The Case for Supplements
As I set out this week on the Wednesday morning hike I take with my husband, I realized I’d forgotten to put on my elastic knee supports. We were hiking a steep uneven trail at 7am when it was foggy and damp. I worried about making it to the top with my achy knees but was pleasantly surprised to have no pain at all.
We can never know exactly what causes any ailment, or what specifically cures a symptom, as it’s a myriad of little things in combination that affect our wonderous bodies. But perhaps my happy knees are due to me recently re-starting a turmeric tincture I had stopped taking over a year ago due to tighter finances causing a cost-cutting exercise.
A daily supplement routine can often be dismissed as an expensive luxury or a fad of the professional athlete or fitness guru. But one of the biggest culprits in ill-health is nutrient deficiencies: an element of your body fails as it is missing a key ingredient it was designed to run on.
Symptoms may be your body compensating for the deficiency, and working around its optimum operation to keep you functioning.
A pharmaceutical may be credited with “curing” an ailment but is more accurately masking a symptom. This drives the body to further compensate which leads to unintended consequences we call side-effects, and can result in further ill-health. When you give your body more of what it needs – wholesome food, adequate sleep, movement, hydration – it will heal naturally and improve its overall function.
Extra nutrients can jump-start the healing process and provide ongoing protection against our modern world of toxins, stress and food grown in nutrient-depleted soils.
One Size Doesn’t Fit All
We all have different nutrient requirements – whether it’s our stage of life, the demands we place on our body each day, or the health conditions we are susceptible to or already dealing with.
The Recommended Daily Allowance (RDA) or Daily Value (DV) requirements now quoted in the US for individual nutrients, is an oversimplification of our needs.
It’s worth noting a bit of the history of how RDAs were developed decades ago, before we understood the interaction of different nutrients and how factors like the health of our microbiome, age, weight, and lifestyle greatly affect our nutrient uptake, absorption and utilization. The focus was to prevent the occurrence of specific diseases like scurvy, beri beri, pellagra and rickets (respectively long-term deficiencies in vitamin C, B1, B3: niacin, and vitamin D for calcium absorption). They weren’t (and aren’t) focused on optimal health.
The Food and Drug Administration(FDA) took over the ownership of DV levels to help consumers determine the level of various nutrients in a standard serving of food compared to their approximate requirement for it. You are likely to find the percentage of DV quoted on supplement bottles. But your personal needs may be far higher.
Blood tests can be a useful indication if you are deficient. However, the “normal” ranges quoted for nutrient tests are usually far too low, given that the vast majority of the population is deficient, and therefore so is any sample taken to set the ranges. A deficiency in certain nutrients may not immediately present with symptoms so the sample population may be considered healthy subjects but in fact, their nutrient levels are not optimal.
Consumer Protection
One argument against supplements is their apparent lack of regulation compared to pharmaceutical monitoring by the FDA.
As a comparison – pharmaceutical drug trials only need to prove the benefits outweigh the risks accepting known side-effects (like incontinence, uncontrollable movement, muscle pain, nutrient depletion . . .) as just part of the package. If it alleviates the stated symptom better than a placebo it gets approved. They don’t have to measure the drug’s effectiveness against older drugs with fewer side-effects for example, only an inert placebo.
For dietary supplements there has to be zero risk of adverse effects. In the US, the FDA needs to be notified in advance of any new supplement being sold on the open market. They don’t have to formally approve it, but if it is found to cause problems in the future, they have the power to take it off the market. Plus, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) must regulate the claims made by the product. They will step in with fines and even jail time if a product has been found to make false claims.
This doesn’t mean you can go into your local grocery store and grab any bottle of a given supplement and it will help you. There are a lot of poor products out there, particularly those made cheaply in a lab from synthetic materials versus made from whole organic food. Your intelligent body can tell the difference.
I’ve provided a few quality brands below.
Top 10 Supplements to Consider
When I’m asked to counsel an individual on their health, I’ll typically include a supplement regimen tailored to their particular situation. But I’ve provided a list of those that come up most often and I find are useful for the majority of people.
If you are considering adding to your routine, I would recommend only adding one product at once and taking it for a week or two to monitor any unintended effects before adding another. Remember, the idea is to mimic the nutrients you would get from a wholesome meal so aim to take right after eating unless otherwise specified. Absorption is key so taking a few with each meal is usually better than all at once.
Multivitamin: Always the place to start if you are not currently taking anything or have no discernable symptoms. The quality brands carefully design the range of nutrients for maximum absorption. Look for a formula that is tailored to your stage of life.
Probiotics: Often recommended after taking antibiotics for an infection, they can help restore your microbiome. But many other products and factors damage your microbiome. In one study almost one in four (24 percent) of 1,000 drugs tested were detrimental to a range of gut bacteria strains. Look for shelf-stable probiotics certified to have at least 30 billion micro-organisms by the time they reach you.
Vitamin D: Unless you are working outside every day in a sunny environment the odds are you are deficient in vitamin D. This nutrient acts more like a hormone in your body and is critical for so many bodily processes, a huge variety of conditions can be impacted simply by optimizing your vitamin D level. Getting outside for at least 15 minutes a day with exposed skin is best. But a high-quality supplement of 4,000 or 5,000IU per day, paired with vitamin K2 to improve absorption, is usually the place to start. If you have a serious diagnosis, you may need more.
