Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - Why Most Multivitamins Are Crap (and How to Know What Isn't)

Episode Date: February 19, 2016

The multivitamin supplement is a staple in many people’s lives, but is it really necessary? Can it even harmful? I break it all down in this episode of the podcast. 04:15 - A multivitamin sounds great...in theory. 08:19 - What's wrong with most multivitamins. 16:56 - Supplements vs. real food. 19:33 - Which multivitamin ingredients you are wasting money on? 26:22 - The multivitamin I take and why. 35:28 - The serving size tells you a lot. ARTICLES RELATED TO THIS VIDEO: The Definitive Guide to the Multivitamin Supplement: What Is and Isn’t Worth Your Money and Why: http://www.muscleforlife.com/best-multivitamin/ The Definitive Guide to Vitamins and Minerals: http://www.muscleforlife.com/guide-to-vitamins-and-minerals/ Want to get my best advice on how to gain muscle and strength and lose fat faster? Sign up for my free newsletter! Click here: https://www.muscleforlife.com/signup/

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Hey, this is Mike from Muscle for Life, and welcome to another episode of the podcast. In this episode, I want to talk about the multivitamin supplement. A lot of people have asked me to continue the little series I was doing on supplements, and I kind of got sidetracked and did a couple episodes on other things. So I'm going to get back on track with the supplement series. In this episode, let's talk about multivitamins. They're very popular. They're also a bit controversial. You've probably seen news stories that say, you know, if you take a multivitamin, you're harming your health, or you are increasing your risk of, you know, getting various disease or even dying earlier and so forth. So let's talk about it. So first let's talk about the basic theory or the basic

idea of taking multivitamin is good. And it makes sense. I mean, your body needs a wide spectrum of vitamins and minerals to do everything that it does. And ideally we would get all of these things from our diet, but the average Western diet just isn't there. A lot of people are deficient in different B vitamins and vitamin A and certain minerals like magnesium and zinc and vitamin D deficiencies are very common. And these deficiencies are also fairly common even among people that eat decently.

If you're really taking the time to diversify your vegetable and fruit intake, so if you are eating a fair amount of leafy greens regularly, which are high in certain type of molecules your body needs and certain types of micronutrients your body needs, as well as cruciferous vegetables, as well as colorful fruits and vegetables. The pigment in fruits and vegetables is very healthy for the body. So if you're eating stuff like peppers, red peppers, yellow peppers, whatever, green peppers, if you're eating colorful fruits, like I like blueberries and strawberries. Personally, those are my favorite colorful fruits. So I eat quite a few, quite a bit of blueberries and strawberries. I also like bananas for potassium. But my point is you can plan your diet out to

where you probably wouldn't benefit from multivitamin at all. Like you would get everything you need from your diet. I'd say it's possible. It's going to be tough though because one, it's going to require that you really micromanage your diet and micromanage your meal planning, which is pretty annoying. And two, the foods that you're eating may not be as micronutrient dense as you think. So like, for instance, organic foods, certain organic produce in particular are known to be more

nutritious than the conventional, than their conventional counterparts, but organic is expensive. So not everybody can do that. And even then, you know, we have a declining quality of soil and just the general nutritional value of food here in the United States has been steadily declining over the last several decades. And so it just makes it harder and harder to give your body the micronutrients that it needs, the nutrition that it needs to perform optimally. And really what we're talking about here is not surviving, but thriving. The body, human body is incredibly good at surviving. It can adapt to all kinds of suboptimal, you know, living conditions, whether it be a diet or, or, you know, physical conditions

