Developing a Rational Approach to Supplementation for Health & Performance
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Welcome to the huberman lab podcast, where we discuss science and science space tools for everyday life. I am Andrew huberman and i'm a professor of neurobiology and opened ology at stanford school of medicine. Today we are discussing supplements. We are more specifically a rational guide to supplementation.

Now to be forthright, I want to tell you that I am not a fan of the word supplements, because IT stems from this idea that all supplements are, somehow, food supplements are designed to compensate for what one could otherwise get from food, and that simply not the case. Many supplements are compounds that are extremely efficient, for instance, for enhancing sleep or for enhancing hormone function, or for enhancing focus. And many of those compounds are simply not found in food, or are not found in enough abundance in food to have the desired effect.

Now that raises the issue as to whether or not these compounds are good to take, safe to take, and whether or not they are actually beneath facial for us. And the shorter answer is that, like everything else, supplements can either be good for us or dangerous for us, depending on dosage sourcing, etta. But more importantly, we need to think about supplements and a rational guide to supplementation as taking into account a number of different factors.

And we need to set to aside the idea that all non prescription compounds that fall under the some relevant supplements are simply things that could be extracted from food, but most people don't, either in just enough of those foods or pay up for tension to their diet in order to take them. In fact, during today's episode, i'm going to give you a number of different, very specific questions that you can answer in order to decide whether not you should be taking any so called supplements or not and whether not you should be taking one type of supplement or another type of supplement more or less than the other. I'm also going to discuss safety, of course, and I will discuss cost because obviously, monetary cost is a serious consideration for most, if not everybody, considering the use of supplements.

During today's episode, I will also discuss which specific supplements are optimal for achieving specific inputs, such as improved sleep, such as improved focus and such as improved hormonal function, among other things. I planned to cover the full range of what I refer to his supplements, including so called foundational supplements, that are designed to act as a sort of insurance policy against any deficiencies that might exist within your diet, all the way up to very targeted outcome supplements and compounds, that is, compounds that are non prescription, that are designed to achieve very specific and point, such as enhanced focus over the next four to six hours of physical worker, mental work, so on and so forth, plan to cover everything in between that as well. And I promise to cover how supplements interact with other things, such as behavioral tools, prescription drugs, when supplements might be a good alternative to prescription drugs, when they might not be a good alternative to prescription drugs, when supplements can serve as an argument to already excEllent nutrition and prescription protocols.

And every future of supplements as IT relates to mental health, physical health and performance. By the end of today's episode, you should be armed with a number of different questions. As I mentioned before, that will allow you to develop the most biological, effective and cost effective supplement regiment for you.

And of course, I want to acknowledge that for some people, the total amount or dosages of a given supplement or supplements that you might need to take could be zero. There are such individuals, but that many people can, in fact, arrive. Treatment is benefit from supplements in a way that can be more cost effective, then trying to obtain the same non prescription nutrients from food.

As we head into today's conversation, I want to emphasize something very important, not just as IT relates the supplements, but as IT relates to all aspects of mental health, physical health and performance. And that is, I take the stance that behavioral al tools, that is, specific actions that we take and specific actions that we avoid, form the foundation of mental health, physical health and performance. So things like viewing morning sunlight and exercise are behavioral tools. They don't require the injection of anything within the realm of behavioral tools.

There also some don't or do nuts that can greatly enhance our mental health, YSL health and performance, such as avoiding bright light exposure to your eyes between the hours of ten P M and four A M, or avoiding caffeine too late in the afternoon, because even if you can fall asleep after ingesting caffeine in the late afternoon, we know IT discuss the architecture of your sleep in ways that greatly diminish your mental health, physical health and performance the following day, for instance. So behavioral tools form the foundational layer of all tools for mental health, physical health and performance. Second to that, I would say the next layer is, in fact, nutrition.

No amount of supplementation, or non prescription compounds, or prescription compounds for that matter, can never compensate for poor nutrition, at least not for very long OK. So this is a key point, even though many supplements are not simply food supplements because they are not that designed to compense for anything that you could otherwise get from food. That is not to say that you can live on supplements and I suppose you could live on way protein and fishel capsules and vitamin capsules or tablets for a short while but before long you do either um suffer from boredom to the exchange to want to go back to food or some other efficiency would show up.

I think it's the rare individual that tries to arrive entirely on food supplements and things of that sort. Most everybody, and I would hope everybody, is paying attention to their nutrition. So I would place behavior tools dues and do not, as layer one, the deepest layer, the bedrock of all, mental health, fiscal health and performance.

On top of that, I would place the nutrition, and of course, that's going to mean different things to different people with the understanding that there is a huge ray of different food choices and nutritional programs. Nutrition is fundamentally important for micrometres ants for storage of energy in the form of packages in fat and Foster curtain stores and so forth, but also for obtaining basic nutrient, vital minerals and micro nutrient OK. So we've got behavioral tools, nutritional tools.

Then on top of that, I would place what is typically called supplementation. Although today i'm trying to expand that word to include not just things that compensate for food deficiencies or that are layer on top of food as a way to enhance the amount of nutrition that you could get from food. But as I mentioned before, compounds that are non prescription that can be for a variety of different purposes and many of which are not available food.

So our place supplementation read on top of nutrition, then pass that, I would say, prescription drugs, obviously prescribed from a board certified md, can serve a very vital purpose in the treatment or augmentation of mental health, physical health and performance goals. So some people do, in fact, need prescription entire presence. Other people do not.

Some people do, in fact, need prescription drugs for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder or sleep related disorders, so on and so forth. The whole issue of whether not there is an overprescription epidemic or not is a separate conversation for a separate podcast. I would argue that many prescription drugs do, in fact, save lives. This includes the category proscription drugs related to status s and cardiff asked lar health related to any number of different things, even sleep disorders and insomnia archiepiscopal forth.

That said, there are many instances in which people can either reduce their dosages of prescription compounds or can replace those prescription compounds with quality behavioral tools, nutrition and supplementation, but there are many excesses in which prescription drugs are the only route by which people can achieve the mental health, physical health and performance schools that they wish to achieve. So I would place that as the fourth layer in the stack of layers directed towards mental health, YSL health and performance. So just to list off again, I only believe that behaviors do and do not form the foundation of mental health, physical health performance.

Next in line would be nutrition, that is, the specific foods we eat, the amount that we eat, the combinations of food that we eat in a given sitting, and the timing in which we eat our food. Then on top of that, I would place supplementation, the topic of today's episode, and finally, prescription drugs. And of course, all of these things interact in important, in interesting ways, many of which interactions we will discuss during today's podcast as we drill into the topic of supplementation, developing a rational supplementation protocol and one that is most biologically and cost effective.

Before moving further into today's episode, I want to emphasize a very important point, which is that I am not a physician, that is, i'm not a clinician, so I do not prescribe anything, nor am I going to do that. Today, i'm a professor. I review the research literature.

I described tools gleed from the research literature and developed from the research literature. So I profess many things, but I do not prescribe anything. And I think it's vitally important that anytime you are thinking of adding or subtracting any behavioral protocols, nutritional protocols, supplementation base protocols and certainly prescription drug base protocols for whatever purpose that you consult a trusted board certified physician, that's absolutely essential. I don't say that merely to protect me. I mainly say that to protect you, the most important aspect of today's epo de is not going to be that you discover one particular supplement or category of supplements or blend of supplements that is going to transform your mental heal, physical health and performance.

No, the purpose of today's episode is for you to understand where you have needs that can be met by supplementation Better than any other approach, and most importantly, how to think about supplementation, that is, how to think about the different categories of supplements that are out there, and how those interact with your nutrition and your behaviors so that you can maximize your immediately and long term health. What I mean by this is that we have this word supplements or supplementation, but that means many, many different things. That means vitamins, that means minerals, that means adapted giants.

Most people probably only even know what an adapter gen really is. And in fact, many people talking about adapter gen never actually define what an adapter gin is or design for, or the fact that many adapted genes are also used for other purposes. So today's discussion is really about you learning how to think about supplementation the same way you would learn to think about nutrition or exercise, or anything related to brain and body health for that matter, in a way that lets you navigate this vast space that we call supplementation and develop protocols that are optio for you.

And indeed, IT may be the case that the ideal dosage of a given supplement for you is zero milligrams. For instance, if I ask you, are you sleeping deeply and enough each night? Rested throughout the day, maybe need to shorten nap and that's IT or maybe you don't and you say, yes, I feel great.

I sleep great. I wake up feeling great. I only need a short nap p or no nap during the day to feel arrested throughout the day. Well, then there's really no discussion about sleep supplementation to be had between you and me.

However, if you are not sleeping well, then a big discussion opens up as to what the reasons are IT relate to nutrition or when you're exercising or ingesting caffeine. In other words, no discussion about supplementation can be had in a vacuum. Rather, discussions about supplementation need to be considered in a larger context.

So today you're going to learn how to place the discussion and talking about supplementation in a larger context and think about how specific supplements, that is, specific ingredients and combinations of ingredients, can indeed be used to buffering, support your overall health and lead you to specific health and performance outcomes. Before we begin, i'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and researchers at stanford. IT is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public.

In keeping with that theme, i'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is element. Element is an electronic light drink with everything you need and nothing you don't.

That means plenty of salt, magnesium and potassium, so called electronic and no sugar. Now salt magnesium um in patasse are critical to the function of all the cells in your body, in particular to the function of your nerve cells, also called neurons. In fact, in order for your neurons to functions properly, all three electroliers ts need to be present in the proper ratio.

And we now know that even slight reductions in extra light concentrations or dehydration of the body can lead to deficits. And cognitive and physical performance element contains a science back electronic ratio of one thousand milligrams, that one gram of sodium, two hundred milligrams of peasant and sixty milligrams of magnesium. I typically drink element first singing in the morning when I wake up in order to hydrogen, and make I enough electric lights.

And while I do any kind of physical training, and after physical training as well, especially if i've been sweating a lot, if you'd like to try element, you can go to drink element that's element dot com slash huberman to claim a free element sample pack with your purchase. Again, that drink element L M T dot com slash huberman. Let's talk about supplements and implementation and how to develop a rational supplementation region.

One of the things that's really emerged over the last twenty years is that supplements, and they are referring to non prescription compounds designed to augment nutrition, prescription drugs and behavioral protocols, have emerged as a mainstay within the health and wellness, but also the medical communities that are focused on developing mental health, physical health and performance for their patients and their athletes and for the everyday person. Essentially, what i'm saying is that twenty years ago, a discussion about supplements would mainly take place within the niche communities of health food stores or particular athletes. But nowadays, I think almost everyone is familiar with the fact that, yes, indeed, there are standard vitamin supplements, but that there are also supplements such as vitamin d three, which are designed to make sure that people have a certain amount of hormones in their bloodstream because they might not be getting enough sunshine.

Although I will be very clear over and over throughout this episode that there is no pill replacement for sunshine, nor is their appeal replacement or food replacement, for that matter, for exercise or for social connection or for sleep or for simply getting smarter, again, there is no pill that's going to real place excEllent behavioral protocols. In fact, a physician friend of mine has a great saying that I think everybody should keep in mind as we weight into this conversation, which is that Better living through chemistry still requires Better living. I think that's a very important phrase to keep in mind when thinking about the optimal supplementation or prescription drug protocol for you.

