a day, it's kinda much more than, you know, people had thought about before. But in primate studies showing like really long extensions to 20% extension, I think, in primates to to life and a bunch of cardiovascular effects too. No doctor has recommended me to take Tori. I've had to find that on my own.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. You know? It's amino acid that's really important for many functions and it's it's very good for regulating a lot of neurologic issues and kind of calming. It's very calming neurotransmitter, neurotransmitter, helps with preventing anxiety. And I actually use a product, it's a Medigenetics product called Trancor for a lot of patients, which has taurine, magnesium, B6, a lot of things are very helpful in calming the nervous system, which, you know, a lot of people have a lot of anxiety.
And it's and often, you know, part of the problem is we deplete our nutrients under stress. Mhmm. You know, we deplete our nutrients because we need more of them because we're overloaded with toxins. We need more of them because we eat shitty food that needs nutrients to be metabolized. In other words, when you eat food, it has to be broken down, absorbed, digested, and actually turned into various pathways that are important for your body.
And often, if you're not taking the right nutrients, you're going not have the right functions in your body on a cellular level. So whether it's coQ10 or taurine, these are so these are not considered essential vitamins or nutrients, I call these conditionally essential because of the increased load of stress, of toxins. It's interesting, know, when you stress alone will deplete magnesium. So if you're stressed, you're gonna pee out more magnesium. And guess what?
Everybody's stressed.
Steve Martocci
Everyone's stressed. But like the the this whole concept of sharing and learning from each other, like I remember I was over at your house for dinner one day and I saw you were taking timeline, you know, the urolithin a. Right? And you were like, I fucking love this thing. And I I started taking it.
You know? So like learning from each other, I think is such a big piece of it for, you know, people who are facing similar things or have similar goals to you.
Dr. Mark Hyman
So the stacks are basically guiding you if you want to have a longevity stack or you have PMS or you have So you have the protocol. Gut issues or you have it's like
Steve Martocci
a protocol. Our protocols are very much designed for like the crossover between the nutrients and the Health condition. In the health conditions. Right. So you're gonna be on there with a longevity one, brain health one.
That's really exciting to have those protocols on there. And the stacks to us are what you know what you're taking daily and then you can see how they relate to the the health goals, you know, the nutrient totals across all of them. You know, it's really fascinating to go look at other people's stacks and and see what they're taking.
Dr. Mark Hyman
And you're also gathering information from the users about their own health issues Yep. Their health goals, their needs, their age, their demographics, and so forth.
Steve Martocci
Yeah. When you come in, you you you give us some basic information, which is gonna be, expanded more soon. And then you go and you scan, you know, your your existing products so you can kinda get them in the system. And then we give you a score. Right?
And that score tells you how well your supplements are aligning with your health goals, the quality of your supplements, the cost of your supplements. And people just seem to do really well with this. They want a simple, easy to understand number that they can go move. Well, I I talked to all of my friends who were coming in, they're like, I got a 75. I want it to be an 80.
And so they go and do something. The average person is right now making two to three changes to their product stack based on the sub score, which is amazing. These are these are potential decisions that could impact them their whole, you know, life. It's really a
Dr. Mark Hyman
way to personalize what you're taking. Correct. It's really more of a data driven approach. Right? It's it's it's
Steve Martocci
a I think that's what it really fundamentally is. Like the structured data finally being available and the ability for us to to soon provide recommendations that's that span, you know, give you the info on whether it's an AI based recommendation, whether it's coming from Mark's protocol, whether it's been tailored based on, you know, some of the data that you provided us, and actually give you, like, a pretty comprehensive way at looking at why you are making this decision, why you are gonna take this. And then the end game, which we are we are working on, is then to self report back in whether or not it worked. And once that loop is closed, you know, we think we've completed the journey end to end on supplements, and we can just keep improving.
Dr. Mark Hyman
It's almost like you're a research infrastructure.
Steve Martocci
I think so. I think I think it's a huge benefit. I think in the world of kind of, you know, of an AI driven world too. There's this kind of blocked on human concept they talk about where like, at some point, the AI only has enough information it now needs to get from you whether or not you are getting results from this, whether or not you're taking your pills successfully. That it doesn't have this information.
And if you can kind of sit at the intersection of that, I think you found a very very valuable seam, as the collective intelligence grows and the individual intelligence gets fed back in.
Dr. Mark Hyman
It's powerful. I mean, you know, I think where where where can people learn about what we've discussed?
