#006 Should you take supplements? with integrative dietitian Christa Biegler

Answering listener questions today including about who needs supplements, what brands to buy and how to tell if your supplement is worth a hoot or just expensive urine. 

Bottom line: When we know better, we do better. 

Also taking on kitchen ninja tips for beets. 

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Transcript

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welcome to the less stressed life. All about making this your time to feel frickin awesome about your life, health and happiness. This podcast of the Less Dress Life is hosted by Krista Bigler. Christa is an integrative registered dietitian nutritionist who specializes in reducing food related stress, inflammation and symptoms of food sensitivities. She brings over a decade of nutrition expertise and playing with her food to the table from coaching, teaching, writing and working within a major food company to behind the scenes for a health celebrity to learn more, visit less dress life dot com Friends last talked

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readers. So I am or listeners. So I'm really excited. Talk a lot about supplements today, which is a bit of a large topic that I'm gonna kind of condense into a small topic. But first Kitchen Ninja Tips. It is harvest season right in the gardens and something. I've been getting a lot of his beats now before you go ahead and turn up your nose. I didn't really think I ever liked beats, either. I wanted to give you a couple ways to prepare them that I think it's wonderful. So beats why first, why would you even care. Well, Anything that's really rich in color is really dense in nutrition, so beats very, very dense, like it literally changes the color of your waist. So don't be alarmed when you eat beets, orry beet chips or anything with that really vibrant reddish purple color. It's amazing. So very, very nutritious, very good for liver health and one way I really like to make them. And this, uh, Rusty was inspired by my sister in law, and then I've kind of remixed a couple different ways, so I'd like to chop up beats and some potatoes. Or you could use a winter squash, and this is a little fancy. You could just drizzle olive oil on it, but if you want to be a little fancier, you could take some coconut oil melted on the stove top and put some cayenne and cumin in it may be a teaspoon of each whatever you want and kind of let that heat up just a touch so it blooms. The scent blooms and kind of opens up a bit. You can do that, or you could just Sprinkle it in. Uh, you know, in your large bowl, so chopped up veggies, veggies, onion and this so amazing. Go and chop those up. Drizzle some type of healthy oil and then your seasonings, salt it with mineral or sea salt. That would be ideal because of the great nutrients there. Right cause bleach table sat really doesn't have anything, except it's fortified new dream. So go ahead with a mineral or a sea. Salt is more nutritious. And then roast that. And when you're roasting vegetables, you can let's go easy cleanup to sew on parchment paper that were you pretty much just throw away the paper and it's kind of like once and done. Go ahead and make a whole bunch of that, and then you can bake it or roast it. 400 or 4 25 15 or 20 minutes of beets do take a lot longer to cook through, so those air delicious warm. Ah, you can do some lemon juice on a if you if you like. Maybe some parsley. If you've got a handy or don't whatever works for you, it's really delicious. You can also switch up those flavors a lot if you want as well, and then the leftovers I take and put over greens or salad the next day, and some nuts, like maybe some pumpkin seeds or pine nuts or something like that and do the dressing. And it's kind of a two for one thing, right? So we do it the next day. Another way to do beats as thio shred, um, kind of like a hash brown into a slaw for a lot of people. Boil them and then cook them over the little butter. Or do them kind of like a big potato like with sour cream. And that's fine, too. When you boil them, you do lose nutrition from the color coming out right that those those awesome nutrients coming out in the water. And some people say it kind of loses a little bit of a flavour, so I'd prefer to roast or bake them typically. So that is kitchen into tip for today. So today we're gonna talk a little bit about supplements, and today supplement question comes from Heather. She has a lot of questions about supplements, and I'm gonna kind of, uh, refocus after we have these after we read her question. So here are a lot of different conversations about supplements she says. My main questions are What are the necessary labs asked for what supplements are key, if any, and quality brands. I know when possible nutrient should come from food, but we tend to be insufficient with some, anyhow, like vitamin D. So let me know what you think. When she kind of talked about some supplements that she's ordered and some different ones, she's heard about, uh, magnesium college and different things, sleeping and etcetera. So great questions, and I'm gonna kind of real way back and just go make sure you understand some of the foundational things a little bit first. So let's talk about, um, really all about supplements and how they're regulated. So supplements aren't regulated by the Food and Drug Administration, and kind of I'm OK with this. Like, it's really nice to have third party testing and for independent companies and to know which ones have high quality. But I'm sort of okay with the government not patrolling something that they don't understand, right, and this is not political, but it's kind of like when they're governing health care, but they don't really understand the background of it, and I can say this pretty objectively as a health care professional. It's