Your multivitamin sucks

and they're not telling you about the secret nutrients

Dear Reader,

Did you know that I won $150 in bodybuilding.com store credits as a teenager? It’s true — I won two weekly writing competitions.

I’ve been around the supplement/vitamin scene. All around. Have spent tens of thousands of dollars.

It’s nearly all snake oil. I can’t tell you how many flavors-of-the-year I’ve seen burst onto the scene then fade away.

The one theme I keep coming back to is simply giving my body the building blocks that it needs. One could theoretically accomplish this by taking high-quality nutrients at conservative dosages, but in practice it’s quite challenging because most multivitamins are dogshit.

In fact, any of the following ingredients completely ruins a multivitamin:

• Cheap B vitamins — even just one cheap B vitamin and it’s over, you’re getting scammed by cheapos

• Horrible ratios, particularly with regard to B vitamins

• Cheap mineral forms (oxides, etc)

• Cheap vitamin E ends up smothering your absorption of the other forms (there are actually 8 forms of vitamin E)

The process of elimination leaves very few options, frankly. I’ve looked at hundreds of multivitamins and there’s almost always at least one hard dealbreaker.

I take Designs for Health Primal Multi at a half dose. (The other multi I’m comfortable with is Thorne Basic Nutrients 2/day, which I would also take at a half dose. I think it’s a decent idea to alternate them, too.)

The following might also be reasonably considered as “secret nutrients”:

If you’re considering putting together a supplement regimen in the spirit of my “buildings blocks” approach, you might also want to consider some of the options below. For most of the below I generally recommend skipping / alternating days or taking cyclical breaks — you don’t want to overdo a good thing and turn it into a bad thing:

• Creatine — has been gaining adoption lately for neuroprotective benefits. I’ve noticed that it has improved my sleep quality

• Astaxanthin/carotenoids — for eye and skin health. Promising research and anecdotes for astaxanthin in particular

• Silica — for skin health (there are liquid options you can just spritz in your water)

• Tocotrienols (vitamin E) — as I touched on above, there are 8 forms of vitamin E and my understanding is that recent research has highlighted the 4 tocotrienols (note that the Primal multi already has tocotrienols, while Thorne has tocopherols.)

• Vitamin K2 — for bone/circulatory health (the multivitamins above already have some). Science has only recently caught up on how important K2 is

• Taurine — I find super interesting because it’s an amino acid that cats can’t synthesize without severe health consequences. Humans can synthesize it but not super well. It’s the kind of thing that just makes you wonder if a lot of people have chronic mild taurine deficiency. Cheap insurance

• Lactoferrin — transports iron around to where it’s actually needed, which is theoretically pretty important since stray iron is harmful to your body and feeds viruses. I expect promising research to continue to stack up