or whatever. But that's, I mean, our goal isn't just to survive. Isn't just to make it for a certain period of time before our bodies just fall apart and die. The idea obviously is to thrive, is to flourish, to be healthy and be vibrant and be vital and mentally clear and able to focus and able to enjoy life and do what we want to do. So the idea of taking multivitamin in that context makes sense. If a multivitamin were formulated well, then it could kind of plug these holes in our diet and provide us with essential vitamins and minerals and other things that we're not getting enough of just kind of maybe, you know, getting too many, too many calories too regularly from, from junk foods that are kind of just, you know, devoid of nutrition, maybe just sugar stuff or whatever, or smoking or drinking or sedentary living. Although those are, those are very, very unhealthy habits that are never going to be

overcome by supplementation alone, of course. But, you know, the idea is at least if we are providing our bodies with adequate micronutrients, that they can be resilient enough to not just fall apart. If we don't get everything right all the time, that's the idea. But the problem is, you know, it doesn't matter how great an idea is. It all comes down to execution. And the majority of the multivitamins in the market today are, they're just shitty. Some of my biggest complaints are, one, they're often stuffed with very large dosages of certain vitamins and minerals and then very low dosages of others with no seeming, there seems to be no logic to, there was really no thought,

you know, put into these formulations other than price. So, you know, going with the cheapest forms of, of everything, and then just going with an amount that really just kind of looking at it against the DRI and, you know, in terms of, so that's a daily recommended intake. So like a percentage. So if you saw that a multivitamin had, let's say 5% of the DRI of something you as a consumer, even though you don't know why is the DRI what it is, what does that really mean? What does this do in the body? You would just perceive that as well, 5%, that's going to do nothing. So as long as those, you know, DRI values are high enough on the formulation, uh, then that is just kind of like something that you'd perceive as, oh, well, this must be good. I'm getting 75% of my DRI of this vitamin or this

mineral from this multivitamin, or in some cases getting more than DRI. I mean, a lot of people will assume that more of, they know that vitamins and minerals and micronutrients are good, so they'll assume that more of something good is better. And that's not necessarily true, which brings me to my next point. And the next thing I don't like about a lot of multivitamins in the market, and that is that providing so like too low of something is obviously bad. If you're, if it has, if, if, if a multivitamin contains too little of, let's say, vitamin D or vitamin K or zinc, then it's not serving its purpose. The purpose isn't to take us from very deficient to slightly deficient. The purpose would be to go from any deficiency to sufficiency. And then you have super doses of other vitamins and

other minerals that in some cases can be harmful. And this is why the multivitamin has kind of gotten a bad rap and has taken a beating in the media is because mainly because of antioxidants actually. So in vitamin E is a commonly, it's commonly high, you'll find it in high doses in many multivitamins. And this is probably because antioxidants are generally perceived to be good and anti-cancer and that they're great for your body and yet you should eat all these antioxidant-rich foods and you should take all these antioxidant supplements because it prevents oxidative damage and it's good for slowing down the process of aging, blah, blah, blah. down the process of aging, blah, blah, blah. And there's truth, yes, in the basic idea that your body, that's what, yes, those are some of the things the antioxidants do in the body. But the problem is superdosing antioxidants can actually be harmful. And especially a certain type of synthetic vitamin E that is used in many multivitamins. So when you superdose that, there's research that suggests that that alone could increase, uh, the risk of dying. Essentially it's all cause mortality dying for many cause. Um, and, and that's where a lot of these new stories have come from saying, Hey,

if you take a multivitamin, you might be increasing your risk of, of death. Um, so you'll find a lot of vitamin E in, in multivitamins you'll also find it in a cheap synthetic form. And not that all synthetic vitamins are worse than natural vitamins. In some cases, they're even better. Like I believe it's vitamin B5 is the synthetic form has been shown to be absorbed better than the natural form. So that's also, I mean, I would say that's kind of a slight aside, something that is more in the marketing of multivitamins. They'll try to sell you on, Oh, because these are food-based, uh, you know, this is a food-based multivitamin. It contains no synthetic vitamins or minerals. It's better for you. And that's not true that

that can be true depending on the product, but you can't just say that generally it's, it's like the all natural claim that's used on food. It just means nothing. Appealing to nature is an easy way to increase the perceived value of something because a lot of people assume that the more natural something is, the better it is for the body, but that's not necessarily true. Anyways, back to the antioxidants, you also find vitamin C in very high doses because it's an antioxidant. And again, it's one of, it's, it's just markers playing on people's perceptions. So if people think that taking high amounts of vitamin C is good for them, even if the supplement companies know that it's, there is no benefit to it. You don't need to be taking, you know, a couple of grams of vitamin C a day, unless you're sick, but on a day-to-day basis, you don't need to be taking a ton of vitamin