hard to watch that right because it's hard to kind of make everything work. And so I feel like actually, the integrity of supplements would degrade Maur if they were regulated in some ways, and we don't really have to have that debate. But there are outside third party testers of some really high quality supplement brands have outside testing, done and otherwise. There's websites like lab door dot com and other testing sites where you can go and look up reviews for that supplement where they've taken that supplement, bought it from any kind of Endor and then looked at What kind of purity is there is a big deal for fitness supplements of like the vast majority. I wish I remembered the percentage. It's very, very, very high. Percentage of fitness type supplements have heavy metals in them, so that's a big issue, right, because that's adding another stressor onto our already overloaded immune system, are stress body and causes more trouble. So we want to be careful about quality supplements, so let's just step back before we even talk a lot. Maura about types and qualities and brands and just talk about should you even take supplements? And actually, I've kind of wavered through this feeling a lot over the years, actually, and I really want to summarize it in one sentence. When we know better, we do better. So the more you learn, the better you're gonna do. And that's really the best you can do right now is with what you know. So if you just stick to that, that's okay. So let's just talk about maybe a case for supplements. So it's thought that food is maybe half as nutritious as it was like 100 years ago, And that's because we farm the same soil and farmers do use cover crops or do try to rotate crops to make sure they're not depleting the nutrition too much. But the last I knew it was, I think it was ust his own data that showed that food was half his nutrition. So there was 100 years ago. Uh, I would say less than 10% of the population eats the recommended five cups of fruits and veggies each day, and those two food groups are the most nutrient done. So if you're skipping the most nutrient dense things. Well, there's a good chance that that's not working. Let's talk about another reason, even if you are eating really healthy, and this is kind of this is where the distinction really falls. What if you're eating really healthy? You're eating five cups of fruits and veggies today, but you're starving issues. You're tired all the time. You have symptoms like your skins out of whack or or things like that. Those air signs that you might have some type of, maybe got leg cramps has a really common sign of particular nutrient efficiencies. Um, so if you have something like that going on, you might not be absorbing all that amazing nutrition your you have. So what's thought that a really large percent of the population has got issues? And so our intestines, especially our small intestines, where we absorb most of our nutrition. So if we have any problems with that, so there's a lot of things that can cause issues with that stress in general antibiotic and medication usage. Um, for me, chlorine seem to be a trigger. Chlorine is a another word for bleach, right? Um, and that's in our water. So just so, so, so many things. And I don't mean to target just a few things because it really could be anything. I have people where they'll start having issues of foods, that pregnancy or after pregnancy. So any kind of a traumatic thing or a car accident of someone have start having major issues after car accidents is just any kind of major stress. And that can come in many different ways. Right? Can come. It's regular stress and come as an environmental toxin, it can come as an imbalance of bacteria fungus. Um, whatever. Right, So So there's those things. So it's absorption. Are you able to absorb nutrients properly and then you won't have another issue? So, um, this is a problem for sure. Some people don't make the right thing to absorb that nutrient. For example, when people are B 12 deficient, they don't have the right thing in their stomach to help observe that. And that can make them feel terrible, like a ton of weird, unrelated things like tingling feet and weird low grade fevers. And, uh, just crazy, crazy, crazy fatigue. So, um yeah, so one thing people aren't eating very well, right? We're not getting the most nutrient dense things we can eat and two along with it. And he's sometimes go together. Um, people aren't absorbing them. Okay, so there's a couple couple cases for supplements. They're probably okay, But should you always just take the same thing over and over over? Probably not, and it just kind of depends on the type of supplement. So let's talk about probably one of my most favorite things that I need you to know at the end of this episode is the difference between different high quality supplements. So, for example, and this is my favorite analogy, let's talk about a pregnant mom. Probably You've known someone who took a prenatal vitamin and she felt sick or felt like she had to eat something with the prenatal. Probably because of that synthetic iron that's in there. So most stuff you go buy off a shelf is gonna be a synthetic form of nutrients. So it means it was really created in a lab, whereas there's other types of multi vitamins that are called whole food. Multi vitamins and those are ground up whole fruits and vegetables and foods. And I would we would say, that those Air Superior because we we're pretty smart. But we're not that smart. We can't really replicate in nature if we could. Our health care system and status would look probably a lot better if we could really replicate nature. So nutrition really plays off of co factors like certain nutrients play off of each other. They help absorb each other summer, you know, propelled each other. So when you grind up things that go together, you're gonna have natural co