Supplements for Ultrarunning with Brady Holmer PhD (c) and Examine.com | KoopCast Episode 175

Trail and ultra runners, what is going on? What's happening? Welcome to another episode of the KoopCast. As always, I'm your humble host, Coach Jason Koop. And this episode of the podcast is an attempt to help you, the listeners, navigate the wild, wild and loosely regulated world of sports supplementation. From the tried and true supplements like caffeine to some of the newer kids on the block like beetroot juice, the landscape of sports supplementation is indeed a dizzying one. Now you add to the fact that there is an undeniable and insurmountable amount of influence or pressure that comes across your social media feed and your podcast feed on a daily basis, trying to lure you into the latest supplement du jour based off of this, it worked for me strategy. And by the way, here's a 20% off coupon code. And I don't blame you, the listeners for being confused. In fact, every single week without fail, I receive an inordinate amount of questions that start out with what are your thoughts on and end with supplement X. And those questions are primarily driven by the supplement du jour hype cycle. And I try to answer those questions as thoroughly as I can based on the available evidence. But this is becoming more and more of an uphill battle

for me to personally understand because I am not an expert and spend every waking moment researching this stuff. Add to the fact that there's a varying degree of the strength of the studies that are out there. They study different cohorts and the outcomes that are measured can constantly be misconstrued by both a lay and even experienced audience. And it even adds to the confusion. So I even have an enormously difficult time keeping up. One of the ways that I try to weed through all of this is through consensus statements put out like put out by entities like the ISSM and IOC. In fact, to date, my single most popular episode is one with Nick Tiller, who is the lead author on the ISSN's position paper on nutrition for ultramarathon training and racing. Another way that I curate the research is I go directly to the meta analyses to get an initial grasp on the particular subject or supplement. Now, aside from these position statements and meta analyses, I also use a website called examine.com to help cull the research on a particular supplement that I am interested in. And while I always take the time to read the individual papers themselves, I feel that this is a good tool to initially get a bearing on any particular supplement. So in this episode, I bring one of the people from examine.com into the KoopCast.

Welcome to the podcast today, Brady Homer. And we talk about this whole array of how examine.com curates the research, how you should view supplementation for yourself and how you can make correct decisions on what supplements to take, what supplements to forego, and how to go through the process of individually evaluating them. I want to take this time to reemphasize a longstanding philosophy that I've had with this podcast, because one of the reasons that I can authentically opine on the supplement industry is that since the onset, this podcast has been without sponsors or without endorsements of any kind. And I made that choice very deliberately when starting this podcast, because I wanted to have conversations just like this with Brady in an unadulterated and unfiltered way so that we can talk about whatever we wanted to talk about. And the supplement industry itself, because of the nature of how it's set up, and we will get into that in part of this podcast, the supplement industry itself is a big reason why I wanted to create that separation between me and any sort of revenue stream that they might potentially throw at me. And that has actually happened. I've been approached by all of these companies for sponsorships on this podcast, and I've said no to every single one of them. All right, that is my spiel. And with that out of the way, I am getting right out of the way. Here's my conversation with Brady Homer from examine.com,

all about sports supplementation, and how you can curate and call the research yourself to make the right decisions. Appreciate you coming back on the podcast. We're going to go right for the jugular. We're going to dive right into it. Everybody will probably tune out after the first three minutes, because we've gone through all the important stuff. But so what Brady and I are about to go through is we've got a list of supplements. You can add to this, by the way, and just surprise me. I'll have to come up with a ranking off the top of my head. We've got a list of about 20 supplements that we've both individually ranked on a one through five scale, one being no benefit or hardly any benefit and nobody should really be taking it. Five being a high benefit and everybody should take it. And we're just going to run through this really quick. Brady's going to rate it. I'm going to rate it one by one, and then we'll see where we're different and where we're the same and where we're going to like poke each other's ribs because we have a stupid answer. Does that sound good?

Sounds good. I think, yeah, if nobody gets anything else from this podcast, this first few minutes will be very, very essential. It might be very entertaining. Okay. You ready? All right, let's do it. We're kicking off right with caffeine. Five. I gave it a five, two amino acids. I gave that a two, but then I have the caveat that protein would be a five. Okay. Uh, I agree with your caveat, but I downgraded amino acids to one. All right. Um, exogenous ketones. Yeah, this one was a hard one for me, but I gave them a two, two. I gave it a one, two. I'm going to, I'm a little bit more harsh than you. I think this is the thing that's going to emerge. My ones were rare and I really only gave the ones to a few. It's a deserved one. All right. Okay. Iron. I gave iron a one.

Okay. Oh, here we go. I have situationally five. Oh, okay. See, I guess, yeah, another caveat for iron one depending five, perhaps it can be either one or five. Yeah. And we're going to get into that a little bit and how you guys like call your research and how to actually present it. So perfect. Okay. The next one is my favorite athletic greens, which is now known as AG one. I have to say that the jury is out on that one. Jury is out, man. So you're trying to be too diplomatic. I have to being a big conservative. I know. So I would give it, I would say jury is out, but probably two, but I downgraded it to a negative one because it's a cult. All right. That's fair enough. Fair. Okay. I guess I don't hold my tongue. All right. Fair enough.