C. However, if people think that vitamin C, taking a lot of vitamin C is good for them, then there are a lot of supplement companies that'll just go, who cares what's good and what's not good. This is what people, you know, if we can play that angle and increase our sales of that product by 8%, let's do it. And of course, that's just, you know, shitty people being shitty, but that's, that's, I don't know. That's the industry. That's the space. Another example of a vitamin that you can find overdose and multivitamins is vitamin a synthetic form called retinol that it was once thought that having taking large amounts of retinol was good for you, but now newer research shows that it can harm your liver. So the point is that that's why multivitamins can be harmful.

And that's why a multivitamin formulation has to be created carefully. And it has to be created with the target, you know, who you're going to be selling it to in mind in terms of what their diet is like. And which multivitamins and minerals should be higher and which should be lower. And it's not just, hey, let's just stuff a bunch of stuff in this and let's just fill it full of antioxidants so we can say that in the marketing copy, then people are going to think it's good for them and take it. And that's really the general approach of creating multivitamins, and it sucks, obviously. And another reason why many multivitamins are just subpar or worse is they don't contain much of anything beyond the essential vitamins and minerals.

So many multivitamins, I should also mention if we're talking essential vitamin minerals, are missing very important ones altogether. Like I'd mentioned earlier, missing vitamin D or having way too little. If you look at, there's a guy, his name is Dr. Michael Hollick, and vitamin D or having way too little. There's a guy, his name is Dr. Michael Hollick, and vitamin D research has been kind of his life's work. And thanks to him, what used to be the DRI of maybe 400 or 500 IUs a day, we now know that a much safer or a much better baseline intake for everyone is 2,000 IUs a day. And there's research that suggests maybe even as much as 5,000 IUs a day would be a good baseline for adults. And in some cases, people need more. Like my body genetically needs more vitamin D

because you can get blood tested. And that's really the best way to know if you really want to know how much vitamin D your body needs, you can get blood tested so you can find out how much D3 is actually in your blood and what do you have to take in terms of supplementation to get there. For me, it's about 10,000 IUs a day. That's just how my body is. I'm not in the sun, even though I live in Florida. I mean, I'm, I'm in this office all the time, so I'm not out in the sun much. And that's, you know, that's the main, that, that, that's the main way that you're going to get your vitamin D through, you know, natural sources. You have to be out in the sun because there's interactions in the body with, with, with

cholesterol that, that creates vitamin D when you're in the sun. But if you're not in the sun, you know, you can get vitamin D in small amounts in certain foods, certain fish and dairy, but again, you're not going to get enough. So if a multivitamin contains 400 or 500 IUs of vitamin D per serving, that's too low. A lot of multivitamins don't contain vitamin K, which is a very common vitamin deficiency. And vitamin K was once thought to just be the bone vitamin, but now we know that it has a much larger and much more important role in the body. And kale is a good source of vitamin K. If you're going to get it through your diet, again, that's something you're going to kind of have to do intentionally. You're going to have to

