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Supplementation Mistakes You Are Making
96 Plays1 year ago
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Transcript
Introduction and Common Mistakes
00:00:01
chrisyzen
Hey, it's Christian Jordonov. Today, I want to talk a little bit about some of my observations around when I start working with new clients, what mistakes they're making in terms of their supplement program and routine. And these mistakes are maybe something you're you're um you know making at the moment, not that it's the end of the world or it's bad. It's just clearly a lot of my clients are, you know, high achieving, high performing, successful people that are very busy and they're doing well in many areas of life. But this is the kind of thing that you just have to put in a lot of time to research and they don't have the time to research it as much as I have had, you know, like 10 at this point, tens of thousands of
Importance of Informed Supplementation
00:00:49
chrisyzen
hours, this kind of stuff. right And this is my favorite topic. So
00:00:52
chrisyzen
You can bet. I mean, just on iHerb alone, God knows how many hundreds of hours I've spent on just on iHerb dot.com looking at supplementing ingredients and brands and excipients and fillers and even reading reviews as terrible as the reviews are because iHerb gives everyone a buck for every review they do. So it's just a reviews or a shit show. But so here are some of my observations that you you can perhaps learn from. Right. So the first thing um Not all, but some of my clients, quite a few clients, especially recently that I started working with, they're taking a ton of stuff like 25, 30, literally 25, 30 supplements or even more. And the issue with that is when I start asking questions, why why is this one in there? Why is that one in there?
00:01:46
chrisyzen
Um, there's no real, there's no real rhyme or reason. So I actually, I take quite a lot of supplements, but if you ask me for absolutely every single one of those supplements, like in my kitchen, I have maybe, I don't know, four, four dozen, five dozen product, every single one of those that you ask me, why would you take that? When would you take that with food, without food, empty stomach, all that stuff. I will tell you the exact rationale behind why it's there, right?
00:02:16
chrisyzen
And with a lot of my clients, it seems like, okay, they they heard a guy on the podcast that they like, he had this concoction of things. And this other thing had this special delivery system. And, uh, you know, we kind of, we all fall prey to the marketing and the hype, right? And the thing with with supplementation, you are better off, you know, using 12 or a dozen or so supplements that are super targeted, that are powerful.
00:02:46
chrisyzen
Then, you know, 20 different products with like random ingredients and stuff like that, which brings me to the next point. So a lot of clients that are kind of.
Challenges with Supplement Effects
00:02:55
chrisyzen
using the shotgun approach, they often buy supplements that will have like six, eight, a dozen different products or ingredients. And I'm just oh um'm like, that's that's a mistake. it's That's kind of like the Warren Buffett analogy. You only need to diversify if you don't know what you're doing. So if you have, let's say, a thing with like 12 herbs or eight herbs in it, first of all, are you taking enough
00:03:23
chrisyzen
of that each ingredient to actually make a dent, metabolically speaking, to actually have a you know quote unquote effect. Could you, especially the folks that have health issues, like especially digestive related stuff, if there's intestinal permeability and inflammation and immune system dysregulation, could some of those things be triggering your immune system?
00:03:45
chrisyzen
Could you maybe be getting benefits from some, but maybe a detriment from others? It's really very hard to know. So if you take a supplement like that and you feel better, what was it that made you feel better, right? Was it the ginseng? Was it the amla or the, got you know, all these other, all these sort of weird and wonderful things. i so ah So that's one thing. And then a lot of these products, they will have tiny amounts of the actual things that that that are truly valuable, right?
00:04:14
chrisyzen
Let's say there'll be an amino acid like glycine or amino or taurine, but there will be only like 100 milligrams or 300 milligrams, which are preposterous doses. like The doses for for glycine would be at least 10 times higher than 300 milligrams, you know ah if not more. so you're much better and These products are not cheap because you know they they're a little bit overhyped. The marketing is great. The websites are great.
00:04:42
chrisyzen
the you know the videos, the productions. I'm sure there's sourcing quality ingredients, but that cost, for let's let's say if a product costs like $60 with 12 ingredients, you could get literally like a kilogram of, let's say, one amino acid.
00:05:01
chrisyzen
and then maybe like two half kilogram batches of pure other like products right powder form and those could last two months right so some could last you half a year or three months so not only will you be ah able to get like a proper dose of the thing a proper serving size that will make a dense metabolic speaking but you're gonna ah you know have a ah bigger batch of it it could be more pure and Maybe the same the purity thing is done not so important um so that's That's what I would say about the products with the many ingredients. I often just take my clients off of them at least for a while So we can start working with like a little bit of a baseline, right?
