The Truth About Supplements No One Talks About!

The Truth About Supplements No One Talks About!

In this episode, we break down the truth about supplements, longevity, and what actually moves the needle when it comes to your health.
No hype. No shortcuts. Just real conversations about what works—and what doesn’t. From the “wild west” of supplements to the power of behavior change, this is about taking control of your body with knowledge and integrity.

What You’ll Learn:
-Why the supplement industry can be misleading
-How to read labels and avoid overdosing
-The difference between deficiency vs. optimization
-Why behavior change beats any pill

“Not every patient needs the same pill.”

About This Podcast:
We Got Your Number is your go-to health and wellness podcast for real conversations on nutrition, GLP-1 treatments, plastic surgery, and medical innovations. Each week we bring you expert insights, the latest research, and actionable advice you can trust.

Learn more at https://wegotyournumberpodcast.com/

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The content shared on the “We Got Your Number” podcast is for educational and informational purposes only. It is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the guidance of your own qualified healthcare professional with any questions you may have regarding your health, nutrition, or medical care.

Transcript

unknown 0:00

Yes, absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome back to the We Got Your Number podcast. I am here with my co-host, Dr. Thomas Romo. We are doing another just co-host episode, and today we are talking about supplements.

SPEAKER_00 0:12

Wow. Okay. Thank you for uh being here, Allie, with me. Um this is a hot topic. And so uh you and I we're gonna try and and go deep, but also go superficial, because it's easy for you and I to start getting technical, because you and I are both scientists. So we'll we're talking about molecules and things like that, and uh and we have to uh probably go from macro to micro on this. So um supplements. Uh uh that's all uh everybody's talking about right now. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_01 0:43

So we want to think, of course, the supplement industry is in a billion-dollar industry, right? So there's so much money in wellness, right? And I'm not saying wellness, just general wellness. I'm talking about in like the big wellness industry. A few things to know. We know it's not regulated by the FDA. Correct. So it is a Wild West, essentially, when it comes to supplements. And oftentimes there's so many questions that people have in the sense of what do I take? What do I not take? Is this safe? How much of this do I need? There's also because supplements are not regulated by the FDA, they're allowed to make claims um that aren't always backed by science, right? So before we even talk about like the technical stuff of supplements, we're gonna talk about hot topics today. And the first one is um, and I'll share my opinion, and I'm interested in hearing yours, is we see a lot that when a doctor comes out with a supplement, they're instantly called a grifter, which I don't necessarily agree with, right? So there is the connotation that if a doctor sells a supplement that they're instantly exploiting people. And I don't agree. And I want to hear your perspective before I share mine.

SPEAKER_00 1:58

Okay. Well, that that's a big um let me back up just a little bit. I think what we're talking about, first of all, you're talking about supplements. So what does supplement mean? You know, supplement means supplement mean anything to anybody. So it means to augment, to add to and in this case, you add to your diet, add to your your person. You're supposed to take something to augment and then augment what? Your health, your your your your longevity, your I mean, how what are you taking? So what are you taking? But what are you trying to do? I mean I mean, if you I I think if you roll it back and you go, well, when there were not all of these supplements, which are now g g have a terminology of being a sp special product that you have to imbibe uh and they're and they'll sell it to you online everywhere. I mean, what did people do before they were doing that? Did they live long lives and yeah, they lived a hundred years old? Right. And they weren't taking a supplement. How did they do that? Yeah. Because they really didn't need to take a supplement. So I think you have to get back and we'll have to define that process. What what is a supplement and what does that mean? And then and then because the communication device today is uh virtual and it's online. I mean, nobody no one even knows uh a Gen Z kid doesn't even know what the yellow pages is. So I mean, no one you well, how do you get all your information? Well, you get your information from online. So that's how people are going to propagate and or sell their product. Right. Be it an MD, be it an MD who recently was called out for some bad things that he did. And now when you look a little bit deeper into what he's uh doing, he didn't even finish his residency. Right. You know, and uh and and you know, and and and you're looking at and and he became a guru of supplements and longevity because he was online.