say, I'm going to eat these foods regularly because that's how I'm going to get my vitamin K. A lot of people don't do that. You're not going to find vitamin K in a lot of multivitamins because it's very expensive in terms of for just a single vitamin. Many multivitamins don't contain enough zinc. Many multivitamins don't contain enough magnesium and on and on and on. So there's a problem with just the basic formulation of that. I mean, that would be the bare minimum that we would expect from multivitamins, at least have a well-formulated collection of essential vitamins and minerals. So at least, you know, help give our bodies what we're not getting from our diet, which, by the way, don't think that a multivitamin, even a good multivitamin, could ever replace fruits and vegetables. Those are obviously the primary sources of micronutrients in your diet. And the main reason for that is the natural sources of vitamins and minerals contain not just

the vitamins and minerals, but other molecules that interact with those vitamins and minerals that you're not going to get from supplementation. So really a multivitamin supplement or a green supplement, which I'll talk about in the next podcast. It's meant to supplement your diet. It's not meant to replace, you know, foods that you should be eating to just, to just live healthy. Like the standard government recommendation for adults. If I remember correctly, it's about two or three cups of vegetables a day and two, two cups of fruit a day. And that's, that's what I eat personally. So I get there with my lunch is a big salad, dark greens and onions and peppers. And then at dinner, I eat about another two cups of vegetables. These days, it's a lot of Brussels sprouts because I also know that my body

has a heightened need for cruciferous vegetables. And I like Brussels sprouts. So I do that. Sometimes, though, I do cauliflower. Sometimes I do broccoli. And then it's also there are mushrooms in there, onions in there, garlic. So a pretty diverse group of vegetables. And that's kind of planned.

Fortunately, I like those foods, so it's easy for me to do it. And then in terms of fruit, I have about, I would say close to a cup of strawberries every day. I have a banana and I have about a half a cup of blueberries every day. And, um, that, I mean, there, there are my fruits and vegetables and everything else. You know, I have meat and I have, uh, grains of some kind. Usually know, I have meat and I have grains of some kind. Usually these days it's oatmeal. And I have, what am I forgetting? I have some Greek yogurt. I have some almonds to get some good fat in addition to the saturated fat that I'm getting, you know, to get some unsaturated fat. I like almonds. I also have some chocolate every day, which has

some unsaturated, some saturated fat. So those are the basic. I mean, there's my diet and I also do take a multivitamin and I'll explain why and which in a minute. The bare minimum that we'd ask for multivitamin is, you know, okay, we're going to eat fruits, we're going to eat vegetables, but that doesn't necessarily mean we're going to have all the micronutrients at the right levels. So at least, you know, we want that supplement to bring everything up to where it should be to the healthy, normal range. Now that even like doing that is not very expensive. Creating that product is not very expensive. It just takes, you know, thought and it takes research and takes time. If you were to do it, let's say, I mean, I don't even know actually what the cost per bottle would be for just that alone,

but I can tell you it wouldn't be an expensive product. If you want to make a great product, you have room to add more things in to it. So what else should be added? Well, many multivitamins, they just kind of add proprietary blends of crap. Some of them have BCAAs, which makes no sense. There's no reason to supplement BCAAs if you're eating enough protein, unless you're training fasted. I've talked to a lot about this, but the average person on a day-to-day basis, especially the average person working out that knows a bit about dieting, that's eating enough protein, does not need any BCAAs. You also find enzymes, digestive enzymes in multivitamins, which again, the average person

with a healthy gut doesn't need digestive, doesn't need to supplement digestive enzymes. Your body produces these enzymes and unless you have a problem, it produces everything it needs and you're not going to gain anything from adding those to your supplementation. Probiotics, sometimes you'll find some probiotics and multivitamins. And again, if you have gut problems, probiotics, we know that scientifically speaking, they can definitely help. There may be benefits for people with healthy guts. We don't know. This is a line of research that it's just ongoing.

that it's just, it's ongoing. So, but how probiotics are sold, a lot of probiotics are sold as if, you know, this is guaranteed to help you. If you, you know, you have a healthy gut, this is guaranteed to help you. This is, it's going to boost your immune system. It's going to help you lose weight.