Steve Martocci
Yeah. So, sup.co is the is the site. You
Dr. Mark Hyman
can go on s u p
Steve Martocci
C o. And if you go to supp.c0/mark, you'll be able to find a link to the protocols and, Mark's stack on there,
Dr. Mark Hyman
which is pretty exciting. My goodies. Your goodies.
Steve Martocci
My recommendation. And you'll get to see when that gets updated and when things change, which is very cool. And look, I I I think together, we're gonna build something something better. Something better for this industry and something that, you know, I know you've wanted to see exist for a long time. And so this is just the beginning.
Dr. Mark Hyman
So there's a website which is sup.co, there's also an app? Yeah.
Steve Martocci
The app. The you can get the you can get it in the App Store, just search supco, you'll see it in there. Or you can go to the site and sign up and we'll send you the links to it. You can go to
Dr. Mark Hyman
sup.co/mark. And then you can share it. Like, you can share that data with the community and learn
Steve Martocci
You can share it with the community. Can share it with bunch of social sharing features too. You can you can build customized kind of lists and stacks that you think work for you and share them to the community, which is kind of a fun new thing that's on there as well. So, you know, we have a mix of, you know, AI driven data, clinical data, expert data like from yourself, and then users sharing their their n equals one stories too. And so it kind of wraps it all up in an easy way for you to to make decisions about your health.
Dr. Mark Hyman
The bottom up data is really interesting because it's often dismissed, you know. It's so dismissed.
Steve Martocci
There's a battle going on between them.
Dr. Mark Hyman
But it's like, oh, I took magnesium, I took zinc, or I took here's what happened to me. Yeah. That data is really valuable
Steve Martocci
I know. In an aggregate. You In aggregate.
Dr. Mark Hyman
When you look at all the people putting the data in about how things are affecting them Right. And what works and what doesn't work, you know, we're gonna learn a lot. We're gonna learn a lot. And I I think for me, I've learned a lot doing, you know, this clinically with tens of thousands of patients over three decades and doing lots of diagnostics to see what levels of nutrients people have, what their risk factors are, you know, and it's so important. Mean, one of the things I test for is glutathione.
Yep. Which is a really important compound that's involved in detoxification, that's involved in regulating immune function and inflammation, it's sort of the most powerful antioxidant in your system. And there's genetics involved in what your needs are and how much you need and Yep. And there's a lot of toxic load out there. And so the body uses it up very quickly and it's kind of the final common step to remove stuff from your body like heavy metals or environmental toxins.
If you're urinating the fires, your house burned down, which is tragic, and that you're exposed to all sorts of things. So how do you upregulate your body's detox system, for example? And N acetylcysteine is a compound that boosts glutathione. There's also other things like lipoic acid, and you wouldn't know this unless you Or, you know, you if you are someone in LA, would say, here's some things you should take.
Steve Martocci
Right. Someone has shared, an LA fire recovery stack, you know, someone has shared that narc community.
Dr. Mark Hyman
That's amazing because I think there there there's a lot of value in that. And and also, you know, even for basic things that, you know, we think are kind of standard in medicine like prenatal vitamins, most of the ones that are prescription are just full of all kinds of crap Yeah. And are including nutrients that are not the most bioavailable and not in the right forms, don't work as well. And and so women are just unfortunately getting stuff that is kind of second rate or third rate.
Steve Martocci
That's a topic that's that kinda near and dear to, you know, while I was building the first, you know, CEPCO, Kelly was pregnant and Why? Going through it. Yeah. And it was it was it was hard to get the right information. We had one saying, only take magnesium oxide.
We had another saying buy my supplements. Like it was it was a wide spectrum. So we think those issues, menopause issues, things like that that we really wanna have somebody yourself coming on the platform. Another round of experts are coming on to tackle individual topics that they're the best at. So you'll be able to see a nice mix of what the individuals are doing, what the experts say, and what is the kind of clinical thing.
Dr. Mark Hyman
And I think one of the things that people probably have bringing around in their head is, gee, all these big studies on supplements show they don't work. Omega-three, vitamin D, B vitamins, beta carotene, this and that. And so this the doctors see these big studies. They show there's no benefit, and so they basically dismiss it all. And so people have a kind of in their heads this sort of background talk around, well, my doctor said that there's been big studies and shows that vitamins don't work.
And there's so many problems with those studies. One, they don't often measure the baseline level of nutrients. So if your vitamin D is fine and you take vitamin D, you won't notice any change. But if you don't measure vitamin D at the beginning or omega three fats, if you don't measure if someone's deficient and you give everybody a thousand people vitamin, omega three fats, some might be fine because they eat a lot of fish, but some might not be. And and so you get so the effect size washes out.