So what is an ideal supplementation protocol? Well, I think what we need to do is to take a step back and ask what are different supplements designed to do? For instance, there are foundational supplements. These are supplements that are designed to establish a foundation or provide insurance along with your nutritional intake to ensure that you're getting all the things that you need in order to have a basic level of mental health, physical health and opportunity for optimal performance. Now this is the one category of supplements for which I think is appropriate and in fact, advantages to have multiple ingredients in a given supplement throughout the rest of today's discussion, i'm going to talk about the advantage of mainly focusing on taking single ingredient formulations for a variety of reasons.

But when IT comes to foundational supplements, what we're mainly talking about, our supplements that contain vitamins and minerals that are designed to compensate for any deficiencies you might have from diet or from lack of adequate diet, how would such a lack of vitamin mineral intake a rise? Well, for instance, if you're somebody that practices intermitted fasting or other components of fasting, or for you somebody who does not get enough vitamins and minerals from vegetables and fruits and grains and meat, well then taking a supplement that can act as an insurance policy against any vitamin, mineral deficiencies, in many ways, can be advantages. Although I will talk about some of the safety concerns in just a few minutes now, I want to acknowledge that as soon as we talk about vary mineral supplements, the skeptics immediately raise our hands and say, what all that vitamin and mineral supplements do is give you very expensive urine.

And there, the skeptics are referring to the fact, the reality, that you and just high levels of water soluble vitamin, think vitamin, and some of the other vitals that indeed you will excrete them in your urine. However, it's also the case that many people are not getting enough of the water solid border variations from their foods. And it's also the case that many people are and is also the case that ingesting higher the needed amount of most water soluble vitals, provided those levels aren't exceedingly high, is or at least we should say can be safe.

And again, this is provided that the levels that they're interesting are not exceedingly high. So the typical of a mineral supplement is indeed going to cover any gaps or deficiencies that might arise in the water soluble vitals from your food intake. But the reality is that most people are getting enough of the water soluble vitals from their food if they are paying attention to a couple of things, and those things are very simple to lay out, regardless of whether or not your a vegan and vegetarian, a more traditional omnivore, eating from both animal based and plant by sources, brains at a or even if you're in the pure carner war or strict guess it's called the lion and diet or it's just meet insult.

Regardless of what type of nutrition you follow, you will get vitamin minerals, but you'll get more or fewer of them depending on the nutritional program you follow and of course, depending on how often and how much you eat. That's just sort of obvious. Most people who take a vitamin mineral supplement will indeed excrete a lot of the water soluble vitamins.

They will retain the fat, solid, able vitality. And there are, again, the skeptics will raise their hands and say, you do not want to take high levels of fat soluble variations because they will be stored in your system potentially to levels that are dangerous. Again, provided that vitamin mineral supplements are not taken in access, it's unlikely that you're going to have such a build up of the fat solyman variants in your system that they are going to be a problem.

So that raises a very specific question that you need to ask. Do you want to take a vitamin mineral supplement? Well, the answer to that will be highly individual. But you really just need to address two things. First of all is the cost within the range that you can afford and want to pay, right? Often times, these vitamin mental supplements can be quite inexpensive, but some of them can be quite expensive.

And you can see the full range of ones that are pennies per day all the way up to many dollars or tens of dollars per day because of what are reported to be variations in quality and sourcing and so forth. I'm not aware of any real differences between the quality of the water soluble, in fact, solid ble vitamins found in the less expensive versus the more expensive vita mineral supplement. More typically, the cost scales with the dosages of these different vitamin minerals.

And as could probably be expected, the more expensive to obtain and source vitamins and minerals tend to be in lower quantities in the less expensive versions of vitamin mineral supplements. This is kind of obvious. So you need to ask yourself, can you afford IT financially? And then you need to ask yourself, are you able to regularly ingest enough foods with enough variety to cover your vitamin mineral needs just from food? And for some people, the answer is going to be an immediate yes.

They are careful to get enough of the foods that allow them to obtain their vitamin and mineral quote. And for other individuals, the answer will be no. I would say for people that are extremely physically enduring, mentally active, and for people that perhaps are in following a intermit and fasting schedule, so they are not ingesting a lot of food in general or restricting their food intake to specific times of day, well, then a vitamin mineral supplement likely makes sense for them.

However, it's going to be very important to adjust that vitamin mineral supplement with food and ideally early in the day. So that can set up a little bit of a chAllenge for the intermit and faster who are restricted in their feeding window to late in the day. Why do I say this? While many of the water solvable vitamins and particular the b vitamins need to be injured ted with food, because otherwise they can cause some stomach upset.

And again, there's arrange there. Some people like myself, can take b vitals on an empty stomach, can feel fine. Other people feel really lousy when they take b vitamins.

There are few other things that will talk about later, namely sink and coins. I'm q ten that really should also be taken with food. But the best time to take a vitamin mineral supplement is with food.

And I believe that if you're going to take a vitamin mineral supplement, that you want to take IT with food and you don't want to take dosages of vitamins and minerals from supplements that are exceedingly high for a couple of reasons. One is the build up of fat solid vitals that we talk about before. The other reason is that when people tend to take very high levels of vitamins and minerals from supplements.

They tend to spend less time and focus on making sure that they're optimizing their nutrition or at least trying to get their nutrition right. What do I mean by getting their nutrition right? Well, I think regardless of whether not your kito omnivore, carn ovar vegan or any other nutritional plan, the key thing is to get most, that is about seventy five to eighty percent of your foods, or more from non processed or minimally process sources.

I think there is agreement across the board that most people should avoid highly processed foods. Highly proceed foods are going to be foods with very long ingredient list that have very long shelf lives. So this often includes snack foods that does not include sack foods like chips at a PyTorch that could sit on the shelf a long time.

But IT also includes things like can soups and number different foods that have many, many ingredients, preserve tips. Most people would do well to avoid those kinds of foods and focus most of their intake on things that are non proceed to. These would be things like fruits and vegetable.

You know that the non process foods will tend to have very short shelf life or require refrigeration in some cases, such as meat, eggs, eta, or minimum processed foods such as rice and opens and pastas, beans and things of that sort, beans. Often hands can be completely on process as well. Of course, this is two general categories, unprocessed mini process that should make up about eighty percent or more of your food intake if your goal is health, and obtaining adequate amounts of vitamins and minerals.

This called foundational supplements include a course of vital mineral supplements, but has expanded over the last decade or more to also include supplements that have vitamins and minerals, but also things like digestive enzymes. And again, here we have an example where indeed you can get digestive enzymes from food. For instance, eating a bit of pia or even a little bit of pineapple can assist in the digestion of certain aspects of micronutrients, because these are naturally occurring enzymes that helped digest things like carbo, hydrates fats and proteins.

And there are other food by sources of enzymes. You're welcome to look those up online if you just put food sources of enzymes and you'll find those. But nowadays, a lot of the foundational supplements will include papin or they include different light places or anytime you hear the word based, by the way, that means as an enzi and nyme is designed to break down or to calise some sort of reaction, biology and nutrition in particular, so you can find foundational supplements that include vitamin, minerals and digestive enzyme.

Nowadays, more and more, the quality foundational supplements are also including things like adapter gans. And here the name adapt gans, his sort of vae and IT indeed has no specific Operational definition. This is something really important. Understand about supplementation is that companies, and indeed podcast, can talk about adaptation ging without actually defining what an adaptations in is in an Operational way.

When we say Operational, what we mean is a definition that everyone in a given arena or space research, for instance, can agree on, so that when we talk about the adapt genre effects of a given compound, we're all talking about the same thing. Well, foundational supplements out ays include vital minerals, digestive enzymes and the so called adaptive gans and the adapter gans, broadly speaking or thought, to improve the body in brain's ability to buffer against various stressors. So these could be things like urs, like ash uganda, that are designed to reduce cortisol l levels.

In that sense, ash uganda is an adaptive gin, but after gone to, has other effects related to hormonal augmentation in both the testosterone and ater gene, maybe even the thyroid ths. We will talk about the silly bit later when we talk about supplements for hormonal augmentation. So foundational supplement has really expanded to include a lot of different categories of nutrient and micrometres ans, vitamins and minerals, digestive enzymes designed to achieve abroad spectrum of effects.

Again, this is the one category of supplementation where I think that makes sense to explore multi ingredient formulations. And the other thing that's often included these so called foundational supplements, or probiotics, or probiotics, which are designed to augment and support the so called gut microbiome. The gut microbiome is the collection of trillions of little micro bacteria exist in all of us.

They mainly exist in the mucus membrane lined tissues of the body. So that would be your nasal passages, your mouth, the vagina, the, your retha and the got the whole way from your mouth, all the way out the other end. So not just your stomach, trillions of bacteria live there.

Trillions of microbes. Tera also live on your skin. Every time you shake someones hand, you are exchanging microban turia.

These microbes. Tera often are healthy for us, good for us. They support a huge number of positive biological functions. But there are other microbes, turia, that live in our god and elsewhere on those mucus line tissues, that can be the saddle antares for us, that can harm our health. A growing idea.

These d is based on a number of different laboratories work, including the laboratory of my upstairs neighbor at stanford, doctor Justin swanberg, who has been a guessed on this podcast, is that having a great diversity, a arrange of microbiota, as they called biome microbiota. And these microbes, turia, are all sentiment referring to the same thing. The microbial is the whole collection of these microbes, tera.

But having a lot of different so called species of these microbes, tera is known to be advantage for immune stem function, hormone function, IT supports the so called gut brain access. That's important for a number of things, including mood and motivation actually supports the production of neural transmitters in the brain and body that can help keep you motivated. Elevated mood support the general function of neurons.

Well, not surprisingly, there are ways to support the gut microbes, and there are ways to harm the got microban referred to the podcast ever, so we did with just in sonne g, you can find that a huberman lab docotor, you want to learn all the different ways you can support you got microbes on. But for sake of today's discussion, I want to emphasize that some of those methods of supporting the gut microbes ome are through the direct consumption of particular foods. There are two categories of foods that if you're getting enough of them, it's likely that you got microbiome is diverse and is going to support all those important functions I just listed off, and other functions as well.

The two sources of got my go biota supporting foods are low sugar fermented foods. So these would be things like sarco kim cha, great greek y yoga, again, low sugar greek yoga. 嗯， compusa in particular as a drink, things like key for there are a bunch of other varieties of fermented foods, different cultures at different for mental food.

So the japanese nata is a another source of of fermented that is very good for the gut microbial and work from Justin and burger lab and close by labs at ten ford school medicine have shown that if people in just four servings a day of these low sugar mental foods are greatly improves the function of the gut microbial, and in particular enhances the function of the immune system and IT reduces the so called in flamm IT, reduces inflaming in the rain body in the ways that are helpful and effective for brain and body, that is, mental health, physical health and performance. So they're always to support. You've got my robes strictly from food.