factors and center just a compounds that make for better absorption and utilization for your body. So I see this very commonly where someone gets they maybe have a stomachache after a synthetic prenatal. But if they have a whole food prenatal, it's no problem. They're just kind of a fun analogy to talk about whole food versus synthetic. Now, I was really all about the whole food, um, supplements. And then I started focusing on food sensitivities. Sometimes when you have a food sensitivity, we need to really stick to a very, very clean item that doesn't have a lot of other ingredients in there, so we can isolate and really make sure we're re pleating just that nutrient that's deficient or the ones that kind of go together that efficient without reactive compounds. Eso If someone's reacted a beef, I probably avoid a gelatin capsule that's made out of beef if they're reactive. Thio Soy. Well, I need something that's not in soybean oil because that's a thing. A lot of cheaper supplements. Um, actually, there was a study in quite a few years ago. It was in the press about people taking antioxidant supplements, which an accident like vitamin C, vitamin E, and we won't go into too much of what? That's what that means exactly. But some basic supplements, um, basic stuff that you're familiar with. And basically, it showed an increase in mortality was the big headline. Well, yeah, there was. There is probably No, uh, there was probably no standards for quality at that time, right? So if you go pick up garbage supplement for $5 off the shelf, it big box store, et cetera, you know it's gonna be a lot different than one that has been created with a lot more integrity. Doesn't have, you know, isn't using um good bad. Not as healthy oil for the carrier and that's kind of stuff can make a big difference if that stuff isn't were controlled foreign a study than I think it's it. It kind of changes the whole spectrum. So when I say synthetic, so one example is a score. Bic acid is vitamin C, but that's a synthetic form, right? Um, the whole food isil. It might mean just a single component from the whole food, whereas the whole food extract it would be like a green tea extract or tuna oil or Buckley juice. It's partially the whole food, and then the whole food is like carrot powder, kale or flax meal or something like that. And those things air foods. But they also have a lot of benefits to and like how they're setting her question. We really should get our nutrients from food first, but sometimes things break down and we need to replete. That's one of the steps in the process of how I work with people you sometimes after replete to get head right, so that way you can just nourish with food. So let's talk about should you take supplements forever or not? Well, that really depends If your diet sucks, you're not fixing the root cause of things absorbing, you might need some supplements forever. Another reason you might have a need for a supplement or certain genetic things. So I recently had my genetics analyzed by my friend who is a genetic genius, And we were talking about how in my genetics I'm predisposed to not being very good at, um, my liver getting rid of certain things. So I was maybe gonna be deficient in this one nutrient Colin. And so we talked a little bit about what that means and kind of the whole genetic pathway, and it really kind of opened my as to thinking I'd really gotten into thinking, Yeah, I don't really want to have to be on supplements forever. But there are certain situations may be a genetic situation, especially I had mentioned this before. Some people do have this issue where they can't really make the thing that helps absorb B 12 and those people need B 12 shots or it's like a slow death, and that's called pernicious anemia. So there's definitely certain cases where you need nutrients or supplements long term. If you're not gonna eat, ah, lot of fruits and vegetables you might benefit from supplements or another idea that I'm really a big fan of is cycling. And so next, when I talk about different great supplements that are kind of broad spectrum that everyone seems to need a little bit off. I love the idea of cycling and pulsing and rotating them. Okay, so the 1st 1 that I want to mention is, Ah, the whole food multi And I kind of already touched on this before. You can get a lot of bang for your buck with a whole food multi right, and it just takes care of lots of things all in one, So that makes things really easy. So really nice. One of the I was giving some some lip service to prenatal vitamins earlier. So one of my favorite prenatal full food, Maltese, um, is new chapter prenatal, and I haven't looked at the ingredients for a rainbow bright, but I think that that's another whole food multi, and I'm sure there's lots more out there now. Another ah supplement that I think that people can benefit from our probiotics now. Should you just randomly take probiotics the same one forever? Um, no, not really, And there's a lot more to products probiotics. So probiotics are good bacteria that you take in. And let me just give you a quick analogy about, um, bacteria. So we have so many bacteria in our body, like the amount of species in the Amazon is one analogy that I've heard. So when we take Anna and it's on our skin, it's everywhere, right? And so we really they're like good soldiers and bad soldiers, and we really want more good soldiers. Well, imagine you spray a lawn and it's dead. What comes up first The grass, the grass or weeds, right, so weeds come up first and so bad bacteria. It's very easy for bacterial in balance. That's why it's like, so widespread to have a bacterial imbalance, which causes constipation, all kinds of other problems. But it's really easy to do that because of our use of antibiotics or antibiotic type things, right, which and medics air useful and necessary for life. But we haven't