Vitamin C: One of the most misunderstood and under-utilized nutrients on the planet, vitamin C is a powerful antioxidant. While a multivitamin probably has some vitamin C in it, the RDA is typically in the range of 50-100mg whereas a body under any kind of stress, mental or physical, and especially fighting a viral infection, will use up far more. The body needs a constant supply of vitamin C to maintain vascular strength and integrity which is why many viral infections result in bleeding complications. Sodium ascorbate powder (buffered vitamin C) is a good option taking at least three doses split up throughout the day providing a total of 1,000-2,000mg for mild illness or protection during winter.
Niacin (vitamin B3): Niacin has an incredible history of efficacy against everything from mental health disorders, arthritis, cardiovascular disease, kidney disease, autoimmune conditions and more. It’s because after vitamin C and D this is probably the most critical substance our body needs as it is converted in our bodies to nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD) which is involved in over 400 gene functions. For more on Niacin including its different forms and dosage read my dedicated article.
B complex: There are eight B vitamins which are all essential to the body. They are water-soluble which means they can’t be stored in fat so you need to keep consuming an adequate supply. Our brains are particularly susceptible to low levels of B vitamins. A good quality B complex contains B1 (thiamine), B2 (riboflavin), B3 (niacin), B5 (pantothenic acid), B6 (pyridoxine), B7 (biotin), B9 (folate), and B12 (cobalamin). While your multivitamin may contain enough of the B’s, if there are any brain or emotional symptoms in play, I’d suggest higher doses. Plus the amount of niacin usually included, even in a B-complex, is low for most people so adding niacin separately is recommended.
Magnesium: Vital in blood pressure and glucose management, many people are deficient in magnesium without knowing it. Beyond a poor diet, several pharmaceuticals deplete magnesium levels including pain medications, blood pressure tablets, antacids and antibiotics as well as oral contraceptives and hormone replacement therapy. Symptoms may be subtle such as constipation, headaches, nighttime leg cramps, heart palpitations or tremors. There are various formulations available but I find the highly absorbable magnesium glycinate in the range of 250-500mg a day helpful for most people. Taking it after dinner can help with relaxation before bed.
Glucosamine: Glucosamine Sulfate is usually combined with Chondroitin Sulfate and Methylsulfonylmethane (known as MSM) in a heavily studied supplement even in conventional medicine for its beneficial action on joints. Perhaps it’s my age but I find myself often recommending this to my friends. It’s one of the only supplements that you immediately notice if you’ve missed a day or two as the aches quietly return. It revolutionized my pickleball enjoyment and takes some of the credit for my hiking pleasure too.
Lysine: I eat a lot of nuts. Nuts are very high in arginine, an amino acid. Viruses love arginine and need it to multiply. Too much arginine in the body can disrupt the balance of another amino acid called lysine as they share an absorption pathway. Taking in more lysine can conversely deprive viruses of their preferred nutrient and avoid the virus making you sick. I recommend lysine to people who tend to get a lot of colds and flu. There is also a school of thought that thyroid problems can be related to Epstein Barr virus (EPV) lying dormant in our thyroid. The theory is that thyroid conditions like Hashimoto’s and graves are actually our body trying to attack the virus, with goiters and thyroid cancer being the fallout. I need to do more research (watch this space!) but I was interested recently when my own thyroid condition of years ago flared up after I stopped taking lysine regularly. On restarting it (and getting more rigorous with my other natural thyroid regimen you can read about) my symptoms disappeared.
NAC (N-acetylcysteine): A form of the amino acid cysteine, NAC came to prominence as a Covid-19 remedy. It helps the body create glutathione in the liver which is vital for detoxification of external toxins but also internal byproducts when fighting an infection. It is well known as a remedy for hangovers and liver damage due to Tylenol toxicity. 500-1,000mg is a typical daily dose.
There are plenty of other supplements I often recommend but will leave you with what is probably my top 10. My book mentions many more and provides detailed guidance for specific conditions with over 300 scientific references.
Whatever other modalities or remedies you are using or planning to use, even conventional medicine, you can always improve matters by giving your body more of the nutrients it needs.
Wholesome food is obviously the best approach as scientists have only studied something like 150 nutritional components of real food while they acknowledge over 26,000 distinct biochemical elements that likely affect our bodies. A whole orange for example contains vitamin C but at least 40,000 other cofactors that help you absorb the vitamin C and create balance in the body.
But for those of us unable to live naturally on regenerative farms unencumbered by stress, taking a few supplements as part of our daily routine is just good sense.
I recommend specific brands on my website under ETA products. This stands for “Emma Tekstra Approved” and was a term coined by close friends who would check with me the food or products they were consuming to get a sense of whether they were good for their health. I have no financial ties to any company selling products to ensure my recommendations are entirely independent.
Some quality brands with a broad range of products to get you started are:
They are all widely available but you could check out iHerb.com to compare formulations and pricing.
As always, please don’t take my word for anything. Do your own research. There is plenty of clinical trial and scientific data on the efficiency of specific supplements. A good place to start is GreenMedInfo.com.
Finally, I would caution you against small companies with single products touting outlandish claims. Give your body the basics from well-established quality supplement companies and do your independent research to confirm validity of the efficacy claims.
I’d love to hear what your supplement routine is or what products have worked well for you in the comments!