00:05:45
chrisyzen
And then after a while, if something doesn't have like weird crap in it, like resveratrol or some weird estrogenic garbage or like some straight up poison, like, um, so far vein or some other nonsense like that, that's overhyped.
Effective Use of Herbs and Nutrients
00:06:02
chrisyzen
Um, if, if the product is somewhat benign, I just tell them, look, you can, you can work with that one if if you want, but let's just, let's do my thing for a while, see how you feel. And people, people generally,
00:06:14
chrisyzen
they if they Obviously, if they become clients, they trust what I am going to recommend. So they do that. And lo and behold, they start improving and then those things kind of, you know, whatever. the And the thing about those things, I just took ah tell people, a lot of these herbs, like the adaptogens, for example, right? Or the hermetic ones that are supposed to give you a hermetic effect, right?
00:06:36
chrisyzen
ah They're not meant to be taken daily and a lot of clients another mistake They make is they just take something like four years like one product 2030 ingredients maybe even and they just keep taking that over and over and that's the thing it's with with these herbs you may you may be getting a benefit, but it's they're supposed to be cycled on and off right whereas the stuff I Use a lot of the stuff is quote-unquote bioidentical, right? So the body either produces it not sufficient quantities or it's an endogenous molecule So things like that and these are the most powerful things at the end of day You know a sick person or someone with health issues. They're often not deficient in
00:07:19
chrisyzen
blueberry anthocyanins or whatever the hell nonsense or curcumin. They're not deficient in that. They're often deficient in vitamins, minerals, perhaps not getting enough of the amino acids needed to make the antioxidant enzymes that then help them get rid of some of the toxicity. right Because a lot of people think, oh, you know broccoli extract, that stimulates my detox systems. yeah Yeah, it stimulates it, but you're under enough toxic burden that your detoxification system is already plenty stimulated. excuse me So you don't need to stimulate it further, you need to support it with with things that the body recognizes and uses constantly.
00:08:04
chrisyzen
right and they're not gonna be you know weird herbs so this thing with taking tons of herbs really kind of I I use herbs look at I absolutely use herbs in my work with clients but they're very targeted and strategic as opposed to, oh, well, let me take some adaptogens to see how I feel. Or, you know, I heard this lowers inflammation, so let me take that, right? Which actually is ah is probably a better bitter sort of rationale, of course.
00:08:36
chrisyzen
Um, so the, the, other the tons of herbs with no real rhyme or reason, that that's a big mistake people are making and they're wasting a lot of money. And the thing is some of these herbs, they, first of all, a lot of herbs do have estrogenic ah properties, right? But there's so much going on in them. So you you could have compounds that are beneficial, but you could have compounds that Cancer the effect or kind of her like lower androgens or a estrogenic. So there's so little we know about the the the Various phytochemicals in these herbs. So we it's really difficult to ascertain what the effect will be in a person whereas You know amino acids and kind of vitamins minerals things like that these things are you know, we produce them. So if you give it to the body, it is likely going to say, oh, great, I can partition this somewhere. You don't know where it's going to go. you You can kind of guess and you know make educated guesses about it. But the body knows the exact best place to use that. Right. Whereas, and actually just to add to that point, the thing what we're doing with herbs in many cases is, for example, let's say you drink lemon balm.
00:09:48
chrisyzen
or chamomile or kava kava or there's a few other ones that are known to stimulate or to activate or interact in some way shape or form with the GABA A receptor so that has anxiolytic sedating relaxing calming properties okay which is great, but the way I'm thinking it, what else, what other properties do these things have? What are their long-term effects? We don't know. So my personal strategy,
00:10:24
chrisyzen
is there endogenous things or um ah bioidentical things to the body that already do that. So why are we using a foreign compound when a more ah something that the body recognizes as let's say a vitamin again a mineral amino acid, why don't we use that as a first port of call? That's kind of what, over the years, the reason, that's why I kind of have strayed further and further away from the herbs. I used to, I used ah ah tested so many different things.