And and also, when you look at individual problems, there's a lot of data. For example, fertility is a big issue, not just prenatal vitamin, but fertility is a huge especially for men. Men don't realize that their sperm count, their sperm quality, their sperm motility, their ability to be potent is dependent on certain nutrients like zinc and other things that are really key for men that they need to be taking in order to optimize their sperm production if they wanna have a healthy baby. But these are these are things that people don't know, and it's all in the scientific literature.
Steve Martocci
Right. So you So we've packaged those up, some of those topics, particularly fertility, prenatals, they're like they're on the platform with the, the protocols. And every one of the recommendations has an explanation of why. Right? So, you know, you have an ability to really understand why and you can pick and choose whether or not you want to follow it to to exact or adapt it to the fact that you might know that you know, you don't need to supplement your vitamin d, you are okay.
So that's I think that giving people the ability to either click the button and go for it or tailor it to what they know they need, is a unique feature that we have.
Dr. Mark Hyman
To me, it's so exciting because it's been a problem that needs solving for a long time and no one's really figured it out. And there were attempts like Consumer Labs or some of these natural medicines database, which is thousands of dollars, usually only really accessible for physicians to look at things in detail, or some text sort of textbook that nobody looks at. It's like, but how do you actually solve the problem in the marketplace? And I think Subco's done an incredible job and I think partnering with Function to do diagnostic tests Totally. To see what's going on is really helpful.
Because we're gonna be measuring a lot we do already measure a lot of things. We're gonna be expanding our testing to do more and more nutrient testing because it's so widespread. And When people tell me, oh, you don't need nutrients because it's not an issue, I go, here's here's our data. I mean, I have my data from my own practice and the other five doctors in my practice, but we've got 150,000 people now who've tested their nutrient And the amount of just frank deficiency, not insufficiency, but frank deficiency is shocking to me in in a population that I think is probably more health forward. Right.
If they're using function, they're probably like a little more leaning into their health. They wanna be healthier. They're probably eating better. They're probably taking vitamins. And it was like
Steve Martocci
The average Subco user takes six products. They're probabl if they're correlating the same to your data, they're taking the
Dr. Mark Hyman
wrong thing. And so you solve their problem. So I think I think it's really exciting. I think we're in this moment where we can really give people the support they need to make the right decisions, to understand that they're not overdosing on certain things, to understand the quality issues and where to find the right products.
Steve Martocci
Engage in conversation, be able to talk to your doctor about it, be able to talk to your friends about it, share the things that are working for you, aggregate n equals one data. There's a lot of like submissions in making sense of supplements with Supco.
Dr. Mark Hyman
So everybody just go check it out. It's sup.co,s u p p C o. If you wanna find out what I'm taking, go
Steve Martocci
to sup.co/mark.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yep. And you can see the kinds of things that I recommend or that I'm taking. And I think, we're at this really transitional moment with sort of consumer empowerment, AI, data driven healthcare, you're tackling on the supplement end, I'm doing it on the biomarker testing, lab testing, and we're combining forces. And to me, it's really an exciting moment where people can start to own their own health, they can be the CEO of their own health, they don't have to abdicate or wait till their doctor learns about nutrition, which might be ten or twenty decades from now. Yep, for sure.
I mean, hopefully not, but, actually Texas where I live in Austin where we are now, I testified in front of the Senate Health Subcommittee. And the Health and Human Services Committee basically introduced a bill called SB 25 where they said which passed, which mandates that Texas doctors have to learn about nutrition
Steve Martocci
That's great.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Which is amazing.
Steve Martocci
You're great at the policy stuff, it's amazing. So it's like,
Dr. Mark Hyman
finally, people are talking about it and I think it's exciting. I think so with all the forces are moving towards people being empowered, people being Yes. Agency And agents of their health. Agency over their own health and what I like to say is being the CEO of your own health. If you want to do that, you need the data, information, you know what you're doing.
And and actually, the truth is I I I have been taking a bunch of stuff and I I I haven't run it through sup Yeah. Yet, and I want to go right now to my medicine cabinet or my supplement cabinet and actually scan everything and see what I'm doing because it's so fascinating and see where we are. Because I think, you know, we we all try to figure out even even I try to figure it out and it's not as easy as you think. No. It's not.
So thanks for what you're doing, Steve. Thanks for starting this company, and, I look forward to, you know, how we kind of unfold this in the future and empower people. So good job.
Steve Martocci
Thanks for having me. This is great.
