5 Supplements You Should Consider If You Take Your Health and Longevity Seriously
Whether you are a veteran meathead and have memories of crushing NO-Xplode before workouts, a science nerd obsessed with the Huberman Lab Podcast, or someone new to fitness noticing all the shiny supplement labels at the front desk of the gym along with all the colorful shaker bottles floating around (I think I have fallen or do fall in to all 3 categories), if you have spent any time in the gym or at any point have started an exercise routine to improve your health, you have undoubtedly been exposed to supplements.
But the supplement world can be a tough one to navigate. So, what should you be taking? We’re going to help answer that question in this article.
Let’s start, however, with this. You need to have the foundation of your house built first before supplements matter. A balanced diet consisting of mostly clean, whole food sources along with having your sleep and recovery in order is the foundation and the bricks that make your house. Without these, supplements will not be able to provide the potentially significant benefit that they can provide.
So, you have the foundation of your house built for a healthy body that will perform at its highest level and provide you with the longevity to remain active through a long life. NOW let’s get to the supplements that can help take your health and longevity to the next level.
We are going to discuss 5 supplements here that you should take if health, performance, and longevity matter to you. Let’s stick with our house analogy and discuss the ‘3 roommates’ that live in the house together.
Multi-Vitamin
If sound nutrition, good sleep, and proper recovery are the foundation and bricks of your health and fitness house, a multi-vitamin is the mortar that holds the bricks together.
Our bodies depend on many different vitamins and minerals to complete the complex tasks of keeping our bodies moving and performing our physical activities on a daily basis. There are over 40 essential micronutrients (think things like zinc, magnesium, calcium, etc.) required to maintain our bodily functions efficiently. Sometimes we cannot cover all our needs through our diet alone. This is where supplementing with a multi-vitamin comes in. Maintaining appropriate levels of vitamins and minerals can help our immune system function optimally, keep our mood regulated, and help with optimal hormonal functioning (1).
Make a good daily multi-vitamin part of your daily supplement routine to pick up the slack for any gaps that may be left in micronutrient needs not met by your diet.
Vitamin D
Vitamin D is the Ring doorbell camera or security system that keeps our health and fitness house safe and protected.
Vitamin D provides a powerful boost to the immune system and can help bolster immune response to aid in protecting the body against disease (2). Vitamin D also has an important role in absorbing and retaining calcium and phosphorus, helping to build and maintain bone health (3). Vitamin D can also aid in reducing overall inflammation in the body.
It’s often included in a multivitamin supplement, but to really get the true power and boost to our immune system that vitamin D can provide, we often must supplement it independently and at higher dosages. The recommended dietary allowance (RDA), alone, for vitamin D is 600 IU (international units) and many do not even hit that amount on a daily basis.
Fish Oil
Now we get to the roommates living in our health and fitness house. Fish oil is the elderly grandparent of protein powder and creatine’s who owns the house, but benefits from having protein powder and creatine around to help with chores and other manual labor projects, so likes living with the ‘young people.’ Fish oil is a retired triathlete who looks forward to pickleball 3 days a week now to stay active between reading books.
Research points to fish oil potentially having a role in maintaining cognitive function as we age, which can help protect against dementia and Alzheimer’s Disease (4). Fish oil also has potent anti-inflammatory effects that can help to reduce muscle soreness after workouts and may even help us in maintaining muscle as we age (5). Some research also even points towards fish oil helping with symptoms of depression (6).
A high-quality fish oil supplement will provide an abundant source of omega-3 fatty acids, which is what we’re after to get the benefits listed above. The reference daily intake (RDI) for omega-3 is 1,100 mg for women and 1,600 mg for men, while the RDI for the combined total of EPA and DHA (specific types of omega-3 fatty acids) is 250-500 mg. If your fish oil supplement hits these baseline values, you’re off to a good start.
Protein Powder
Our next roommate is protein powder. A classic ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’ case of a person. Protein powder has a successful career running a manual labor business, is tatted up and jacked and can rep 2 times their body weight for multiple sets on squats, but they are also a big teddy bear. Protein powder volunteers at the local animal shelter and never passes up the opportunity to help an elderly man or woman cross the street.
Protein powder has been a victim of the power of marketing in the supplement world. Often, it’s associated with gym bros who ‘want to get huge and shredded.’ News flash here people, protein powder is literally just (basically) all the same amino acids that are in the chicken breast you eat on top of your salad, just in powder form. You’re not going to ‘get too bulky’ by drinking a few protein shakes.
What you will accomplish though, with using a high-quality protein powder supplement and increasing your protein intake via a shake or 2 added into your daily nutrition, as mentioned above, is getting all the amino acids that are the building blocks necessary for the body to build muscle, maintain a normal digestive system, and make hormones and neurotransmitters.
You must have sufficient protein in your diet to build and maintain muscle. Of course, building muscle is important to achieve our fitness goals and progress in the gym. It’s also important in helping us achieve our body composition goals. However, maintaining muscle is extremely important as we age. Sarcopenia, or loss of muscle as we age, is linked to increased incidence of frailty, falls and fractures in elderly individuals (7).
To build muscle, it is recommended to take in 0.5 to 0.8 grams of protein per pound of bodyweight (8). For a 150-lb individual this would mean 75 grams to 120 grams of protein per day. And while it could be debated that you may even want more than this, if you aren’t even currently hitting this number, you should strongly consider increasing your protein intake and adding in a protein powder shake can be a good way to do this.
Creatine
Our final roommate is Creatine. Creatine was the directionless kid in undergrad who loved going to the gym and just wanted to get huge. They got a little off course after college, but finally matured and got their head on straight, decided to change their ways and get serious, and is now in medical school while living with cousin protein powder and grandparent fish oil.
Creatine has been absolutely shown in research to improve performance in the gym. Largely due to its ability to help maintain ATP levels within muscle cells while work is being performed. Creatine can help improve and increase maximal strength, power production, and sprint speed (9).
What a lot of people don’t know, and what is becoming increasingly clearer with more research on creatine, is that it can also be a beneficial tool for cognitive health and function as well. A growing body of literature points towards creatine’s ability to improve cognitive processing, maintain brain function and even help with recovery from trauma (10).
Creatine monohydrate at 5-10 grams per day has been recommended for the above benefits to be achieved (11).
Closing
A closing point to make regarding supplements is that quality absolutely matters. The quality of ingredients used, sourcing, and production all matter and can make a difference in the effectiveness of a given supplement. There are a lot of great brands out there, but it can be challenging to find one company that makes all the supplements you are looking for and at the desired quality. We believe Thorne Supplements provides this option. Thorne’s ingredients are lab tested for purity, quality, and to ensure no contaminants. They also make a point not to use unnecessary fillers or binders and have over 30 supplements that are NSF certified for use by competitive athletes, which are some of the reasons why they have earned our trust and why we personally order supplements from Thorne as a staff at Outlast.
Because of our belief in Thorne’s quality, we have also chosen to partner with them to offer our clients a discount on their retail prices and to receive free shipping. If you wanted to take advantage of this offer, simply go to https://www.thorne.com/u/outlasthealth and create an account and follow the ‘Thorne Supplements’ link under the ‘Shop’ tab on the outlasthealth.com website and place your order from there.
Be Well!
Chris Stires, PT, DPT
Sources:
1. https://www.webmd.com/diet/health-benefits-of-multivitamins
2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3166406/
5. https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/fish-oil-bodybuilding#bodybuilding-benefits
6. https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/benefits-of-fish-oil#TOC_TITLE_HDR_11
7. https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/23167-sarcopenia
9. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8228369/