But if you come as no surprise that most people are not ingesting for serving the day of fermented foods, hopefully they're getting enough fiber, especially prebiotic fiber, which is one other way to support. They got microbiome. All of the studies, from Justin on emperour's lab, point to the fact that fiber intake itself was not directly supportive of the good microbial in everybody.

IT was in some individuals, but not in others. In some had no effect. And in other individuals, IT actually made the categories, or I should say, the array of inflaming marker's worse.

IT actually had to more inflation tion. So there's not to say that fiber is bad. In fact, in the episode that we did with dr. Lin norton, he discussed the many benefits of in a fiber. There are a lot of reasons why people should get enough fiber in their diet, but at least for supporting the got microbiome, four servings a day of those sugar fermented foods seems to be the best way to support to get microbiome through the intake of nutrition. Again, most people are not achieving that.

And therefore, these foundational supplements that can be justice real supplements, or could be vital mineral supplements, plus digestive enzymes, or both of those things, plus adapt genes, now also tend to include probiotics and pro biotics that are designed to support the proliferation and maintenance of enough got microbiota in order support the gut microbiome and the gut brain access. Now because of the importance of the got microbiome, because most people are not getting enough support for, they got microbiome in the form of low sugar, fented foods and prebiotic fiber from their diet. I think perhaps one of the most essential foundational supplements, irrespective of of whether not that includes vitamins and minerals, adaptations, ins and digestive enzymes, is some way to support the gut microbes.

Now this gets into a whole dimension of of categories of probiotics and probiotic capsules. And one needs to be very careful there. I do want to say that most of the probiotics and probiotic captions that you can buy, first of all, are very expensive.

The best ones are going to be refrigerator or require refrigeration, just as do any good low sugar for mental foods, by the way. So for instance, pickles are a low sugar for mental food that can support the up microbes. But if you're buying pickles from the section and of the grocery store where they the pickles are not refrigerated, well, then you're not going to get the got microbiome supporting effects from those pickles.

So are funny. We're even having this conversation talking about pickles. But the reality is they can greatly enhance the microbiota if you are getting the pickles that are and require refrigeration and include the broad in which is the the liquid around them.

The same is true for shower crowd. Non refrigerated sour crowd is not going to support. You got microbiome. You will supply some other things, perhaps, but is not going to support you got my Robinet has to be the refrigerator versions for the reason that most people are not getting enough food based support for, they're got microbial.

And because of the importance that they got microbiome, one of the key categories of foundational supplements are supplements that create support for the microbiome through probiotics. Or probiotics, again, they tend to be the refrigerated varieties of the ones that are actually going to work. Those also tend to be very expensive. And there are some evidence that taking excessive amounts of probiotics and pro biotics that is typical of these capsule forms of probiotics and probiotics, if they're taken ongoing, not for short periods of time, but if they are taken ongoing, can lead to subsidies like brain fog. There is a nice literature on this and a growing one at that.

So my suggestion is that if people are going to take supplements to support biome, that those supplements include low enough levels, that is small enough amounts of probiotics and probiotics that you don't start to venture into the realm of brain fog in some of the other issues that could be associated with taking too much prebiotic and probiotic in the form of supplements. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, athletic Greens. Athletic Greens, now called ag one, is a vitamines al probiotic drink that covers all of your foundational nutritional needs.

I've been taking athletic Greens since two thousand and twelve, so i'm delighted that they're sponsoring the podcast. The reason I started taking athletic Greens in the reason I still take athletic Greens once are usually twice a day, is that IT gets to be the probiotics that I need for god. Health, our god is very important, is populated by got microbiome that communicate with the brain, the immune system, and basically all the biological systems of our body to strongly impact our immediately and long term health.

And those probiotics and athletic Greens are optio. And for microbiology, alth. In addition, athletic Greens contains a number of adaptations in vitamins and minerals that make sure that all of my foundational nutritional needs are met.

And IT tastes s great if you d like to try athletic Greens, you can go to athletic Greens dot com slash huberman, and we'll give you five free travel packs that make IT really easy to mix up athletic Greens while you're on the road, in the car, on the plane, at sea, and they'll give you a year supply of vitamin d 3k two。 Again, that's a letter. Greenstock comes slash huberman en to get the five free travel packs and the year supply of vitamin d 3k two。

The other category foundational supplements are those adaptations. S that we mention adapt jeans, again, being a very poorly defined category, but these are typically micro neutrons urbs. Sometimes they go into the mushroom category, and these are non psychiatric mushrooms that provide either some buffering to the stress system by reducing cortisol typically, or that are thought to or known to based on research, study, to enhance things like blood flow to the brain, or to enhance some aspect of cognitive function by way of enhancing neurotransmitter function.

This category of so called adaptations is an important one. Will get back to this little bit later. The reason I mention IT now is that IT is indeed hard to get the so called adaptive gts in sufficient concentrations from food based sources.

I have to assume that most people aren't out there collecting choga mushroom, or that I should have gone to urbs and then combining them with their salads and their foods. And so that's why this adapted gen category fits into foundational. Now this opens up the category of foundational supplement that are broad spectrum, that is, that include vitamins and minerals that have digestive enzymes that have adapted gans, and that also have prebiotics and probiotic ics at the appropriate dosages.

This is one reason why I am a big fan of supplements like athletic Greens, which is many of, you know, a sponsor. This podcast and does really nicely cover all of these categories of foundational nutrition. But I do want to emphasize that this is not a way to focus on athletic Green specifically.

There are other categories and brands of excEllent foundational nutritional supplements that cover these categories of vitamins and minerals, probiotics, prebiotics, digestive enzymes and adapted gans IT. Just so happens that that athletic Greens is the one that I discovered in that works best for me, and that many people find works really well for them. So this is why when people approach me and they ask me, as they often do very, very often do, I should say, if i'm Normally gone to take one supplement, what supplement should I take, rather than just give them one place of a cancer, I actually asked them three questions.

First question I asked them is, how well are you sleeping at night? Are you getting enough sleep? Are you're waking up feeling rested? Because if they're not, that opens up a whole different set of interactions that we need to have and discussions around what sorts of things they need to do and possibly take in order to get their sleep right.

Because sleep is the foundation of mental health, physical health and performance. We will have that discussion a little bit later in this episode. The second question I asked them is how's your nutrition that is, are you eating regularly? Have you found the combination of macro nutrient or which died is right for you? Do you think you're getting enough by ams and minerals has your digestion? We have that conversation.

And then the third thing that I ask, which is extremely important, is what's your budget? Because if somebody has ten dollars a month total to spend on supplements versus a thousand dollars a month to spend on supplements total, well then there is a different set of conversations to be had as to what supplements they should take. Now once those three questions have been answered, assuming that somebody is able to spend about a hundred dollars or more on supplements per month, then my recommendation is that they not focus on any specific supplements directed towards sleep or tod focus or hormone on augmentation, but rather that they focus on buffering and enhancing their foundational nutrition, adapt gans, probiotics, probiotics and digestive enzymes because of the simple fact.

If they do that, they're going to raise the tide on all the biological and organ systems that are going to lead to enhanced mental health, physical health and performance, including sleep. So this is one reason why if people say, well, if I can only take one supply, should I take? I say, well, what's your budget? If they say they can meet that hundred dollar thresh hold per month, then my recommendation would be athletic Greens or something like this, or that they invest the time and energy to go find the various combinations of vitamins and minerals and probiotics and prop biotics and adaptations and so forth in individual components that they can then take in combination in order to meet their foundational needs.

But most people are not interested in doing all that homework and like work to figure out exactly what the dosages are. That's one reason why, indeed, I have taken athletics in two thousand twelve. I like IT makes me feel Better.

I have more energy, I sleep Better, my digestion is certainly Better, and IT supports, I got my I do that for that reason. But again, I want to emphasize that there are other great sources of all the relevant things within those foundational formulas the athletic Greens contains. So it's certainly not the only route to covering your foundational health needs.

There are other ways to do that. Now somebody has a budget lower than one hundred dollars per month to spend on foundational supplementation. Well, then a couple of discussions to be had.

Now the amount of money that they have to devote to foundational supplementation is zero, of course, respect that. And then IT becomes a discussion about what sorts of foods and patterns of food intake are going to best support their mental health, physical health and performance. Now somebody has somewhere between zero dollars and fifty dollars to spend on supplementation for sake of this thing.

We're calling foundational health per month. Will then a different category of supplement discussion arises and will have that in a moment. But this sort of closed the conversation on foundational supplementation.

Again, that means many different things. It's vitamins and minerals sometimes that's one vitamin mineral supplement. IT means digestive enzymes that could be its own supplement or in combination with vitamin admirals. IT means often not always adapted gans things like oh ganda different um plant based and mushroom based formulations that can buffer stress and provide other brain body support and IT often, although not always, but should I believe include the probiotics and probiotics or anything that supports healthy got microbiome.

Once again, I think a broad spectrum supplement that has many, many ingredients of high quality that covers all these spaces is going to be the best route to ensuring foundational supplementation is covered. And I do think that should be the starting place for any and all supplementation regiments. I'll say that once again, I think covering your foundational needs in the realm of vital minerals, probiotics, digestive and signs and adapter gans, is going to give you the most benefit by cost in the most benefit across the board in terms of brain in body systems.

That's going to allow you to feel Better overall, sleep Better overall, focus Better overall and support all the different systems in your brain and body that are going to allow you to be at your best well, of course, also paying careful attention to your nutrition because you simply cannot abandon nutrition. Again, Better living through chemistry still requires Better living. So now that we've had that discussion about foundational supplementation and again highlighting the fact that that's the one category of supplementation where multi ingredient ent formulations make the most sense, i'd like to now shift our attention to single ingredient formulation supplements that are designed to achieve specific n points.

And here, again, rather than focus on specific ingredients and supplements to achieve specific points, because we've done that already in episode ted to sleep and focus at sea, i'd like to take a step back and focus on the larger theme of today's episode, which is how to think about supplementation in a rational, cost effective, in biologically effective way for each of these categories. And the three categories that i'm going to cover are sleep, hormonal support and cognitive enhancement and focus. Cognitive enhancement and focus being the final third category.

Let's talk about sleep in the rational approach to thinking about supplementation for sleep, as I mentioned earlier in this episode and on many previous episodes of this podcast, sleep is the foundation of mental health, physical health and performance. You might be somebody who can do in all nighter and feel okay the next day, or maybe even even great. But most everybody, once they start to have minimal sleep for one or two nights in the form of broken sleep, poor sleep, not enough sleep, or sleeping at the wrong time of night, there is such a thing or day, they starts to suffer, their mood starts to suffer, their cognitive clarity and performance starts to suffer.

Their mental health can suffer severely, and physical performance definitely suffers. Hormones suffer, everything suffers. Conversely, when people are sleeping well, that is deeply and enough. Eighty percent of the nights of their life, mental health, YSL health and performance all flourish.

And I think most people start to be almost amazed at how well they're doing in vary domains of life that previously they might have struggled with. So sleep is fundamental. That's established. One thing about supplementation for sleep, we need to ask ourselves a number of important questions.