It's going to improve your skin, your hair, blah, blah, blah. And that's just not true. Again, there may be benefits to healthy people, but we just don't know yet. So if you're going to sell probiotics, honestly, that's kind of how you have to sell it, which obviously isn't very compelling, which is why you don't see that. Ironically, I'm working on a meal replacement shake and actually the formulation is done. So now we're getting samples going and it's going to contain probiotics. Um, and, but that's how in the sales copy is this is basically going to be the pitch. It's going to be, Hey, so here's this research that we know that if you have, if you have any gut issues

or certain types of gut issues, like IBS type things or whatever probiotics can help. Uh, if you have a healthy gut, we don't know, but it's possible. And here are the possible benefits. And then we're including them in this product also because, because it's possible. And here are the possible benefits. And then we're including them in this product also because, because it's a mirror placement shake and it's going to be a high calorie shake. And if it is going to help you digest it at all, then, and if it is going to help with any sort of absorption or anything, then great. They're not super expensive. I'm putting them in there, uh, you know, with my fingers crossed, basically. You'll also find some of the added stuff in, in multivitamins. You'll find like proprietary blends of fruit and vegetable powders,

which, um, again, we'll talk about greens supplements in the next podcast, but yeah, that's fine. I mean, you can just eat your fruits and vegetables or you can, you can get them powdered, but when you have a hundred milligram proprietary blend of fruit and vegetable powders, it's going to do absolutely nothing. If you were taking, I would say, 15 to 20 grams a day of certain fruits and vegetables, certain powdered fruit and vegetables, that could definitely help. Again, it wouldn't replace your fruit and vegetable intake because it's not the same fresh vegetables. It's not the same as eating vegetables that have been powdered or eating fruit that's been powdered.

But I would say that at least that could help, but 100 milligrams is not going to do anything. Sometimes you'll also find stuff that's supposed to help your body detox, like it's supposed to detox your liver or help your kidneys detox or whatever, and that's bullshit. help your body detox, like it's supposed to detox your liver or help your kidneys detox or whatever. And that's bullshit. If you just go to Legion, go to legionathletics.com and search for detox. You'll see an article I wrote on this subject. And the long story short is, yes, we're exposed to a lot of toxins in our environment and a lot of poisons. And yes, we know that some of these toxins lodge in fatty tissues, but it's, you can't just take, you know, a supplement to get rid of it. You can't even, you're not necessarily even

just, you know, exercise sweating doesn't necessarily get rid of them. Um, so that, that's kind of the long story short in detoxing. A lot of people, they turn to detoxing as just a way to rapidly lose weight. And that's just starvation dieting, which I mean, uh, if you want to do that, okay, you can do that, but you don't have to take, you have to waste money on detox supplements. Just, you know, eat, uh, just eat 200 grams of protein a day. Uh, that's it. That's all you get and do that for five days. Um, kind of like a, you know, a protein sparing modified fast type of thing. If you would really want to do that. Of course, that's not something I recommend. It's not like, I just, I think, I think starvation dieting is silly. Um, just be patient, do it right. And you know, you don't have to suffer through eating no

food, uh, for a week or whatever. So you'll find a lot of other ingredients in multivitamins, stuff with no scientific research to back why it's there. The main point is just to create a long label, a padded label, a padded ingredients list, where when you look at it as a consumer, again, like I was saying earlier, it comes back to perception. It's all just about perceived value. If you were to see a multivitamin with a small number of ingredients, you might instinctively think that is less valuable than a multivitamin with a long list of ingredients. And this applies to supplements in general. This has been part of the supplement game for a long time is have a massive list of ingredients.