00:11:04
chrisyzen
you know, the macro roots and all the things that they're supposed to raise your like your um libido and your testosterone from the Jesus Christ, what was those things? um So all the adaptogens, the Jin Zangs, the Siberian, and I mean, like we went through all of that stuff, right? And the more we were using those, the more i sort of started going back to basics, the more benefits and the more predictability I had with with the the tools that I use right now, because no ah one herb, let's say, um Tim, what was the one? Tribulus, terrestris, right? Some people, it can raise their quote-unquote you know libido, testosterone, whatever, but in others it can lower it. And the thing is, with the herbs, if it's extract, if it's an extract and it's extracted in water, it can have certain properties. If it's alcohol extracted, it can have other properties. So there's a
Tailoring Supplement Strategies
00:11:59
chrisyzen
lot of
00:11:59
chrisyzen
and Unpredictability so you don't with a client you don't really know is this gonna do them good like ah you know I've heard some people taking um turmeric or curcumin and that lowers their libido you know like they feel it and ah So how some people feel amazing after it right and it does them good, but for how long so with this unpredictability is one of the reasons I kind of moved away from the herbs again I use herbs but there's very targeted properties that we leverage of herbs for specific purposes okay so that's another mistake I'm seeing people make and then
00:12:37
chrisyzen
um Also, taking a ton of fancy stuff or buying all these like liposomal glutathione and very basic and very sort of elaborate sounding things like matrix delivery system nanotechnology, ah this liposomal stuff,
00:12:54
chrisyzen
The delivery system, all of these things. I mean, look, I'm sure some of the stuff is um is good and I haven't tried at all. The biggest reason I haven't tried a lot of products is because dealing with customs here, ordering stuff from the USA has been just a nightmare from from the the the you know since I came to Portugal in 2018.
00:13:16
chrisyzen
So I just I just use companies that where you pay the customs tax Stuff while you order so it just bypasses the whole process with the you know, the administration So that's a big reason why I haven't tried some of these newer fancier stuff But when I when I look at these kind of hyped products when I look at the ingredient list sometimes again It's like a five six herb combination And perhaps it was the first and the second ingredient that you can get very cheaply online, let's say.
00:13:46
chrisyzen
aloe vera, for example, or whatever, mastic gum, you can get that um online cheaply a clean good product, a single ingredient. So without the the brand label, without the sort of the hype in the marketing, you could get that maybe for a quarter of the price and inside that supplement with the six different things, that could be like the major thing actually moving the needle when you take that supplement, or you could get the first two for half the price and you have maybe like a three month supply instead of a one month supply.
00:14:15
chrisyzen
so this is where ah I think a lot of when they tell you, oh, this has this property and this these four products do that, that fifth product does that, the the more products, the less quantity, then therefore the less possible effect, right? Now, caveat is every product is different. That's why I tell my clients, look, if you want to try a supplement,
00:14:37
chrisyzen
just send it to me, let me look it over. And you know' I'll let you know, like a client of mine last year, she sent me this thing, it's like a dropper, you drop it on your tongue and it had these all these amazing things. Then I looked like one ah ah serving size, were however many drops, you're getting like microgram quantities of like those B vitamins and the glutathione. So like these micrograms, you don't like these ah B vitamins there,
00:15:05
chrisyzen
The RDA alone are like in the milligram quantities for most of them. ah the The glutathione comes in like 250 milligrams, 500 milligrams sort of ah serving sizes. so what do you What do you think you're getting out of a thing that you get a few drops with micrograms? so I told her, don't even don't even think about buying this thing.
00:15:26
chrisyzen
you know um But and she could bought some other stuff from the company I thought I told her look you might as well some of these companies offer Money back say just look I want my money back for this or send it back and better off spending it elsewhere So a big thing I do with my clients at the beginning of the program is I overhaul their current stack Because sometimes things cancel each other out, you know as well um So we overhaul the stack we remove some things that I just tell them don't ever take this again If you trust me, right? So of course always up to yourself um And some things I tell them pause this pause these you can cycle these on and off, but let's take a break Let's do my thing for a while. See how you feel and then you can always cycle this in and out Let's say the more adaptogenic stuff or the whatever if you if you like your cocumens or turmeric whatever
00:16:18
chrisyzen
And I just generally, I tell them, you know, all this fancy nano nice, particle size, delivery matrix, patent pending technology with liposomal, unicorns and rainbows, fairy dust, kajigger. Great, use it, finish your product, but I wouldn't spend, you know, $100 or whatever, $80 on a month supply.
00:16:46
chrisyzen
again, on that specific product that can give you better stuff for the purposes that that thing was you know marketed for. right And then the other kind of similar to this is ah lot sometimes folks who have a lot of these fancy things, expensive things, very advanced technology matrix delivery system,
00:17:08
chrisyzen
But then they're not taking very, very, very, very basic stuff, very extremely basic stuff, right? Like, for example, vitamin D, ah or calcium, if and they're not eating any dairy, for example, you know?