First of all, you should ask yourself how well that is, how deeply and how much you're sleeping per night, assuming you're somebody who can fall a sleep easily, stay, sleep through the night. Wake up feeling relatively rested, maybe a little groggy, and then can move about your day with plenty of energy and focus. You're not falling asleep in class or at work or behind the wheel.

Where is a passenger on public transportation? Well, then you're probably getting enough sleep. And by the way, it's perfectly Normal to require anywhere from a ten minute to a nine minute nap in the afternoon. For some people, if you're not a napper, no big deal.

It's known that naps can disrupt time sleep, but provided that they are early enough in the day, if you take a nap and you are still able to fall asleep at night, then maps are fine for you. If you're someone who doesn't like naps because you wake up groggy or grump y which often happens to certain people, then don't nap. You certainly do not need to nap, but if you're feeling energetic throughout the day, chances are you're getting enough sleep at night.

But there are people, of course, who are struggling with sleep, are the falling asleep, staying asleep, but they're not feeling a enough in the day or all of the above. And then that makes sense to step back and take a look at what supplementation can provide if you are one of those people who is not sleeping enough or well enough at night that you are suffering during the day, in whatever way, mild to severe, there are two questions you should ask yourself. First of all, are you ingesting caffeine after two P.

M? If the answer is yes, you want to limit or eliminate caffeine after two P. M. Maybe you can push IT back to noon or earlier.

I know that can be excruciating for some folks, but I can really help with your ability to fall and stay a sleep at night. Second thing is, most people would do well to avoid food within the two hours prior to bedtime. But of course, you don't want to be so hungry that you can fell asleep.

So those are the nutrition and behavioral tools that everyone needs to consider. If you are not interesting, caffeine to P, M or onwards, and you are not eating excessively immediately prior to bedtime or within the two hours prior to a bedtime. And you're not hungry when you go to sleep well.

Then there are certain supplements that can support you're sleep. And we've talked about these in the perfect sleep episode and in the episode with our guest expert, matt Walker from university california, berkely end in the mater you sleep, I was and we have a tool kit for sleep. You can access zero cost by going here in love out com and going to the menu.

Go to the newsletter, you can find that tool kit. You can sign up for other free tool kits like IT. But the point here is not to go systematically through each of the supplements that is beneficial or has been shown to be beneficial for sleep, but rather to address specific aspects of sleep that can suffer, and why and how certain patterns of supplementation can support or alleviate those pain points.

If, for instance, somebody who falls asleep just fine, but wakes up in the middle the night around two or three A M, or any time for that matter, and has trouble falling back asleep, there are two categories of supplements that you might want to consider. The first is mio in oita, typically taken as nine hundred milligrams of oin. Oita in oita can help short the amount of time that IT takes to fall back asleep if you wake up in the mill the night my own.

And ospital has other beneficial uses as well for mood at seta. If you would like to see many of the different effects that have been explored in the scientific literature for my own hospital, you can go to examine, not comments and excEllent sight, not just for invitation, but for all supplements, for that matter, talks about the human effect matrix, that is, the different effects of different supplement compounds on different aspects of hormone, brain and body health, where the evidence is strong, where the evidence is weak, has links to studies and so on. Again, its exam 点 com， amazing website, wonderful website, provided such a rich resource for me and for many, many other people.

Other people who wake up in the middle night will wake up because their dreams are very intense. Or they were having dreams that were so vivid that suddenly they were jolted from their dreams. Those people would do well to avoid certain supplements.

So in a moment i'll talk about the value of a supplement called theanine for falling asleep. But theanine, which typically is taken in dosages anywhere from one hundred milligrams to four hundred milligrams, depending on body weight and experience, and what you find to be most effective for you, minimum effective for you. Well, the I can be great for many people, but for people who have excessively vivid dreams, those excessively vivid dreams can lead to immediate waking, and sometimes a liberty anxious upon waking in the middle the night.

So some people who wake up in the middle night so joked mentally and physically out of sleep because of their intense dreams would do well to avoid senior supplementation. Talk about this a bit before, but, and something that I think a lot of nighttime, middle of the night wakers might be familiar with and would want to take into consideration. Now, for those of you that are not waking up in the milk the night, or not having excessively vivid dreams, but are having trouble falling asleep, two supplements in particular, have been shown to be effective for shortening the transition time to sleep and allowing people to easy to sleep more readily.

And those are magnesium three and eight, which is interchangeable with magnesium bis. Glick ate magnesium b license. And magnesium three, eight. Both have transporter systems that allow them to readily across the blood drain berrier.

And they lead to a mild form of drawing is mild in the sense that is not going to prevent you from Operating a motor vehicle or kind of any um conditions under emergency that might arise in the middle night or if they did arise in the middle, you'd still be able to function. So it's not like a sleeping pill, but people who take those often find that their transition time and to sleep is much faster and their sleep is also much deeper. Incidentally, those supplements are also thought to be useful for cognitive support and neural protection, although there's less data on that.

Yeah so that's for falling asleep. That's one category. Either magnesium, magnesium, three, eight or by clicking would be interchangeable for assisting the transition time to sleep. And then the other, someone is a pig in A P I G E N I N APP genna, which is a derivation of chem.

I talk about this in various podcast before, also as a bit of a anxiety lowering compound, which is essential, prior to sleep, for people to essentially turn off they're thinking or to be able to reduce the amount of ruminating and problem solving in future anticipation that they are doing, which is a requirement for keep. So what's the rational approach to supplementing in a way that allows you to fall a sleep more quickly and stay asleep? Well, would you immediately take magnet sim three, eight and APP gene together?

Well, that depends if you have the budget and you just simply want to fall a sleep quicker and you don't care which of those two ingredients is going to be more effective for you. Well, then you could try one, for instance, magnesium three, eight and try IT for perhaps a week and see how that affects your late, and see the sleep time, that is, how quickly fall asleep. Or you try APP gender in the first week, or you could combine them both, or you could try magnesium three, eight for a week, then switched to only for a week, and evaluate which one works Better for you.

If neither works for you, I do recommend trying the combination together. again. This is just the way that any scientist would design an experiment to try to understand which variables, that is, which ingredients, are most effective for the result that you want. I supposed to just lumping them together and taking them.

That said, a lot of people want excEllent sleep so badly that they just say, okay, i'm just onna take magazine three need to take up a if my dreams are too vivid and i'm waking up in the midnight from excessively via dreams, i'll dropped the scene. And many people actually derive great benefit from that approach. But because today they we're talking about the most rational, cost effective and biological effective approach to supplementation.

If you're not sleeping as well as you would like to or if you want to explore what sleeping even more deeply might do for your mental health, musical health and performance, well, then that makes sense to think about the various supplements for falling asleep versus remaining asleep. What to include, what not to include, end to do that systematically. And again, I think one week's time of taking something provided IT doesn't induce any negative effects, right?

If something induces a negative effect, I recommend ceasing taking IT immediately. But if something does not produce any negative effects, then I think you want to try a single ingredient formulation for about a week, while not varying anything else, not changing anything else in your overall protocols of nutrition or supplementation. I am it's impossible to clamp everything perfectly from week to week, but don't change anything else dramatically.

And just add that supplement for a given week. See how IT benefits your sleep. Maybe add in the same second supplement of you like, or rather swap and try a different supplement for a week and then see what works best and see if the combination works even Better. Now I acknowledge that what I just described as succeedin ly basic, but it's something that I don't think most people do.

Most people either decide they have the budget and the interest in just improving their sleep across the board and they don't care what ingredient is providing the maximum benefit or they simply try something and decide, oh, well, I didn't work for me and so i'm not onna try anything else. Supplements don't work for me or my museum doesn't work for me or um you know I woke up in the milk night from vid dreams. And that's because you're taking more of a shock gun approach without teezle out the different variables.

In fact, that there's an overriding theme of today's conversation. It's really about learning how to isolate variables in the realm of implementation because once you do that and once you start to develop that intuition ers or sensitivity of sorts to how different ingredients impact you, IT is an enormously powerful stance to have because you're going to keep your costs limited. You're also going to find the things that work particularly poorly for you and more importantly, the things that work particularly well for you toward your goals.

Any discussion about supplementation for sleep, I feel, has to include a discussion about malta. I've talked about malta a before on numerous podcast, mine and others. And I will say once again, I am not a fan, a miton an for a couple of reasons.

Melton's, a hormone known. To induce sleepiness but not keep us asleep. So often times, people will take military and fall deeply sleep, and then wake up and have trouble falling back to sleep.

The other reason is that military and supplements almost always include levels of millions in or amounts of military that far, far exceed the Normal biological levels, are so called in doggy ous levels of military and that we would Normally produce. And yes, it's true that as we age, we produce less militant in, but melatonin as a hormone also impacts other hormone systems, particularly the reproductive harmon access to sara gen. a.

Just not to say that if you've been taking military for some period of time that you've disrupted your fertility or those hormonal, but it's possible that you have disrupted them somewhat. And it's very clear that military and can impact not just sleep, but other systems in the brain body IT can be useful for jet lag and for occasional use. But there are also, I want to, a voice, a message of caution.

There have been studies expLoring the dosages of military and containing in various supplements, and whether or not what's listed on the bottle matches what's actually contained in those formulations. And despite those formulations coming from quite reliable quote and quote or thought to be reliable sources, he was found that the supplements contained anywhere from fifteen percent of what's fought to be here or is told to be in those supplements, or many times more melatonin than is listed on the bottle. So the dosage ing does not seem to be consistent with what's often listed on the bottle.

And this is even true within some of the more repeatable brand, so that a real concern. So we need a highlight melatonin as perhaps something that only used occasionally. You wants to talk about dosages for melatonin, use for jet lag that are go to exam and t com.

There's some excEllent references to studies there. Just put malatino in the search function. It'll tell you everything you need to know about military on.

But now, you know, my stance on melotte. A question I often get about supplementation for sleep is, does IT create a dependency? That's an excEllent question to ask. I think most people worry about, even fear, relying on something so heavily that if they did not have IT for whatever reason, that they couldn't sleep.

In my experience, there is no problem falling and staying asleep in the absence of a supplement for sleep, even if you've been taking that supplement for sleep consistently seven days a week for months and months, maybe even years on end, I confess that I occasionally fall asleep having not taken my please sleep supplements. And I happen to take my museum three and eight and epigenetic, take an official IT greatly enhances my sleep. And there been nights when i've fall asleep not having taken any of those things, and i've slept fine.

That said, if I were to explore multiple nights of trying to sleep without that supplementation, I find that my sleep is not as good. I'm still able to fall a sleep, but the depth of my sleep and the duration of my sleep is not as good as when i'm supplementing. So I think that refreshing news, at least to me, that there isn't a dependence on the supplement in order to be able to fall asleep.

It's not the same sort of dependence that people experience from things like sleeping pills. That said, any compound, any compound can create a placebo type effect where we think we need something in order to achieve a certain effect. We had a guest on this podcast some time ago.

