When Taking Vitamins Is a Waste of Money

All right. Next question is from Zelen Castiot, is vitamin supplementation necessary if you eat a balanced diet? Okay. This reminds me of one of the best sales pitches I ever was taught when it came to selling supplements. The multivitamins? Yes. And it was great because it totally sounded like it made sense. So what they used to teach us back in the day when I was managing gyms and all that stuff, and they were trying to get us to sell more vitamins, is they'd say, you could have the perfect diet, but because you're eating low calorie, lose weight, there's only so many nutrients you can get with that. But you still have micronutrient requirements, which are higher. This is why everybody should be on a multivitamin. And it made so much sense to me. I'm like, yeah, 1,500 calories is necessary, but you need 2,500 calories worth of nutrients. Here's why that's not necessarily true. So a multivitamin is like a nuke. It's like everything, right? When it comes to nutrients, if you really want benefits, it's got to be specific to you. Because if I take a multivitamin that's got everything, maybe my zinc is optimal. And now I'm going high in zinc, which affects my copper and other things in my body. Or maybe my vitamin D is low and my multivitamin doesn't have enough vitamin D to support that for me. So if you really want to know what's ideal for you, I don't care what your diet is, get your nutrient levels tested and then supplement specifically for your body. That would be my advice. No, I think that's the answer. Because what does a balanced diet even mean? What does that mean to somebody? Does it mean you have an even amount of protein, carbs, and fats? You could do that and still be missing some serious nutrients, if you're not diversifying with color in your diet, what types of meat, where you're getting all of your protein from. So even having a balanced diet, you could easily miss out on some micronutrients that you don't realize. The best answer is exactly what you said. And instead of just throwing the whole kitchen sink, which is like a multivitamin. Find out what you're deficient in. And then, of course, and I've shared this before, right? Like with the omega-3s, for example. My kind of personal goal is I try and get three servings or so a week of fish. And if I don't, then I have my omega-3s there to supplement it. So I think once you kind of figure out where your levels are, where you lack or you don't lack, and then you are aware of what your normal diet looks like and your tendencies, and then what foods produce those nutrients, then you can go, oh, wow, this week I haven't had X, Y, and Z, and those are rich in X, Y, and Z nutrients, so I'm going to supplement that. Or hey, this week I was great. I hit all those things. So lay off and save the supplements. Yeah. And it even gets more complex sometimes because you could be, your lifestyle could cause you or your body to be deficient in certain nutrients based off of, let's say, stress or lack of sleep, or your body doesn't, maybe your body doesn't synthesize cholesterol into vitamin D very well, so you supplement with vitamin D, but you don't see the numbers go up very much, so you need to take more than the average person. Are you even absorbing it properly? Yeah, that's another one. Gut health. Because you're swallowing it too. It's like a lot of times too, like having, was it fat soluble, and having that added in to be able to shut all those nutrients is a whole part of the process as well. People don't consume it. Yeah. And then one last thing, like vitamins and minerals are not innocuous, okay? Some of them, yes, are water soluble, so whatever your body doesn't use, you get rid of, you know, relatively good. But some of them get stored, minerals and fat soluble vitamins. So you can cause problems and trouble for yourself. Okay, so you guys remember in the 90s how there was this huge push to have women take calcium, right? Because of osteoporosis on the rise. And they said, oh, you know, bones need calcium, so let's supplement, let's make everybody supplement with calcium. And of course, that's an issue that's stupid because if you don't have the signal to build bone, you can take all the calcium you want, it's not going to do anything, plus you need vitamin D and other stuff. So anyway, they did this general, like, calcium, you know, take this for bone. And then you had all these people developing calcium deposits in their arteries, and there's issues with taking too much calcium because it was just this broad brush stroke when, if you don't know what you need, you don't just take everything. So that's, and by the way, if you have a deficiency and you take a vitamin or mineral to fill it, and it works, life-changing. So I do want to say that as well. Sure. It can make a tremendous difference. Hey, if you enjoyed that clip, you can find the full episode here, or you can find other clips over here. And be sure to subscribe.