given enough service to re pleating good bacteria. I worked with some very ill complex medical status clients in ah place, right, do some contract work and it makes me want to hit my head against the wall when I see how long it takes before someone gets on a dose of pro backs of some sort. Anyway, I won't digress into that. Uh, we want to make sure that it's different. Strains of aerobatics do different things won't go into all of that business. One question I get a lot about probiotics is okay. How should I do that with antibiotics if they cut out? You know, if they kill all the good bacteria while usually like to do that four hours afterwards. So that way, the antibiotics don't necessarily kill off all the probiotics. And then another thing you wanna do with probiotics is don't you don't need to stick to the same one over and over and over, because if you're just sticking to like one or two or three strains and your body is a diverse as you know the world's ecosystem just on your own micro level, why would she just have, like, two species of birds? You know, like you have so many? Why would you just limit yourself in? Pigeonhole yourself to those couple species If you don't even know if they're exactly what you need. That's a little bit about probiotics. Another one that is very useful for a lot of people isn't omega three fatty acid, and people just seem to get burnt out on Omega's. Um, let me talk real quick about Omega's six versus three. So I talked a little bit about this on Facebook when we had the podcast launch party. But the thing with Omega six Omega three is real quick. Is that Omega's? We need both. We just have a little bit of imbalance because of our standard American diet. So oils that are higher in omega six, or maybe, like some flower oil, soybean oil, vegetable oils, things that we tend to get Maur and abundance off than some of the omega three oils like olive oil. So our goal and fish oil, fatty fish and salmon and things like that. So our goal is to bring the ratio, which is currently maybe more like 16 to 1 of six of omega six in omega three, more like down to 4 to 1, and so we want to kind of bump that up. There's a lot of other great benefits, too, you know, Fats of wonderful you know, they have different omega threes for all types of things, right for brain. How there's tons of research on that eye sight. Just anything you can think of. My favorite Omega company, which is Nordic naturals who does third party testing because, you know, it's a big problem, right? Fish have heavy and metal issues. It's really important, and it's expensive. But it's really important if you're gonna do and Omega three to have a really high quality one. And I should, you know, if we should put in the show nights, Um, we should get a discount code for you so we'll do that in the show notes. If you go to less stress life dot com, I will include some links to these different supplements, and we'll see if we can get some discounts in case you're interested in years. Wanna learn more about them? And really high quality supplement brands also have great research or data on their websites, typically so we talked about a whole food multi. We talked about probiotics, talked a little bit about Omega three, which is also an anti inflammatory right, helps just kind of reduced that immune that that inflammation. Uh, and so? And then let's talk about just a couple more. So immune support. I really think that's a good one. No pulse, right? Especially for winter. So we know vitamin D is important, and we know that we're not getting this much sunlight in the winter. So vitamin D is important and was talking to another health coaching type friend recently were on a trip together and and she had a real beef about, um, people just blindly taking random supplements and not really knowing the best quality. And so I just wanted to speak a little bit about D. So it's great if you can get outside and make D through your skin, because that's where we get D right. But, um, your body is kind of a manufacturing plant, and it has a lot of processes to go through before it can turn that D on toe active d three. The last place it stops, so you'll hear different functional providers talk about maybe they'll be in California and have patients coming in with Low D. Well, why is that? Maybe one of their motors has broke down in their factory. I'm not sure because there's so many places it has to stop to really get manufactured properly into that active form. For example, when I work with people with kidney disease, it used to drive me crazy. They'd come over with Orel. Vitamin D to so active D three is the active ready to use form. They come over with aural acting aural vitamin D to which is, you know, one step under D three and the last place for the factory to finish manufacturing the D is the kidneys, so their provider had no idea, You know, about vitamin D synthesis. And so, um, that aural d was possibly useless, and they unless they had a little bit of kidney function left. But recently I did see some headlines about how de tu was sort of going away as a supplement, which makes sense. Maybe one of the reasons that due to is out there is a supplement versus, like just the ready to go form is because I believe most plant based forms of vitamin D r d to me because they don't have kidneys. That makes the most sense to me. Uh, I kind of like let me just go off on a tangent real quick. Have you ever noticed? Remember when peanut butter used to say cholesterol free? You know why that was so funny to people? Because cholesterol is naturally made in the liver and peanuts don't have livers. Of course, peanut butter was naturally closer, all free. Thanks, marketing. Anyway. Just comedy. Come the hour over here. So we talk about holstered multi probiotics talked about so immune support. Vitamin C is great for immune support. Just like there's a lot of things