Um doctor ali chrome was a professor at stanford and works on these mindset effects, belief effects and placido effects and placebo effects can be very real and in some sense dove tale with any conversation about dependency, meaning if you are somebody who loves your sleep supplements and sleeps great with them and one night you discover you don't have them or you can access them for whatever reason, that can create a little bit of an anxiety around the idea that oh in in their absence, you're not going to be able to sleep. And that's a sort of a placable o effect in reverse, if you will. Because what IT suggests that there is a uh, emotional or a cognitive of association were taking these things that allows you to sleep well.

I would highly recommend that people explore this issue of dependency and placebo effects for sleep supplements on their own and under conditions in which there's nothing impressing the next day. That is, you don't have a big presentation at sea. So what I recommend is that every two weeks or so, maybe every month or so, take one night off completely from all your sleep supplements or leave out one sleep supplement.

Try to understand to what extent you might have established a dependency, either real or placebo, based on the sleep supplements. And again, I suggest doing this on perhaps of friday night so that you know it's a weekend, the next days you don't have to work. If perhaps you don't sleep well, think what you'll find is what most people find and that in the absence of taking your supplements stack for sleep one night, you're still gna sleep just fine.

Now does that mean that these supplements are not actually working under Normal conditions where you're taking the me tonight? No, what this means is that many of these things, magnesium in particular, can build up in the body and brain in a way that can be beneficial. And what probably explains the fact that you can still sleep if you miss an out of taking them, is that the neural circuits that are involved in turning off thinking or not thinking and and falling asleep, those neural circuits undergo, it's called plasticity.

In other words, if you get Better at falling and staying to sleep time, even if you ve got Better at that through the assistance or with the assistance of some supplement or combination of supplements, well then those circuits are still going to function just fine, even in the absence of not taking those supplements just once. We'll get back in to this conversation a little bit later when we talk about cognitive enhancement and focus. It's the same story there where indeed there are things that people can take in stimulant form and and non stimulant form that can enhance cognitive service and focus.

But that does not mean that you become so dependent on those that you can't focus unless you take them. This has been shown multiple times over. So again, to answer the question, is there a dependency establish by taking supplements for sleep? The short answer is no, with the caveat that placebo effects and belief effects are always going to be at play.

Whether are you talking about supplementation, prescription drugs or even behavioral or protocols for that matter, the next category of supplementation that would like to talk about is hormones support. Improving or so called optimizing your hormones is a critical aspect of mental health, physical health and performance. We've done multiple episodes about hormones, including testosterone and estrogen, for both men and women and for people of different ages.

Also had episodes on thyroid hormone growth and so on. You can find all those that human lab dot com. In fact, you can go to the huberman lab dot com website.

There's a search function where we can just put in a keyword and IT will take you to all the episode des and specific time points where that topic happens to be covered. Now hormonal health is such an important topic to discuss in the context of supplementation because indeed, there are compounds that are non prescription based. So how supplements that can improve hormonal function.

Again, anytime we are discussing a particular aspect of mental health, physical health or performance, we need to start with a mention of the few behavioral tools and nutrition based tools, or at least some top onto our coverage of those in a way that frames up the discussion about supplementation appropriately. So in the context of hormone support and augmentation and optimization, if you are not getting adequate calories from high quality sources, hormones like testosterone and asteroid will suffer. This is one of the reasons why women will stop having their periods if they're not interesting enough calories.

This is one of the reasons why test offering levels will drop if people are not interest enough calories. In fact, on the episode with expert guest and medical doctor Peter tea, he described how sex hormone binding globulin 是在 protein that's present in males and females that binds to test astro and other hormones and prevents IT from being in its free foreigner is the more active form。 While insuing, which of course is going to increase after the injustice of carbohydrates, in particular insulin, actually inhibits or reduces sexual binding global lin, this means is that for you intermitten faster, or people that are ingesting very few carbon hydrates who have very low blood glucose, or perhaps are taking things like met for men or burbery, which is a supplement based on approach to reducing blood glue cose well, your sex home moon binding globulin is going to increase dramatically.

Conversely, if you are eating enough calories in the form of foods that allow your incident to be a bit higher, not excessively high, we hope, but IT a bit higher, well, then sex former bonding globally will go down and free test after room will go up. So the discussion about hormones, support and augmentation has to include some nod toward, or understanding the fact that nutrition, and the way that nutrition impacts hormones, and the way that hormones such as instant impact, other hormones such as free test, that all has to be acknowledge. That is not the topic of today's discussion, but it's important that I remind everybody that nutrition matters for general hormones status is also important to remember that behaviors matter for hormones status.

Getting morning sunlight increases cortisol levels. Cortisol levels are very important to have elevated early in the day, for focus on alertness and for immune function and to make sure that quarter of all levels are low at night, and thereby levels of growth, ormon and testosterone, which is secreted mainly in the early morning, can be elevated at night and in the early morning. So getting morning sun like getting strenuous exercise in the form of both cardiovascular exercise, but also relatively short, meaning an hour less boult of intense resistance training a few times per week, can also dramatically author hormone profiles.

In fact, in the episode that we did with doctor duncan french, again, you find that episode, human lapdog come. He described a very strange ous, but still brief today, a week protocol of using resistance training specifically to increase testosterone one and free test astern and growth hormone and so on. So nutrition matters, exercise matters, when IT comes to increasing, supporting or augmenting different hormones.

And that's just the discussion about test stone free testosterone and ater gen. There is also the vast discussion about fire. Red harmon IT again recovered all those topics and previous episodes. But once those behavioral tools are in place, once you're doing the right things and you're avoiding the wrong thing, doing the right things to support your hormones, and avoiding the things that diminish hormones in the ways that can be detrimental, once your nutrition is in place to support your hormones, then IT makes sense to turn and consider. What supplements can support hormones, but I do believe that you want to get your behaviors in your nutrition an correct before you start thinking about supplementation for hormones.

I repeat that, get your nutrition and your behaviors correct for sake of hormones and for other health purposes, before you start thinking about supplementation for hormones, and certainly before you start talking about prescription based approaches to improving hormones, once all of those other elements are in place, the supplements that makes sense in terms of augmenting hormones coming two forms. One are broadband support for multiple hormones, and then the others are supplements that are designed to increase or in some cases, decrease specific hormones or hormones pathway. So let's consider each of those in tandem.

There are certain supplements, things like SHE log, for instance, something from I ova c missing, which may mainly uh has the active ingredient fulvio acid, which is known to for instance increase things like F S H followers stimulating hormone, which in women is going to increase certain aspects of eg. Growth, hence the name follow stimulating ing herman is going to stimulate certain aspects of fertility. It's pro fertile and in males can make uh for more sperm production or more motor sperm.

F, S, H is also going to indirectly increase testosterone and males. It's known to increase label in both males and females. So things like sheep can indeed augment multiple hormones and support multiple hormones systems generally in the direction of profitablity pro libido and increasing estrogen and testosterone.

Now there are other with such as oh, uganda, that also fall into this category of affecting multiple hormones as organ. A is a very potent supplement in terms of reducing cordial levels. IT has also been shown to increase testosterone levels, but probably indirectly.

And that's because cortisol and test astro sort of exist on a sea saw in terms of pathways. They're on separate pathways. But those pathways interact enough that when court is always lowered, in general, tester intends to increase.

Now IT is important. That was certain hormones like osha gagan a that you don't take them for more than two weeks at a time at hyde sage. If you want to know more the specifics around osha, uganda, how long to take IT, how to cycle at at a, please see our episode on master stress.

Please also see the examined 到 com website and put in ash uganda。 You will get into some of that description. But sheedy, oh, ga and things, for instance, like l carney, a supplement that we often discuss in terms of fertility, because I can indeed improve sperm motility and quality and egg quality.

So it's a pro futile compound. But IT also impacts of various mineral pathway. It's having a more indirect effect on hormones.

There are many other compounds present and available supplements that are reported to be pro hormone support, in particular for test stone, stroganoff ert, late and label. There is a description, for instance, of things like mca root. Mca route can increase.

Libido is found to be particularly effective in women, but in men as well, and in all people who are suffered from lower the beto due to intake of accessorize selective serotonin reuptake inhibits, for whatever reason, sss are used to treat ocd. They are used to treat depression. Any number of different things.

Mocker route can be, in many instances, effective and increasingly libel. IT does that, however, through augmentation of dopamine in related pathways and some of the hormonal pathways upstream of in the reports that market increases, testosterone are somewhat scant and a little bit weak, to be honest. So it's having these indirect effects that may impact testosterone downstream.

S S. So going to put mocker alongside ash uganda, alongside cho gy as supplements that are impacting multiple hormonal pathways toward increased leeby to increase fertility, increased tester on the extra gen, likely through indirect pathway s OK. Now with all that said, like to provide some examples of supplements that work more directly on specific hormonal pathways aimed at achieving more specific goals, such as elevated testosterone or elevated free testosterone or elevated growth hormones for that matter, and elevated fire road hormone.

I'd like to talk about growth hormone first because it's actually a pretty short discussion. First of all, the best way to augment growth hormone is to get quality deep sleep, especially the sleep that occurs in the first three or four hours. The night is when growth ormon is released, and it's going to be beneficial to avoid coLori intake in the two hours proceeding. Sleep again, don't go to bed so hungry that you wake up an hour or an hour a half later, you have trouble falling asleep. But avoiding food intake in the two hours prior to sleep, and certainly avoiding alcohol and cannabis is going to facilitate growth hormone release in the first hours of sleep.

Many people use internet fasting or even longer periods of fasting to increase growth more on one of the interesting things I learned from an expert gas doc college ett who's a medical doctor on this podcast is that indeed, while length er fast or intermit and fasting can increase growth home on levels very substantially, IT has interact effects on the genetic pathways and the receptors for growth hormone that actually are detrimental for the function of growth ormon. So avoiding food for the two hours prior to bedtime is a good idea. If you avoid food for longer, that's just going to assist even more, certainly isn't going to hurt in terms of growth hormone release.

But extended fast, specifically for the purpose of increasing growth hormone, are not really logical when you look at the broader effects of extended fast. That is not to say that extended fasting is not appropriate for some people, IT can be in certain incenses, or that internal fasted, so called timer search of feeding is not beneficial for some people. IT can be here.

I'm only referring to the effects, or this case, the lack of effects of intervention. Fasting time are started feeding on growth hormones specifically. Now, in terms of supplements to increase growth hormone, there are very few supplements that have been shown to augment this pathway.

There is some idea that argue supplementation prior to bedtime can further elevate levels of growth ormon, especially when fasted. That literature is rather weak, to be honest, to encourage, to go to examine that com. If you want to prove those particular studies, really, the things that increase growth hormone very potentially fall outside the realm of supplementation. They include exercise. Again, look at the dunk and friends episode or in the couch let episode on optimizing hormones, males and particularly, but this also pertains to females that avoiding food two hours prior to that time really can boost growth ormon significantly in sleep beyond what IT would be otherwise.

But it's really only once you get into the remote prescription compounds, things like peptides, like sermon, which increase I G F one and growth hormone, things like growth hormone itself by prescription on if and only if it's prescribed by a doctor, of course, and and say for you, that's when you start getting into really significant increases in growth hormone. Not a lot of supplements out there to increase growth horon potently. Now it's a different story when you start thinking about and talking about test AAA ran and free test astronomy.