Foundational vs. Advanced Supplements
00:17:23
chrisyzen
um Or, you know, like some folks are not, like they're having fatigue and energy issues and they're, There's some practitioner told them you know the the tongue cat alley and then the you know the ah Whatever herbs the adaptogens will give you energy You know the gene sings and your ashwagandha will calm you down and stuff But they're not even taking like a B vitamin to support energy production so a lot of not a lot but sometimes quite a few expensive products and
00:17:55
chrisyzen
with questionable benefits potentially and not and basic stuff not covered. So this is what I i always kind of like to get folks ah when we analyze what they're doing and the rationale behind it. we like I'd like to remove anything that could be potentially causing immune activation or or just be just being there for the sake of it without any actual benefit that we could even kind of ascribe to the thing is there is there even research backing like amla for example i'm sure there is or it's a various sort of fruit extracts and stuff like that i i don't know i haven't looked into absolutely everything but then we just get to basics right the basic things that the body needs and what does the body need
00:18:39
chrisyzen
At the end of the day, it needs amino acids, it needs, obviously it needs energy, so glucose it needs, and it needs fats, right? Healthy fats, you could say, even though we can make our own fats. Eating, anyone that's done a low-fat diet knows that low-fat diet will wreck your hormones, right?
00:19:02
chrisyzen
So the body needs amino acids, fats, it needs vitamins, it needs minerals, right? So in there already, there's a lot of scope to improve a person's health, even even if they have a very debilitating issue, because these things are very powerful in their own right. Like the amino acids, probably that'll be my favorite aspect of it always the amino acids right they can we can achieve a lot of very powerful effects with them right so once we do that once we kind of have the basics then we can do a lot more advanced stuff and actually I have very advanced stuff that we can do but again what is the point what is the point of doing this advanced stuff right if you're not even
00:19:54
chrisyzen
doing the very basics it's like it's like you know you have a mad spoiler on your on your super car and you know it's aerodynamic sort of side thingies and you know just all of this I don't even know what you how you would soup up a car to make it more aerodynamic and performing better But then it doesn't have, like, tires. The wheels don't have tires. You know, just very basic stuff. You know, you don't have freaking, like, your or your engine is missing. stuff It's like, okay, terrible analogy. No, I'm not very good with the analogies, but it's like we're working on the bells and whistles doesn't make any sense until we do very, very basic things. And this is where I find a lot of folks that have just had not had
00:20:40
chrisyzen
the luxury and the privilege to research this stuff for years and years and thousands and ah of hours and then experiment and then see also clinically what actually helps people get better. and I'll tell you right now, like I said, the herbs have very specific purposes where we can utilize them, but the herbs ain't making nobody better.
00:21:04
chrisyzen
They ain't making nobody better. They can provide benefits Short-term things whatever I'm not again. I'm not saying the herbs are if you like ashwagandha take ashwagandha, right? So we take we used to take ashwagandha Near bedtime and it does it does work, but it's another one of those things You cannot rely on that long term, right? And I have much better ways to get the effects of ashwagandha without but the potential downsides, without all the other kind of, um you know, risks associated with taking something that has, you know, God knows hundreds of different chemicals in it, right?
Predictable Nutrient Effects
00:21:46
chrisyzen
So using very specific targeted things,
00:21:49
chrisyzen
we can achieve those effects much more predictably and not just in one person like it's good to because some of these things will with the herbs it can also vary how it will affect you like like if you take it for a month or two months or three months um so it will that that is much more prone to changing than let's say a specific vitamin mineral or amino acid or these these kind of sort of more again ah um molecules that the body recognizes and some of them it can even produce on its own right that's kind of the the the main thing I want to leave you with is we can get much more
00:22:31
chrisyzen
predictable ah effects in a much wider population so this is kind of the where I would probably end these kind of basic mistakes that I see a lot of clients making and but here you know here is where this sort of individuality aspect comes in. So once we have dialed in this basic stuff, once with the the person is you know sleeping properly, their mood, their cognition, ah their digestion, their immune system, everything is kind of operating much better. At that point, this is where I tell people, look, if you want to experiment with something else, absolutely do that. Like certain herbs, may for some people, they just,
00:23:17
chrisyzen
you know They just do well with them, right? So at that point, you can do a lot of different stuff. I personally, i've Now it's it's been um sort of, um I don't know, ah when i when I recommend supplements from my herb clients, they get my 5% discount code, right? So when clients buy supplements, I get a few bucks here and there. And so it's been kind of like something I i invest in trying new things. So I'm constantly trying new things on myself.