SPEAKER_01 3:57

Right.

SPEAKER_00 3:57

And then he was promoted by companies. So that's where and and in the episode that we just concluded, uh, that was so wonderful, and uh with Rosanna, and she was talking about the most important word, which I think you and I adhere to, and that's why you and I were attracted, because our brains was integrity.

SPEAKER_01 4:17

Right.

SPEAKER_00 4:17

Okay, the integrity, and so as a physician, why are you promoting a supplement? Okay, you're promoting a supplement because your brother-in-law owns a supplement company. You don't know that, okay? So, or you're a scientist and you've worked on this and you've put this together, and this is really uh something that's going to help your patients. And there's how do you where's that barometer come from? I mean, how do you know that? And there's particularly when it's not even covered by the FDA. And you go to a particular large store, I almost said the name, and they check the supplements that are on the uh on the shelves there, and 85% of them are uh wood chips, you know, or uh things like that. And you're good, how would you know that? So it's there's a leap of faith here, and if you use your MD physician degree to pull your patient in, the patients, no matter what, have to do their own due diligence.

SPEAKER_01 5:12

Yeah, you bring up so many amazing points. Um, and I kind of want to dissect a few of them. And the first is that, and this is, you know, my values when it comes to supplementation, right? Just being anything, if it's a PhD nutritionist or just being a physician alone is not criteria enough for selling something. Correct. Right? But I think that the second thing is, and it, you know, if there is a product that you truly believe because you're seeing the patients and you're seeing what's out there that you think can help somebody, right? That's backed by science, that's created in an ethical way, that is dosed in an appropriate way, then I think that that's a different conversation to have, right? And I also think the power of patient choice, right? So what doesn't seem ethical to me is because I make this product, you must take this product. But what seems more ethical to me is this is my product. I believe in this. I invested my time, energy, and research into making this, and this is one of the potential products that you can use, right? Meaning that if you choose not to take, I'll use a simple example. Let's say I made iron, I don't, you don't have to take my iron, but you need iron. So here are four other brands of iron, and you can use your own judgment to decide what is best for you to take.

SPEAKER_00 6:36

And I'll tell you, that's a good starting point. Right. Okay, that's a good starting point. Yeah, you know, I feel and I I always keep rolling more data into that light. Great. Um not every patient needs the same pill. Right. So is there variability? Is a 16-year-old the same one that's a 50-year-old, that's the same thing for a 75-year-old? Yeah. I mean, you do they all get the same pill? Even in big pharma pills and the treatment plans change. I mean, are you are you doing due diligence to continue to see what your outcomes are? And then looking at, well, no, no, I maybe I have one for this and I have one for that age uh or person or one for female, one for male, because there are differences. Our physiology, that's what you're trying to affect here. You're trying to take this, and I you can affect your body's physiology, and we'll get into that, I'm sure, in a minute. But that's you know, you you have to be able to, and again, then the last thing is the integrity factor. Uh, I'm always telling residents all the time, fellows, uh it's not can you do the surgery, but should you do the surgery? And would you do that case on your mother or your sister?

SPEAKER_01 7:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 7:45

Okay, you got I'm trying to get some ethical boundaries on this. Would you give that supplement to your mother? Okay, not just to sell it to somebody and get them off the shelf because someone's over here checking your account.