You'll find this with fat burners a lot too, where you'll have, you know, five proprietary blends that have 20 ingredients each. So it's just an insane amount of ingredients. But what you don't know is, you know, you can list an ingredient on a proprietary blend if there's less than a milligram of it. So there could be basically nothing of the majority of those. And don't think companies don't do this because they do. A proprietary blend, that first ingredient, it's predominance by weight. So that first ingredient means there's the most of that in the product out of anything else. And then the second, or at least in that blend,

the second ingredient is the second most, but that first ingredient could actually be 99% of the blend. So if the first ingredient is something cheap, and then you have a bunch of other stuff that comes after it, and some of it might be expensive and good stuff, it may be one milligram of each and yes, companies do this. So that's, that's, you know, the multivitamin, uh, that, that's kind of gives you the big picture of the multivitamin supplement and why for the, for a long time, uh, I didn't take any multivitamins. And then I found two, I found one by a company called garden of life that was decent. Um, And then there was another by Source Naturals that also was decent, but they were just okay. I felt like they were good enough to buy, but they didn't excite me.

So I made my own and that is the name of the product is Triumph. And if you're familiar with me and my work, of course, you've heard of Legion. You know that I have a line of supplements and you probably know the story of kind of how it came about, which is basically this. What I just told you about multivitamins, that's basically the long story short with everything we have. We have a protein powder. We have a pre-workout. We have a post-workout. of not being able to find supplements that I myself, as I became more educated, really could even justify buying and using myself, let alone recommending to others. And I saw an opportunity there to cut out the middleman of wholesalers. And the whole wholesale

retail model is really what makes it impossible to make good supplements because of the margins that are required. You know, if you buy something at GNC for $40, it was produced from anywhere from, let's say, $2 to $4. And that's a standard retail margin. That's how the retail world works because of the margins that each player wants, the manufacturer, the wholesaler, the retailer. So when you mark it all up, mark it all up, and it comes to you, the consumer, you're now at 8 to 10x generally. And in some cases in supplements, actually, I'd say 8 to 10x is probably a general across the board. Retail supplements can be even higher because it's just a shit industry.

So I saw an opportunity to cut out all the middlemen, have an online business, direct consumer, and just put all that money that would normally be taken by the middlemen and just put it into creating better products. And it's gone very well and people have responded very well and the products have become very, very popular and you can find them on review sites and whatever. And you're not going to ever find products like them in GNC or vitamin shop because the margins aren't there. I guess if they were to buy directly from me, we probably could make some of them work, but that's not how they work. They work through wholesalers and distributors and that's it. So I created my own multivitamin. I'm not going to give a big pitch on it. If you want to check

it out, it's called Triumph. Go to legionathletics.com. You can look at it. Um, 22 essential vitamins and minerals, uh, including ones that are expensive like vitamin K, you know, K one and K two vitamin D, um, and, and minerals, uh, like I was saying earlier, you know, zinc and magnesium in actual good dosages. And so, uh, there are a lot of, a lot of work and a lot of thought was put into the vitamins and minerals in the product. And then there are 14 additional ingredients that also confer quite a few health benefits that a lot of people buy separately. And that was also something that I wanted to do when I was working on this multivitamin. And it's not just me. I have people that work with me on this, of course, because I'm informed, but I'm not a

scientist. And so I've worked with scientists on this and I've had a lot of ideas of my own. And then I've obviously gotten a lot of help. But so there are, you know, the idea is like, okay, we have quite a bit of money that we can spend on adding additional things. So let's add things that will work synergistically with the vitamins and minerals in some cases. And then also just kind of what is the purpose of this multivitamin? Okay, so it's for active people. And what do we want out of it? We want to have more energy. We want to sleep better.