00:23:48
chrisyzen
because over time that allows me to expand my repertoire of things I can recommend to my clients but I can't just really nearly recommend stuff that I've not tried on myself and then experimented on my wife with and then you know and then on my clients just kidding of course I i stopped doing that a while ago after after making a lot of dumb moves and that's how you learn that's how you learn so ah this is this is something I actually invest a lot of time, money and effort and research in so that my clients don't have to. So they don't have to make all these blunders and mistakes that I made along the way. right So that's kind of that's kind of a little overview of some basic things I'm seeing. Of course, I didn't i didn't like sit down and meditate and think of all the different ways people make mistakes, but these would be these would be the most basic
Common Missteps and Marketing Influence
00:24:41
chrisyzen
ones. the other I suppose the other one is when ah there's a different sort of
00:24:45
chrisyzen
Segment of of clients is where they're a little bit less self-conscious less health conscious I should say at the outset right so they're a little bit more naive to these things so they're they're the ones that they either fall for like a marketing sort of the nano technology delivery system matrix or they might just sort of gravitate towards very sort of basic generic stuff, you know, like, oh, vitamin C, you know, ascorbic acid, or, you know, just kind of, again, multivitamin, something generic from the, you know, the convenience store. So that's another mistake people make where they get a lot of, not just crap in terms of excipients and whatever, but just poor quality forms
00:25:31
chrisyzen
of the vitamin so yeah so that would be another one so this this would be for the less sort of down the rabbit hole type client right there is there there are those that they they see magnesium magnesium good and you know let me buy this not knowing that there's certain magnesiums that are better than better than others a certain forms of calcium you know certain combinations of ingredients probably are not very good you know for example ah you know you just off the top of my head you know you may know that um they might not know rather I should say that cyanocobalamin
00:26:10
chrisyzen
and ah folic acid are inferior, at least allegedly, are inferior forms of the the ah folate and the B12, right? So they might um get something that says it has vitamin E in it but it's a synthetic form like a DL um alpha tocopherol acetate, right? So it's not an actual full spectrum extracted vitamin E, right? Stuff like that. So those folks do make those mistakes, but those are much easier to kind of correct because you just tell them, you just take these these supplements here and you'll be fine. With some of my other clients, they're a little bit, so they've been down this this health journey rabbit hole for quite a bit and
00:26:58
chrisyzen
They're a little bit, in some cases, a little bit more invested in that specific product or that that influencer or that vendor that that sold on the product. So it's a little bit harder to get them to detach from it.
00:27:14
chrisyzen
Right um But it is possible And we do get there um But yeah, so I think I think I went there don't want to get too ranty Hope you got a little bit of value out of this. Maybe you're making some of these mistakes and maybe you can um correct course correct by my my sort of and mo modus operandi, I guess is Are we doing the basics right?
Fundamental Nutrient Importance
00:27:44
chrisyzen
right so if you're not For example, if you're not taking magnesium
00:27:48
chrisyzen
you know, should you should you be taking like liposomal, nanonized glutathione that you know, you snort up your up your nostril or some some other delivery system, you know. i I don't know. I don't know. Like if you're not taking a basic thing that is required for just basic life sustaining processes. I'm not sure. I'm sure it can have benefit.
00:28:12
chrisyzen
But should you be doing that if you're not doing the basics, right? It's like, it's like, you know, if you have a kid and your kid can't doesn't know the alphabet and then you're trying to teach the kids to read or to write, you know, so we have to really. And this is what this is the way I see it. You know, the vitamins, minerals and amino acids, that's that's the letters of the alphabet. And then with that, the body makes words which are like proteins, enzymes, whatever, and with the words, it can make sentences, ah it can make pages, like a page could be a cell, and then you know that that could be a book, the book is the organ, and then you you're like a library of different sort of things. and But it's all it's all built with the letters, the amino acids, the vitamins, the fatty acids, the minerals. So we if we're not providing an adequate amount of those,
00:29:10
chrisyzen
And we haven't covered any bases where we might be quite lacking in. um Adding fancier stuff is a little bit like putting the cart before the horse. So that's what I ah kind of wanted to relate to you with this episode. And I hope it makes sense. And yeah, thanks for listening or watching. And I'll see you on the next one.