SPEAKER_01 7:56

Yeah. You know, I think I always, I mean, I don't really have any supplements that I directly work with. I usually turn down collaborations unless I think it's really meaningful, but I'll always disclose to my patient so that they understand I'm giving you this recommendation and this is my tie to it, just so you have an understanding you can make your own choice. Yeah. I think that especially when it comes to supplements, which we understand is like the Wild West, there are just a few safety things that everybody needs to know that everybody doesn't know. Um, and the first is um just the dosing. So we have something called the RDA, it stands for the recommended dietary allowance, right? Correct. And to be within the RDA, you mean it is one designed for the general pop population, it's designed for healthy people, and the design, the reasoning is to prevent deficiency and to reduce the risk of chronic disease, right? So the RDA was scientifically developed for those reasons. Keep people healthy, prevent deficiency, and prevent chronic disease, right? How we develop an RDA, and this is where people kind of lapse in understanding, is to have an RDA, which we're saying 97% of the general population, if they intake this certain amount of, let's say calcium, let's say it's a thousand milligrams, we should be able to prevent deficiency. Okay. General population. I'm not talking about a woman um in with in menopause with osteoporosis, right? But once we have the RDA, then we can go two standard deviations, I'm talking science here, from the RDA, and we end up at a value called the adequate intake, right? So what the adequate intake is, is it's a number, let's say a supplement dose, that if 50% of the population has this amount, 50% will become deficient, and the other 50% will not become deficient. How do we develop an AI? This is the most important factor here. We must use a biochemical process or marker inside of our body. For example, for vitamin C, we can use leukocyte vitamin C levels. For iron, we can look at ferritin stores. Why is that important? Because if I understand where 50% of the population will fall deficient, then I can create something that meets 100% of needs. What does the consumer need to know? If you flip over your pill bottle and you see something is 1,000% of the daily recommendation, you have to understand that we are using zero to 100, right? 100% is the daily recommendation for your body. If you are at 1,000, you are taking 10 times higher the recommended dose than what is known to prevent deficiency. Right. So that's an education piece when we're looking at supplements. When I have someone in my office and they're like, I'm taking X, Y, and Z. I flip it over, I look at them. The second thing, and you definitely get questions on this. So I'm interested in hearing your approaches. What I'm never gonna do is I'm never gonna make my patient feel bad for it, right? I'm never gonna say, Oh, this is garbage, don't take this. I'm gonna say to them, Well, why are you taking this? What inspired you to take this? Because what am I gonna hear? Well, I've really been struggling with anxiety, and that's why I'm I tried this, or I've really been struggling with um cholesterol. You you know, I don't necessarily I don't recommend supplements for cholesterol. Um, so I thought I could take this. Or I'm really struggling to eat, so I thought I could take this blend of amino acids, right? So now instead of just saying, no, don't take this supplement, I'm smarter than you, I know more than you, I'm asking them why do you take the supplement and learning why they take the supplement? Now we've gotten to the real issue. Um, and you probably get that. People ask you, Dr. Romo, pre-surgery, post surgery, what should I take? What should I not take? Let's start just in general. Like you're gonna operate on somebody we don't want supplements on board. Which ones?

SPEAKER_00 11:56

Well, I the the real problem is it's because number one, people are being bombarded constantly. And uh uh taking some is good, taking more is better.

SPEAKER_01 12:10

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 12:11

And I remember right before COVID, they had a picture of uh Katy Perry, and she was on stage and she had this bag of 20 kinds of different pills in a bag with and they're going like, I take all these supplements. And you're going like it it it's it's not that first of all, they're not benign. First of all, they're not benign. They have to be, you take them in, your body has to process them. They've got to get excreted through the liver or the kidney, and and you're putting that those chemicals in your body. And so, just like you said, you're taking a thousand times more than you need. There, you know, that can those can hurt the liver, they can hurt, they can hurt uh the kidneys. Uh there so they're not good for you. Uh too, uh, in a surgical situation, for sure. Um if you're taking a supplement uh that uh increases your bleeding time and you're getting ready to have surgery, that's not a good thing. So we always talk to them about vitamin E, the G herbs, ginseng ginkgo, garlic, St. John's wart, uh, because those actually you wouldn't take if you're gonna have arthroscopic surgery on your knee, you wouldn't take something that stops you from clotting. And so the same thing in elective cosmetic surgery, where there's just a common sense kind of thing. And you you you have to learn um that the public is uh is one has their own opinion, and by and large, they tend to overdo it. I was talking to somebody the other day about NPO past midnight. So almost every surgery that anybody goes through, it's you're you're told by anesthesia you can't have anything to eat or drink after midnight. Right. Now that's if you had a glass of water in the morning or something, your body's gonna absorb it and it's gonna be gone in 15 minutes. So it's kind of uh but they don't mean that. What they really mean is but if you give somebody an inch, they're gonna take a mile. So the guy says, Well, he says, Well, you can just have a little bit of breakfast. And then he shows up and he says, Did you have a little breakfast? And he goes, Yeah, I had two eggs and some bacon, and and he goes, Well, no, now we cancel surgery. Right. So these dogmas come in to protect people, and from a supplement point of view, it's get off of all of them for two weeks. Okay, I mean, you you you're not affecting by and large if you eat a, and you know this better than anybody as a PhD nutritionist, if you eat a good diet, if you eat regular diet, and that's what I was trying to come at from before when we were starting here. Prior to the advertising and pushing of supplements, did people survive? And yes, they did. And they there are very specific supplements, maybe that you need. I mean, uh you mentioned iron. Um, I mean most men don't lose iron, uh, but a woman who's having her period does. Yeah. And and you and and so you can't equate the two.