Luton's ing hormone luti zing hormone e is released from the patuit ory, which is this gland not far from the roof, your mouth, and it's nearby neighbor. The hypotheses is a collection of neurons that sits above the roof, your mouth and talks to the patuit ti, talks to IT through neural connections and hormone based connections. There is a hormone called G N R H canada rope in releasing hormone that is released from the hypothalamic.

The patuit ory IT stimulates the release of uti zing hormones, or lh, which then travels in the bloodstream to impact multiple tissues in the body, but mainly the over and females and the tests and males to stimulate estrogen production and testosterone production. There are supplements that can potently increase G N R H and or uti zing hormones and then indirectly increased testoon an estrogen. And I was like, remind people testosterone estero in our present in both males and females o and both are important for things like libido, muscle growth and so on.

A lot of people think that oh, and males having very high test stone and low s rogen is actually ideal. It's actually not ideal. If you want to keep your label, anything that lowers your estrogen too far is going to reduce your libido. You don't want asters and too high, but you also do not want IT too low. So supplements that can tickle this pathway, or actually can act as a bit more of a directed hammer on this luini zing hormonal pathway may also in packet in age, are things like photogen aggressive.

This is an erb that i've talked about before in the podcast that when taken at dosages of six hundred milligrams per day, many people not all report elevate levels of libido, elevated sperm production, elevated testosterone, in some cases, elevated estrogen, a bunch of hormone's downstream of luti zing hormones. Are you going to be a photo gia retest responder or a non responder? There is simply no way to know, except by trying IT if you are going to go down this road.

There are two very important considerations. First of all, there's a fairly extensive literature on the fact that photo gia gratis can be toxic, two testicular cells and perhaps other cells when taking at very high dosages. So oh, baying the particular dosages of photog aggressive that are recommended on various product labels.

And cycling photog ogress's can be important. Some people need to cycle IT eight weeks on, two weeks off. Other people opt for twelve weeks on a month of. I know a few people who have taken IT continuously with no issues, but I do want to suggest caution when taking for dog ogresses, the cautionary notes are stay within the recommended dosage ranges. You can go lower, but certainly don't co hire.

And I think IT is wise to cycle every eight weeks or so to come off IT for two weeks and then going back on, if that's your choice, if you feel IT benefit you or taking IT for twelve week periods of time and then cycling offer a four months before repeating again. The best way to know whether not photo, gia or any of these other supplements is impacting your hormonal levels in the direction that you want and not impacting your home on levels or other aspects of your biology in ways that you don't want is from a blood test. There is simply no Better tool to evaluate whether or not these supplements are working to support your hormones in the ways that you want and not causing issues except to take a blood test.

This podcast has inside tracker as a sponsor that can do in home blood test and give you blood panels. There are other sources of blood tests that are quite good as well. Of course, in in the first episode of the human in lab podcast that I did with doctor coyle, let again a medical doctor, expert in hormones, diabetes and very other aspects of medicine he described, and IT is time stamped.

How to stand the best probability of getting your insurance to cover a blood test, how to talk your doctor about getting a hormone panel and so on. So i'll refer you to that epo de for that. But blood testers are going to be very important. I recommend taking them before adding in any supplement to increase hormones of any kind or decrease hormones of any kind for that matter.

And then again, after about four to eight weeks of taking that particular supplement in order to evaluate whether not IT worked and whether not IT had any negative effects that you would like to avoid, I also want to remind people of the dosage conversation that we had earlier just because there's a recommended dosage of fido gio rescuers of says six hundred milligrams per day. First of all, that is non invitation to take twice as much and expect twice the positive effects. That is not a good approach, especially with something like for dog ogresses, which can at high dosages be toxic, but is also important to perhaps consider taking a lower dosage and seeing how that affects your hormones.

That approach requires a bit more patients. I know most people think I want the effect and I want IT now, but I think it's very important when thinking about exercise, your nutrition or supplementation to really play the long game, to think about what's going to work for you in the immediate end, in the long term, and to ease into any kind of supplement regiment, for instance, spite, taking one thing at a time, varying one supplement out and one supplement in, starting at minimal effective dose, and build up your protocols over a year or several years, IT really can be beneficial, I can say for myself. I started expLoring the supplement space and taking different supplements in different combination, and alone evaluating which one's work, and did not work for me somewhere.

Absolutely dreadful for me. I have tons of stories about supplement fail, some of which were just kind of inactive. I meaning they were a waste money which isn't innocuous but at least IT wasn't detrimental to my health.

Other supplements, which fortunately don't exist on the market anymore. Um I think actually we're quite dangerous and I feel lucky that I did not experience even greater negative effects from them. Other supplements have been tremendously useful for me and for other people, for things like sleep and hormone on support, focus and so on.

So for dog, gresser is a good example of a supplement that is known to have put in effects, but you need to approach IT with the appropriate um respect for the fact that the dosage rangin which IT works um have to be kept pretty narrow without causing issues. IT does increase uti zing hormones and thereby testosterone and estrogen. So if you're somebody who's already excessively in one or the other, it's going to be very hard to just direct IT to only to ask or only estrogen.

Now the topic of today's episode is not about photog aggressing per say I highlighted because this is one of the more potent supplements for sake of hormone on augmentation, but it's still fairly broad band. It's a little more specific than something like sheedy, but it's still fairly broadband in terms of hitting multiple in point hormones to astern in estrogen and maybe some other hormones as well. There are other supplements, in particular tonic ali, which is known to, for instance, increased libido.

Whether not IT does that by way of augmenting dopamine related pathways or testing pathways still isn't clear. IT is known to increase free test asteroid by reducing sexy mom minning globulin tony ali can be beneficial both for men and for women in dosages anywhere from two hundred milligrams to six hundred milligrams per day. So there, I would say, scale according to body size, although start with the minimum amount and find the minimum effective dose for you.

Again, blood work is going to be the most effective way to what's working or not working at the level of objective numbers. But subjective experience matters too. You know, if you take IT at four hundred milligrams for four weeks and you don't notice any effect, you might try at six hundred milligrams, but not higher.

And if you still don't seem effect well, then doesn't appear to have work for you. Other people experience dramatic effects from things like fido's a and tony ali. Why would that be the case? Well, if you look to the scientific eraser, what you find is that the studies that report the biggest effects of any supplement usually start with a population that somehow diminished back on its heels in one particular dimension.

So for instance, people that are hypothetical, they are not making enough test astern or free test astro. In fact, their levels are very, very low. Their sub clinical off range in terms of the chart below the Normal.

While those people, when they take supplements like tonga fido's a, tend to experience greater effects because they're starting from a lower level than people who perhaps are close to the optimal levels achieved through either age, genetics, exercise, nutrition or some combination of those. So that's an important thing to think about. These are called flow effects and ceiling effects.

Ceiling effects are, for instance, if an individual already has a very high testosterone and free testosterone, and they take a supplement to increase IT further, they might not see any increase where somebody sits more in middle to low range stands to experience a much greater increase. In fact, one individual I know who took toner ali, admittedly dly, on my recommendation. His testosterone was initially very low, and he was having a number of different symptoms.

He did blood work. He got how he knew he was low, and he then took toner ali and photo gia in combating because he said he just wanted result. He didn't care which which thing was going to give him the result.

Any experience? Big increases in testa stern, this would be not free, but total testosterone. He experience much as six hundred anagrams. Protest leader increase from he was before, which is very dramatic, was a near tripling of where his testosterone had started off to where he ended up.

I don't know he's ever done the experiment of removing for dog a tongue d to find out which one IT was. And this is why many people just take them in combination. And if you have the budget for IT and you are interested just finding what works, but not isolated, what works at the level single ingredients, that would be the approach recommend.

However, again, I think most people do well to figure out which specific ingredients are gone to work best for them by isolated the variables the way have described repeatedly throughout this episode, to my knowledge, toner ali does not need to be cycled, meaning you don't have take periods of time off from IT. I should note that the effects of tonga ali can take a little bit longer to experience, so perhaps blood works should be done eight to twelve weeks after initiating the tongue I protocol, as supposed earlier. And IT does seem to have sort of accumulate of effects on libido, and that points to the likelihood is having some impact on neural pathways as opposed to hormonal pathways.

Harmon pathways as can be slow, but in general, neural pathways are the ones they are going to explain slow rising shifts in any kind of physical or mental aspect that then remains stable over time. So the exact effects of tonga, ali, and where, meaning where they a rise in the brain body aren't known. I will provide a link to a really beautiful review article that covers the literature on tongon ali.

This came out fairly recently and that i've reviewed with a number of other um mds and medical where medicine related podcasts ers. It's a really nice review or provide a link to that gives a survey of tongue ali, what people are discovering, what they're finding, what they are not finding and so forth. As a final note on supplements for hormonal augmentation and supplementation, I want to make a brief mention of something specifically related to female health, which is, of course, the menstrual cycle.

And across the mental cycle, different hormones and president different levels follow. Stimulate hormones is very high during the so called for clear face, right? And then you have your studio phase. We have an entire episode coming up about female hormones and hormones health that will cover this. We also have covered a little bit of this in the other episodes on to stern and estrogen.

But the point i'd like to make now is that for women, they should fully expect that certain supplements, not all, but certain supplements, because of the way they impact different hormones, would have different effects, maybe even opposite effects, at different phases of the menstrual cycle. And for that reason, I believe IT is especially important to have tight control over dosage and individual ingredients in your supplement regiment. So for instance, of your somebody who take slog, I know many women who take slog or tonga, ali, for instance, or maka, and you find that IT really serves you well.

That is, that provides the mental and physical benefits that you want and enjoy at certain phases of your menstrual cycle. But at other phases of your menstrual cycle, IT feels like too much, or IT actually can start to give you negative mental and physical effects. Well, then obviously, having control over those specific ingredients is going to be extremely important so that you can, I trate the dosage or increase the dosage as the case maybe, or ceased taking those things entirely at certain phases of your menstrual cycle.

That's not to say that some women can't just continuously take these settings without their mentor cycle. Some can, but some find that that makes them very uncomfortable or that they would do well to alter different ingredients, different faces of their cycle. So again, this speaks to the critical importance of single ingredient control, dosage control and the ability to seized taking individual and multiple ingredients according to the backdrop of your health generally.

And obviously, the metro cycle is a profound shift in the hormones and thus the entire biological psychological meu that exists in the body. And of course, there's the issue of birth control and whether not people are taking hormone days, birth control, certain forms of harmon by birth control and women involved tonics elevating that means consistently elevating estrogen. That's certainly going to reduce the fluctuations and thus the probability that certain hormones and hormones pathways will change across the metro cycle but not eliminated altogether.

Also, there's the key issue of fertility in both males and females. One important note, even though this is not an epsom about fertility, we're going na have one soon. But the important point about fertility is that there are supplements, not just sheedy, but there are supplements and supplement protocols such as l carnet, in particular injectable l carnet, which does require a prescription at least in the U.