We want to recover faster. We want to perform better. So what can we add? You know, you only can go so far with, with vitamins and minerals, of course, but there are a lot of other things that you can, a lot of other supplements that you can take, uh, that people do take that is by separately. Of course it just adds up. So if, you know, if you have your basic multivitamin and then you also are taking eight other things in this case, triumph has 14 additional ingredients. I mean, you're obviously one, it's going to be super expensive. And two, your cabinet is just going to be, you're going to need a pantry just for your supplements alone. So, you know, go, you can go check it out. And that's the multivitamin now that I, that's all I take. And it's become very, very popular. You can check it out on Amazon. If you want to see reviews, people love it. Probably the most common benefits that I hear from people is more and more energy, more mental clarity, sleeping better. Um, and just kind of feeling better, better mood. And

that's not surprising because when you go look at what's in this product there in all the scientific research is linked on our website. Of course, you can go see for yourself. Those are the effects that, you know, most people are going to experience. Of course, there are non-responders with everything, but the research shows, if you go look at the literature, that when you take this, you should expect this effect. And of course, everything is also included at clinically effective dosages, which means the actual dosages used in clinical studies. And that's a very important point and something that I've, I harp on a lot because I want to educate consumers and I want you as a consumer, even if you don't buy my multivitamin, I want you when you're evaluating other multivitamins and other supplements to be keeping this in mind

that even if something appears to be science-based and the ingredients, uh, appear to be, uh, you know, based by on actual research. Okay. You know, beta alanine. Yes, that should be in a pre-workout. That makes sense. But how much is the key? You can't just take any random amount of beta alanine and expect to see the results in clinical studies. You need to take the amount used in studies. So that's something of course, with Legion, with my supplements, in studies. So that's something, of course, with Legion, with my supplements, that's one of our core values, you could say, in terms of products, is everything needs to be science-based and at clinically effective dosages. We've had to drop ingredients from products, from formulations that I would have loved to have,

but I wouldn't have been able to put enough because when you look at the research, it's in some cases you need quite a bit to really justify its inclusion in a product and, and be able to justify, um, I wouldn't say like when, when I'm, I want to be able to, when I'm marketing and selling, I want to be able to make very clear, definitive, hard sell type of statements. I want to be able to say research shows this will do this and not have to beat around the bush, not have to lie. So to do that, we need to make sure that we're, we have enough. And if anyone educated looks at the copy and really looks at the research can, can say that's an accurate statement. That's an honest statement. And, um, we've heard from a lot of people that, uh, you know, PhDs and people that work

in biochemists and stuff that have written us just to say, you guys are doing it right. Like, I'm impressed. Wow. This is a really good product. It's sold very honestly. The research is, you cite good research, blah, blah, blah. So we have to stick to that standard. Like, for example, in, I don't remember, remember triumph was a while ago, but I remember a recent example. I have a green supplement, which again, I'll talk about green supplements in the next podcast because it's kind of similar. The idea sounds good, but the execution is poor. And so I want to do it my own way kind of thing. But I wanted to include, I was talking earlier about the pigment in fruits. So the pigments, the fruits contain, colorful fruits and vegetables contain something called, it's an anthocyanin is the name of the molecule.

And these are very important in the body, and they confer a wide variety of extracting them. Like if you want to just have pure anthocyanins, uh, you know, in a product, it's so expensive that at a, at a dosage that I felt comfortable with. And that was a, I could say is a clinically effective dosage. It was going to cost $30 a bottle for my green supplement just for that alone. So I killed it. And what I didn't do is just puts like other companies. I didn't just put powdered blueberries in there just cause then people know, and you've probably heard that blueberries contain antioxidants. You may have heard they contain high amounts of anthocyanins and you go, oh, that's good. And you may have looked at the label of Genesis, which is my greens product and see, oh, it has blueberries. That's good. But to reach the amount of anthocyanins that you need to reach through just powdered blueberries alone, it becomes,

it's not possible. I mean, you'd have to, you'd have like a scoop of blueberry powder alone. So that's why I wanted the molecule itself too expensive, have to kill it. So anyways, that's enough about pitching my stuff. If you want to check it out, just go to legionathletics.com. You can check out the multivitamin triumph and you can, if you want to preemptively check out Green's product, it's Genesis. But that's basically a long story short with multivitamin triumph. And you can, if you want to preemptively check out a greens product, it's Genesis. Um, but that's basically a long story short with multivitamins. Um, probably something else also worth mentioning is, uh, the amount of servings, uh, amount of capsules that a multivitamin is, how many, how many do you have to take a one a day? Cause the point is you only can fit. I mean, everything has, has volume. Obviously you only