SPEAKER_01 14:54

Um there's supplementation in two different avenues. I really appreciate you even explaining MPO after midnight because you bring up such a valuable point. We have to keep it simple, right? We don't we don't want to risk compromise if it's if it's a medical procedure and so on. Also, we don't know that the supplement that they're taking that they got on Amazon that says pre-surgery heal, we don't know that it doesn't have 5,000 percent of the recommendation for let's say lion's mane or something that could potentially have some adverse reaction at some point in the surgical or healing process. Absolutely. Um when it comes to supplements, there's two different domains. So there's correcting a deficiency, right? Nobody will argue that correcting a deficiency is not warranted, right? So, for example, vitamin D, iron, um calcium, right? So as a dietitian, I work with a lot of women in the post-menopause space, and you know, getting 1,000 to let's say 1,300 milligrams of dietary calcium is not an easy thing to do, right? Now, this doesn't mean we directly jump into calcium supplementation. You know, we we've seen older data on um, you know, contraindicating general calcium supplementation, but me, my doctorate degree, and my years of training still has to take a few moments to exactly calculate what you need to eat so that you have at least a thousand milligrams of calcium in your body. So then we can start to look into nutritionally fortified foods that are going to deliver um calcium in safe requirements that isn't going to be contraindicated for the body. So um there is a time for supplementation when you cannot get it through diet.

SPEAKER_00 16:46

But you just said uh nutritional food. So I mean, you're not talking about taking a pill.

SPEAKER_01 16:53

I'm not talking about taking calcium carbonate. I'm talking about taking, let's say, um green leaves or leafy uh but sometimes it it needs to be something fortified. So maybe it's a milk beverage that's fortified with additional calcium. That's still that is coming from food that is still a fortified fortification process going into your body.

SPEAKER_00 17:15

And and and each one of these, uh what you're actually talking about as well is the individualization. Right. You're sitting down with a patient, figuring out what they eat, figuring out how you can augment that with nutritional food supplementation, and the last resort is to take a pill. And and and and you you brought up the concept of you know uh uh uh preventative type diseases. It's critical, but it's we're in a different era now. You know, um we don't see a lot of scurvy anymore.

SPEAKER_01 17:44

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_00 17:45

And people forget that where that came from, and there's an interesting story behind that. Uh vitamin C was and they used to call them the these guys on the ships for back when they were floating on ships between the United States and Britain, uh, and the guys were not eating there was nothing really that had vitamin C in it. And so what they started doing is carry limes and oranges on the ships. And that's how the English became limeys.

SPEAKER_01 18:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 18:10

So it was because they were eating, because they needed, because their joints were breaking down because they didn't have any collagen uh to hold it together. They needed vitamin C. So we don't see a lot of disease like that today in this abundant America.

SPEAKER_01 18:24

Right. And I love this vitamin C example because if we think about, okay, so vitamin C deficiency, right? Less than five milligrams of vitamin C repeated over time. And that's when you see a vitamin acting directly.