S, but also orally adjusted i'll carnet, that can improve sperm health and motility and health and mortality. I mention that earlier, but if couples are trying to conceive IT is important that if you're going to take something that is a supplement directed towards sperm and or egg health. That you also consider how that interfaces with some of the other hormone based compounds, that is, prescription drugs that you may be taking.

This is true for people who are doing ivf in petrol feriz ation or not. Again, that entire discussion will be handled in our episode on fertility and on female hormone health. And we already did the episode with dr.

Collate on male formal health optimization, the next category of supplementation that i'd like to address as supplements related to cognitive enhancement and focus. And here there are a number of very useful strategies that one could take. I'd like to divide this conversation into two general categories of supplements to address cognitive enhancement and focus.

The first category are supplements that increase energy by way of stimulant properties. So the most obvious of these is caffeine. Caffeine is, of course, a molecule that can increase levels of alertness, is IT, also can increase levels of focus, provided that dosages are in the appropriate range.

The appropriate range in most cases is going to be one to three milligrams per kilogram of body weight, taking thirty minutes or so before any kind of mental or physical endeavor. We did entire episode about caffeine, where you can learn lots of facts about caffeine, how best to utilize cafe. And indeed, i'll just give you a few those.

Now IT turns out that if you're regular caffeine in user, you can still derive the cognitive enhancing and focus enhancing effects of caffeine, if you, in just caffeine everyday. But if you were to take two days off from caffeine completely, and right now, I hear all the caffeine addix out there just kind of cringing ing at the idea. And then take caffeine in the thirty minutes prior to some especially important event, physical or mental event, where you really need to focus and be able to sustain that focus for long periods of time.

IT would have an even greater effect than IT, Normally wood. But since most people are taking caffeine in the kind of ongoing regular way, I just want to emphasize that is still has pro cognitive and pro focus effects, even if it's taken every day or even multiple times per day. Again, a cautionary note, don't drink caffeine too late. The day past two P M, I can really start to impede uh, your sleep at night. Even if you can fall asleep at night, the architecture of that sleep is not going to be great.

If you're interesting, caffeine in the proceeding eight to ten and even twelve hours and then actually raises another ten general but still important points i'm going to make IT and then get back to supplements, which is the best cognitive enhancer that you will ever take, is a really good nigh sleep of sufficient international, okay? So sleep is going to be the batter rock of your ability to focus and remember things. In fact, it's during sleep that neural connections remodel so cold neuroplasticity.

It's actually not when you trigger learning, but it's when you can solid and reinforce learning in a number of other things that relate to cogia enhancement and focus. Your thing, of course, is that you're going to need to have sufficient levels of nutrition so you don't want to be overly hungry or it's going to be hard to focus nor do you want to be overloaded with calories or a volume of food or have your blood blue coast to be so high that it's going to make you sleepy. There's a reason why, when discussing stress in the social economic nerve system, that the phrase arrest and digest comes into play, rest and digest, as the name implies, relates to the fact that when we have a lot of food in our got IT tends to make us sleepy.

In other words, it's hard for us to focus and it's hard for us to maintain cognitive tention and remember things that set up. So there are bunch of behavioral tools for enhancing focus. We didn't entire episode on enhancing focus. IT does touch on supplementation again, can find links to that in all formats, a human and lab dot com. We also have a news letter related to this topic also at the woman lawed outcome at zero cost.

With all of that said, and in particular, the highlight about sleep being the best way to enhance your abilities and focus, anytime we're having a discussion about supplements for enhancing cognitive and focus, a major category of those supplements is going to fall into the stimulant category, and that's going to include most often caine. Although there are other sources of stimulants i'm not going to touch on those for the moment. Just talk about caffeine.

When people hear caffe ine, they think a while I can just drink coffee. Indeed, that's a great source of caffeine. So as year by mote, I would caution people to um if you use year by mote for whatever purpose, caffeine or otherwise, that you avoid the smoked versions of your romantic.

Um they are personages ic, that is, the smoked versions are carson's genc I know end to I consume the non smoked varieties them instead. The important thing to understand about caffeine is that while IT can be injured ted in the form of a drinker energy drink to your coffee, IT can also be injured ted as a pure supplement, that is, the art cafe in supplements. And I know a number of people, including a very, very prominent podcast, whose name I won't mention, who drinks urb tea, but takes a one hundred to three hundred milligram tablet of caffeine with the arbeit.

So in that case, IT is no longer arbel. IT is caffeinated arbel. When you take cafe in pill form, IT tends to have a much more potent in long lasting effect than when you take cafe in the form of coffee.

R, T, it's actually a world apart in terms of its effects. And if you haven't experienced this before, you might be something that you want to explore. IT might not be something you want to explore, in particular if you're somebody who experiences anxiety or panic attacks.

Be very careful with your intake of caffeine again. See the episode the huberman la pocket, all about caffeine for more on that. But IT is the case that even one hundred milligrams of caffeine in tablet form, my music could be in capsule form as well, but in its pure form, leads to much greater enhancement of alertness and focus.

When does often the comparable amount, or even twice the amount of caffeine contained in coffee or t why would that be? Has a lot to do with the other things that are in coffee and tea. So here I am not encouraging people to become reliant on caffeine captions or on caffeine tablet. But if you want to increase alertness and focus, caffeine is a poor way to do that.

IT works the other category of stimulant that can work in terms of enhancing literary and focus, are going to be things that increase a drennen in some other way, or epiphone, as is also called the journal epinephrine thing in some other way, that are going to touch into, or argument the so called aderke c and a journal and systems. And there are things like you humbled I and different forms of your himba. I like alpa u himine um there multiple forms of these things.

Now I would go to examine dot com to explore the different forms of your himba about ten, twenty years ago, your humble and was marketed primarily as a pro level and pro erectile agent. Turns out that has very low efficacy for both of those things. But there are certain forms of yohimbine that act as stimulants that are effective and are separate from those claims in pathways.

One particular form is called alpha IO himine. IT sometimes goes by the name rowson, and that spelled R A U W O L S C I N E, again, that alphago himine. And it's used as a stimulant often to also promote fat loss and alertness.

I have to say that it's a very poor in somewhat um precarious supplement. Some people experience a lot of xiety on IT. That could also be because they tend to take IT um on either an empty stomach or in combination with sub coller diet. It's it's sort of getting out on the edge of things that for some people can work not so well for other people.

They might actually find IT to be a very effective stimulant in general in terms of supplement based approaches to increase cognitive function and focus caffeine, either in coffee or tea form or in tablet or capable form, but at lower dosages than you would find coffee, and I think is actually a reasonable way to explore stimulate based approaches, enhancing cognitive function and focus. I mention all that not because I think that you probably already didn't know that caffeine can enhance a lern ness and focus. Most people already know that and acknowledge that, but rather as a contrast point for the other supplement based approach for increasing cogent function and focus, which is to increase certain neurotransmitter pathways that are not stimulant based.

So for instance, alpha gpc, which is essentially a Colin donor, acts in the pathways, relate to the neuromodulator a eto Colin and can enhance focus. So a dosages of anywhere from three hundred to six hundred milligrams people experience heightened levels of focus for sake of mental work or physical work. The half life of alph a gpc is about four to six hours, so it's relatively short lasting.

Although you wouldn't necessarily want to take IT right before bed, I don't recommend that IT is not a stimulant. IT tends to enhance focus by augmenting a seat of calling and a set of calling pathways specifically. Now IT does create a little bit of an increase in alertness.

So some people actually perceive its subjectively as an increase in overall stimulation, but it's different than a caffeine type stimulate. So for instance, three hundred milligrams to six hundred milligrams of alpha gpc taken alone will allow people to be more focused, but doesn't tend to make people feel jittery or overstimulated. Similarly, five hundred milligrams to a thousand milligrams, or somewhere in between of something like l terracing, which is a minos ID precursor to dope me a different neuromodulator taking a loan or in conjunction with, again, I believe in separating these things out by product.

But I suppose you could take off a gpc, N, L, tyco together. If you'd already try them separately, decide they worked well for you, then you decide to combine them. What people tend to experiences that the colony age exists lation from alpha gpc and the dope energy exists lation from a tyros ine, or simply l tyre acy alone, or alpha gpc alone, leads to increase levels of focus without the kind of overall feelings of stimulant based alertness that one would experience with caffeine.

And indeed, or I should say, of course, there are products out there and there are people out there that combine all three of these things together caffeine and alpha gpc and alter racy. Um and while i'm not suggesting that a good or a bad thing, I would suggest that anytime you start to explore the cognitive enhancing effects and the focus enhancing effects of any supplement that you ask, which ones are stimulant differences ces caffeine and alphago hib, which ones tend to tap more into the modulator systems like alpha gpc and altera acy and to separate those out conceptual. Because whether things like offer you himine and caffeine will mostly serve the role of increasing levels of alertness but not tightening your focus.

Things like alpha G P C in altera scenes tend to serve the role of less elevation in alertness, but more tightening of focus. And this, of course, is why people often stack these and take them in combination. So I think it's a very important distinction that most people aren't aware of.

And i'm not here to tell you that the stimulant based approach or the new modulate based approach is Better or worse. They are simply different from one another. Although I will say that I think IT is important to explore them separately, if indeed you're going to explore any of them before for you would start to combine them in a single formula.

Again, individual ingredients, we're going to be the way to go in terms of figuring out what's best for you. If anything, some people may find that even the slightest bit of caffeine or even the slightest bit of alphago gpc real terracing just places them into a state of mind and your body that just uncomfortable and not compatible with the kind of work that they want to do. Whether other people, so much of myself, regularly rely on taking three hundred milligrams of alpha gpc IT, turns out more than that kind of doesn't work for me or or attends to send my mind downer pathway that I don't like to be in for sake of code of work.

But I will routinely take three hundred milligrams of alpha gpc prior to some code of work or prior to a workout. I do often combine that with some coffee, not in capture pill form, but rather in the form, a lot of coffee or your biotic and IT. Turns out that for me, just by way of example, l tyre seine is something that works very powerfully to elevate my level focus, but that I tend to crash pretty hard afterward.

And so I tend to air away from all tire seen. But some people tolerate IT really well and actually really like IT. I rely on something else for dopamine augmentation, which is final lel aiming, which is a little bit more short lasting.

Again, I arrived at these protocols for myself by mixing and matching, but mostly by trying individual ingredients alone before combining them into any in sort of cocktail, before taking them before a workout or before a cognitive workout. And I suggest that you explore them in the same way, because that's going to deliver you to the best possible protocols for you, which only you can determine. And then, of course, there's the category of supplements that can support cognitive function and focus, but that also touch on other general functions related to brain and body health, such as met a bala health mood at set up.

And the one that comes to mind here are the omega ati assets. I talked a lot about omega ati assets that are available in the form of foods. So for instance, fati ocean fish, and they're certain in plant based sources for these as well in l gies.

And things that sort touched on this in the episode done, depression that i've done. But this topic mainly comes up around the issue of social fiscal capture and liquid. And this is discussion I think is worth having early on in the episode. Talk about foundational nutrition and supplements that include a bunch of different ingredients. We touch on the idea that some people might have the budget to take one such a product or any number of different products that combine all those ingredients.