can fit so much in a, in one, if you're taking one cap or one tab a day, it's not going to contain very much. And in terms of press tablets, I know that there are also concerns about how much, how well are that, are they, are they digested? And so, and of course absorbed. So what, how much is your body really getting out of that one tab a day? I know that there, I've seen, you know, just news stories, little random things here and there of people, uh, having half digested, like pooping out half digested, uh, multivitamin pills, uh, which obviously, you know, if you already have one tab, which is not going to have very much in the way of, uh, you know, micronutrients in way of anything. And then you're only able, you know, your body only got through half of it before it exited you. Then how valuable is that really? Now, in the case of my multivitamin,

you take eight a day, if you want full dosages of everything. Um, that sounds like a lot, but you take four at breakfast and four, you could be at lunch or I do, I do breakfast and dinner just to space it out because your body takes time for your body to absorb. Uh, and it's good to split it up like that because your body can only absorb so much of, especially certain vitamins and minerals at one time, like water-soluble vitamins like B vitamins, for instance, if it's just going to pee out excess. So the idea is that you, that's all, that's why, for instance,

also same thing with vitamin C. If you're sick, you don't want to just super dose vitamin C in one go. You don't want to take 10,000 vitamin C at a time. It's much, it's much smarter to take about a gram of vitamin C every hour because then your body's able to absorb it, use it, absorb it and use it and have a constant elevated level of vitamin C in the body, which is shown to help the immune system help, you know, beat, beat sickness. So same concept is with, with my multivitamins, just multivitamins in general, if they do have a considerable amount of stuff in them, that splitting up that intake makes sense. And the pills themselves with Triumph, with Mime, are not super large. They're normal pills,

but we cut it off at eight because we could have went less. I mean, again, this is a matter of perception. If people, you know, yeah, of course they would say, oh, well, taking two pills or taking one pill instinctively, I'd say I'd rather take one pill a day or two pills than eight pills. Maybe not thinking about it. Well, what's the purpose of this supplement? Is it to just take one pill? Is it to take the least amount of pills or is it to get the most benefits out of it? I mean, I personally, I probably would have been okay with going up to 10 pills or even why like taking pills doesn't bother me. So it's about how much can I get out of this product? And, um, we kind of got the formulation finally to a point where the price made sense and we're really happy with all the ingredients, but it was eight pills a day. So, you know, I said, oh, well, whatever, let's just put it out there and get

feedback from people. And fortunately people have kind of come to, I guess, the same conclusion as me is like, well, it's not a big deal. You take four pills and breakfast, four pills at dinner and look at the benefits though. Look at everything you're getting that far outweighs the negative of having to take pills. So keep that in mind with other multivitamins is the less pills you're taking, the less stuff is in it. I mean, that's just a fact. All right. So I think that's everything. If you have any questions, you can put them down below on YouTube, although it's hard for me to get to all those because YouTube's comment management system sucks. So better is to head over to my website and put a question on the AMA that's

linked on the front page or just tweet me or send me an email or whatever, and I'll be happy to get back to you. I hope you liked the episode, and next week we will talk green supplements. I have to check my calendar. I may have one or two more supplement ideas to talk about, and then we'll move on to other stuff. So also you can let me know what would you like to see? Um, I'm going to be putting some time into planning out the podcast a bit more for this year. Um, what type of guests I want to go after and, you know, how can I, how can I make it better? So anything you want to share with me on that is, uh, I'm all ears.

So again, uh, emailing me is a good way to make sure that I see it or dropping a comment anywhere on the website, really. I will see it because Disqus, which is the comment management system that I use, is quite good. It all can run through my email so I don't miss anything. All right, so that's it for now, and I will see you next week. Thanks again.