I would just We could do a whole segment on immune support and and that could just be a good thing to kind of pulse and do, um, throughout the right seasons, right? Ah, I will mention the real quick about immune support and probiotics at the same time. Sometimes I'll have people request they'll have, you know, like a friend or something will have a kid that's got some kind of a bug of flu bug thing, and we know they're bacteria's off right there, vomiting or got diarrhea. And so they'll ask me for some probiotics. Well, I'm happy to give you some probiotics, but it's sort of like throwing a glass of water on the fire. You know, you're better off with, um, fueling and stoking that fire early or m gonna said that. Nervous. Basically, you want to be supporting that stuff before it gets to a fire stage. Right? So it's both pro backs and pre backs. Probiotics are great fiber back found in your fruits and vegetables, by the way, Um, and that stuff that you got to start a lot earlier. Maybe then when you got a full on fire, sure doesn't hurt. Pour some water on that fire, does it. But for the full benefits for great immune function, there's probably a lot of pieces to that. And we build that. You know, we build that throughout the year, really? And honestly, kids get in the dirt and playing in the dirt and getting dirty. Um, a lot of experts got health experts and microbiome export experts will say that that's a fantastic way to increase the good quality of bacteria that you have. In fact, there's, you know, um, there's probiotics made out of dirt, and I that's a whole other topic for a whole. Another day. It's kind of debated whether what's better than the other right? Some are made from animals or human tracks and then summer made out of dirt. So I kind of just depends anyway, little bit of aggression here and then lastly Ah, lot of people. When our diets are kind of standard American diets, you can kind of benefit from some type of digestive enzyme and that just sometimes you don't necessarily go out. I need to go out and buy something a specific digestive enzyme, and it really depends on all the other pieces you have going on. But if you have, you know, a product where it's all in one sure doesn't hurt you, right? So digestive enzymes are just great to help break down. You need enzymes to do every kind of biochemical process in the body. Um, so you can get enzymes from any kind of raw food. But if you're not eating raw food and you're deceiving cooked food or boxed food, you're not really getting enzymes to break down that food. So some people really benefit from digestive enzymes just to get things going, especially cause a lot of us have some, uh, in our bowel habits aren't the healthiest, so I hope that this was a little bit useful for you today. It's really just kind of the tip of the iceberg, the very top overview of some of my favorite talking points about supplements. You know why you may or may not need them should you take them forever? Kind of depends on your very unique situation. What are some places you could possibly start? And then let's just talk real quick about some brand. So I mentioned one for prenatal, and there's a lot of great ones, and really, you got to do your own research and you gotta be diligent about it. But I tend to, um, promote uh, high quality supplements that I know are pure and that the company stand behind and on our problem with so one whole food supplement brand that I have used in the past. I don't use now because of my food sensitivity clients there too many ingredients I can't isolate. That was standard process. You cannot buy that on Amazon. You can only buy that from you can, but it's very likely not really. It's probably a fake, and that's not safe for you, and you'll get price couch So Amazon might not be your best place to buy supplements. By the way, um, you will need to buy. A lot of somethings should be bought from health care practitioners because they're doctors, only our provider only companies. So that on Lee give accounts to those providers and then some, you know, are fine being in the store. Nordic Naturals, for example, has a different line for the store versus health care professionals. And actually, since I don't shop for them in the story shot for them from myself, I don't know the difference. I don't know if they're lower doses, so it's fine for people to self does. I'm not exactly sure about what their differences are, but every company is a little different. Other brands that a lot of health care professionals use definitely a lot of functional dieticians and great of dietitians. I'm a gin pure encapsulation sze just because of the purity issues, because I'm usually helping people avoid a lot of like sensitivities. Um, what else? Seeking health designs for health may be the same. Same name. Um, those are just a few of them. So I thought that was really helpful there, You know there's lots of great companies out there. There's a lot of poor companies out there. You just have to do a little bit of research. It's probably not on yourself of your big box store. If you need some guidance on where not to look, that's usually not the best place to start. Let me know if this episode is helpful, and if you have a question, please send it to hello at less stress life dot com. I've been wondering if we should have a little bit of a Facebook group and talk about stress relief activities and just all the things under that umbrella. You can let me know again. Hello at less stress life dot com. I will look forward to your comments. And by the way, you would be my best friend if you went back to the search bar subscribed and Road review because those made me so happy. You guys are the best, best bestest in the West ist or east, north and south. I will talk

spk_1:   28:03
to you next week. Can't wait to keep sharing with you and let me know how I can help talking to him.