I should say that for those that are interested in taking a supplement but have a lower budget, then would allow for taking one of those um general categories of supplements we talked about earlier for foundational nutrition that everything vital minerals, probiotics, biotics add, adjust to inside. I do think that there's a category of supplements that can greatly enhance the probability of offsetting depression and may be even improve mood directly or indirectly. There's evidence for what i'm about to tell you within the scientist nature and or offset the amount of enter to present medication that people need to take that also been demonstrated and improve meta lic function, cardio ashlar function, and also enhances our ability to do focus work.

And here I am referring to this so called omega three essential fatti assets, in particular the omega three form of the essential fatty assets. There's now a lot of data showing that ingesting one to three grams of E, P. A, in particular in the form of either official al capsules or liquid, can be beneficial for a number of different aspects of brain and body health and can enhance focus and cognitive service.

This is especially true in developing brains. And there is actually an extensive data out of a laboratory university, california, a barba, talking about how mothers who supplement omega three is, in particular the eps, although they also need to get the dhs, that leads to greater brain weights and health of the offspring. This is something we will definite explore in a future episode, likely with an expert guest who's doing that work in that laboratory.

At you see, sana barba. The point here is that if somebody has a limited budget to purchase supplements and cannot afford a foundational supplement in the sort that we talk about earlier, athletic Greens are similar, but they do have a budget that would allow them to purchase a high quality of mega fatih ID, special that to ingest IT in quantity sufficient enough to get above that one gram of E. P.

A. Per day. Again, this is really important. If you look at the product, you often see fifteen hundred or sixteen hundred milligrams of essential fatty assets. But the key is you get above that one gram of E P. A per day threshold in the highest three grams per day.

We had a guest on this podcast, doctor on the Patrick, who takes anywhere from, I believe, three to four, maybe even more grams of E P A per day for a variety reasons, including some of the reasons we're discussing. Now before we move on to discussing some of the more global teams related to developing a rational supplementation protocol, I do want to touch on this vast category of supplementation that includes food based or food mimic type supplement. So this would be, for instance, to way proteins, or milk proteins, or egg proteins or plant proteins.

That's a discussion that in and of itself, deserves an entire episode. If you want to understand which types of protein and source of proteins are going to be the most by available, the best for protein synthesis, for recovery from exercise, building muscle sea, i'd like to refer you to a segment within the episode that I did with doctor lane norton, where he talks about total protein needs per day. It's about one gram per pound of body weight per day for most people, although there's some variation depending on activity at seta.

And the quality of sourcing of those various proteins is extremely important. And that, of course, leads to a discussion about the quality and type of protein that will be present in a supplement, like a way protein supplement, or just a little protein base supplement. That discussion is segmented in time, stamped in the episode idea.

With them, you can find a huberman lab dot com. He actually pointed to some interesting data on potato protein as, perhaps being a great plant, they substitute for those that don't want to take way base protein. But the fact that way back proteins can be very useful for getting two and above a protein threshold for all sorts of reasons, not just for muscle building, although it's great for that, but for other purposes as well.

And that's but one category of food based or food mimic type supplements. There are, for instance, branch camino assets. There are, for instance, Green tea supplements. There is a huge landscape of this for too much risk to get into and any kind of reasonable detail, but I do not acknowledge that those all exist.

The key thing to understand is that while they can serve a great role in providing replacement for meals that you perhaps quantity consumed otherwise, and while they often are very convenient because you can drink, is supposed to eat your calories, I think that most people would agree that getting some significant fraction of action from whole foods is going to be useful for a variety of reasons. In particularly the fiber that comes along with IT, the bulk of the food that tends to make us feel sated. And of course, the fact that a lot of vitamins and minerals and other things that are contained within foods as well as essential fatty assets in foods like animal based proteins are not going to be present in most, if not all, of those kind of food mimic type powders and replacements for food.

Another point is this question about age related effects. So for instance, should kids be taking supplements? Well, I mentioned earlier, there is some evidence that making sure that kids are getting enough of mega fatty acids can be beneficial.

They certainly could get those from food by sources. Just look up online food by sources of mega three fat assets and E P S, and you'll see list there. Some people choose to supplement on top of that um in particular in kids that are developing very quickly regardless of whether or not they're consuming enough E P S.

From food. Some parents choose to supplement on top of that. I am personally not a an of children taking military in for the reason that melatonin is already chronically elevated in kids and there is a growing body of literature that meitav supplementation in kids can be potentially harmful.

I don't want to create alarm among those have always been taking IT or giving in to their kids or that gave IT to their kids in the past. But I do think that melatonin and particularly should be approached with a lot of caution, especially for kids. And then of course, there's the issue whether not all these other supplements that we've discussed, whether or not kids can take them safely. And again, it's highly individual.

I would say that for the supplements that relate to hormone augmentation and support, unless your physician aboard certified md specifically recommends them, I would strongly suggest avoiding intake of those things until at least after puberty and probably into the late teens and early twenty years, because the body and brain are still developing and hormone systems are still active even though puberty may happen between ages eleven and fourteen or even fifteen. Property can be a long lasting event with a long taper and tail on IT. So you want to be cautious about augmenting hormones um in Young people through the use of supplementation unless a physician is working very closely with you or rather you with them.

And then in ages of say, twenty two years old, twenty four and older, I don't see any reason why people who are in their fifties or sixties would have any different protocols than people in their thirties and forties. Except perhaps in the domain of cognitive enhancement, where IT might make sense again, might provided IT can be done safely and with the consult of a IT, might be beneficial for people who are approaching their later years to consider increasing dosages or the variety of things. And approaches that they take for cognitive enhancement because actually, cognitive decline is a reality.

There is no person that escapes that. The question is whether not the slope of that decline is very, deeply, very shallow. And of course, this is an opportunity for me to raise the point that I made much earlier and that i'll make over and over again, because IT really is the most important point to today's discussion, which is that behaviors both exercise, sleep, making sure that your relationship to light, getting sufficient sunlight early in the day and throughout the day, if you can, and limiting your viewing a bright artificial light in the late evening, and especially between the hours of ten pm and four A M, things of that sort, all the dos.

And don't. And of course, cardy vascular exercising resistance training exercises may be been flexibility training series topics we've covered extensively on this podcast and for which we will soon have a special serious airing with doctor and he galpin that gets into a lot of detail and protocol development that you can all employ. All of that needs to be done at every age, certainly past puberty, in order to maximize cognitive function, in order to maximize cardiovascular function, in order to maximize focus in every aspect that we really all stand to and want to enhance when we think about supplementation.

So again, get your sleep right. Do that by getting your relationship to light, write, get your exercise right, quality social connection right. And then, of course, is that landscape of nutrition that we talked about extensively earlier and for which we have other episodes that really dive deep, including that episode, or I would should say in particular, that episode without in norn, where we really took a full survey of the landscape of nutrition, everything from protein needs, vitamins, minerals, fibre, microbial.

It's a deep, deep discussion with a lot of action will take away if you are curious about nutrition, and in particular, you a vegan or vegetarian or carnival base but even further more common on awards such as myself. I found that to be an incredible learning journey. Thanks to dr.

Or lin norton just so much um useful knowledge in that episode. If you want to learn more about nutrition, the behavioral tools, the nutritional tools, are really going to serve as the primary two layers upon which your supplementation protocols are going to rest. And again, I want to emphasize that your supplementation protocol may be zero supplements.

IT could include no supplements, what's ever and that would be perfectly fine, provided that you're sleeping as well as you want to in need to. You're able to focus on work as well as you want to to need to. You're able to perform physically as well as you want to.

I need to. And you feel that your hormones and related functions are where you want them. However, for most people who are doing most everything right, they want to explore how they can make things like their sleep, their focus, their hormone function even Better.

And that's where supplementation makes a lot of sense. And when to say makes a lot of sense, I mean, IT makes a lot of sense to explore in a rational and regimented way. There are couple of big themes that we talked about a few times during today's podcast that i'd like to read now because they are so crucial to developing a rational supplementation protocol.

The most important of which is, unless we're talking about foundational nutritional support, that is, coverage of various digestive enzymes, probiotics, S E biodyl and adaptations s we should really be focusing on single ingredient formulations, foundational supplements that include all those things I just listed off, all combined in one supplement, are fine. I simply don't see any other practical, a reasonable way to get each and every one of those things through single ingredient formulations. However, when you want to start thinking about and actually practically expLoring, like supplementation for sleep or hormone on health or cognitive function, the single ingredient formulations are going to give you the most power and control.

They're going to make sure that you can find the minimal effective doses, that you can rule out things that are not effective for you or that may be detrimental for you in whatever fashion. And it's not just about cost effectiveness, is also about arriving at small kits or cocktails of supplements that you can really manage and work with that you're not dependent on, but that you really feel can argument the various aspects of your health that are important to you. So that's really what today's episode is about.

Even though we had cover your specific supplements and their functions in these different domains of mental and physical health and performance, today's episode a was really geared toward giving you resources and a framework to think about how to approach supplementation, had to navigate sticking points and painting inks and supplementation, how to get the most out of your supplementation region without spending an excessive amount of money. And if you don't have finances to allow for a lot of exploration of supplements, how to narrow in on the most effective, supplement the most quickly and derive all the benefits that you can from them. And as a final point, that is redundant with a few of the things we talked about today, but then I don't think I ever really explicit stated, is that while the word's supplement makes you sound like these compounds or something, just to add on top of or compensate for deficiencies in nutrition or other areas of your life, many of them are actually quite potent compounds.

These are potent non prescription molecules that really can move the needle in terms of your ability to think more clearly, sleep Better, support your home home function. But as always, they are just one element with an an ecosystem of other factors, such as your behaviors, which includes those and donors, such as your nutrition, maybe even such as prescription drugs that you also might happen to be taking or hoping to be taking less of or removing completely. Again, that has to be done in discussion with physicians if you're going to do IT at all.

But the real point here is that what we call supplements are actually a powerful gear within a larger system aimed at each and every one of us, customizing tools for a mental physical health and performance. If you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe our youtube channel. That's a terrific zero cost way to support us.

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During today's podcast and on many previous episode to the huberman and lab podcast, we discuss supplements again, while supplements are not necessary for everybody, many people can derbe tremendous benefit from them. We have partner with momentous supplements because momentous supplements are of extremely high quality. They have single ingredient formulations, and they ship internationally because we know many of you resided outside of the united states.

If you d like to learn more about the supplements discussed on the huberman lab podcast, please go to live momentous build O U S. So that's live momentous dot com slash huberman. If you're not already following us on social media, we are huberman lab on instagram, twitter or facebook and linton and in particular on instagram, I cover science and science related tools, some of which overlap with the content of the huberman lab podcast, much of which is distinct, however, from the contents in the huberman lab pockets.

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You can just download the pd efforts, view them on your computer or phone screen. So thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion all about supplementation and more importantly, how to develop a rational and especially effective supplementation protocol for you. And last but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.