Creatine. I gave creatine a five. I gave it a four. Nitrate. A four. I gave it a four as well. Probiotics. Those get a two. I gave it a zero. Prebiotics. I gave those a two. I gave that one a zero two. Beta alanine. I think it's a five. I gave it a four. Sodium bicarbonate. Four. I gave it a situational five. So it's the situation being really high intensity stuff. Got it. Yeah. That makes sense. All right. Vitamin D. I gave vitamin D a one. I gave it a two. That might be another situational one. Mostly, mostly one. It might even get downgraded to a zero just because of vitamin D is also a cult. So maybe a one downgraded to a negative one because it's a cult. The cult though is starting to fall apart and get replaced by something else. It is. Yeah, it is. I agree.

The cult was, it hit its peak about a year ago and I think it's starting to come down a little bit. A hundred percent. A hundred percent. All right. Glutamine. That gives it a two. I gave it a two as well. Vitamin E. That gives it a two. I gave it a two as well. HMB. Three. I gave it a two. Collagen. I'm going to change my answer on this one. I'm going to give collagen a one. Ooh, collagen a one. I gave it a three. Kind of like right down the middle because there's like some compelling use cases for it when it's combined with heavy strength training. But it's, I don't know. It's, it's hard. Maybe another situational, situational thing there with collagen. It's also, it's also semi-cultish. So we got a downgraded because of that. All right. Uh, the last one I have is curcumin.

I gave curcumin a one. One. I gave it a two. All right. Emerging, emerging two, emerging two. Got it. Got it. I did have two that I added that I couldn't think of. Um, so the first one was, uh, tart cherry juice. I gave that one a two. Okay. I'll give a tart cherry juice a three. All right. And then this one, this one's kind of a, an odd one, but a mitochondrial targeted antioxidants. There's one specifically called MitoQ. Um, there's actually a fair bit of research on it in regards to like cardiovascular, uh, health and endothelial function. Um, you know, the problem with the MitoQ is that MitoQ is a brand. And so all the studies on MitoQ are funded by MitoQ, but it's an interesting, uh, it's kind of an interesting emerging one. I gave that a two though, just due to that. I'll give it a zero because of the brand.

Plus it's emerging research. And I would actually, in all honesty, have to look into it a little bit more in all fairness to that. Always be industry funded research. You know, it's not to be immediately discounted, but of course, you know, it's always requires a little bit more skepticism maybe when, when reading those things. A hundred percent. So we weren't that far apart on most of them. And I think one of the things I want to illustrate just by like rapid fire running through all this is we could go through this for forever. Like we, it would take 10 podcasts to actually go through everything and kind of like, you know, rack and stack them a little bit and talk about all the different situations and things like that. And I was actually working on the intro, the, then I'm going to record afterwards to this podcast and trying to like formulate my thoughts around this. And it's a dizzy, it's a dizzying landscape to try to navigate. And it only becomes more dizzying as time goes on because the products that come out far outstrip the information about the products themselves, because a lot of them, they come out on the level of the mechanistic spec, uh, speculation. And then the mechanistic speculation kind of gets propagated in the social media space. And then the research happens and that it just happens at a faster rate.

So it's impossible to navigate. And, you know, not to mention, I think just the list that we had of whatever it was, 20 or so different, those are just like individual ingredients and compounds. And I mean, that doesn't even begin to, you know, span the breadth of like the supplements that you can buy, which often are combinations of all of them. So it's like, we just listed very rarely when you buy, you know, a vitamin supplement or like any sort of performance supplement, are you buying just, you know, something with curcumin and salt? It's typically a blend of all those. So you have the 20 supplements, which then just branch out into the thousands and thousands and thousands of different like supplement brands that you can buy. So it's, it's almost an impossible space for anybody to navigate. Yeah. A hundred percent. So one of the reason that I have you on the podcast is one of the ways that I personally have you, or one of the tools that I use to help navigate the space is your site examine.com.

And it's one of the first sites that I go to, I would say I used to, I used two basic tools. I use the position statements that like the IOC and the ISSN put out. I think that that's a good way to cull down the research. If you're not intimately involved with it and get an expert opinion on certain things. And then I use your site. I always go back and I read as much as I can, the actual papers themselves and their entirety, but to keep up with everything in real time is just absolutely impossible. So it's a tool that I use. And I wanted to bring you on the podcast to specifically talk about how it kind of like works from the inside, because I think that that's a good representation for the listeners to kind of, to, to, to start to comprehend what they need to do in the decision-making process. But before we kind of get into all of the mechanics, like what's the basic like value proposition that you guys go into your office every day, your virtual office every day, how do you work? Like what's the basic value proposition that you're trying to create to the customers that are, that are ultimately, you know, coming in, purchasing the service?

Yeah. So I will just like, uh, clarify for listeners that it's not technically, I guess, my site, but I do work for examine. So I don't want them to think that I'm like the CEO of examine or anything. So, uh, I just wanted to clarify that before he had, uh, forward, but so the basic value proposition really like examine kind of the ethos that examine, and you can even read that in our mission statement is we want to tell you what works, um, so that you can be healthier and perform better. So to help you reach your health goals, whatever that might be, maybe that's a performance goal, but just to literally tell you what works, um, given, you know, our best read of the landscape of the evidence and our best read of kind of the science. And so people really need, you know, as you mentioned, there's such a dizzying array of supplements out there, a dizzying array of just information about these supplements more than any one person could sort through on their own.

So, you know, people need a source where they can go to for the latest up-to-date information, you know, when the latest studies drop, you know, where most people don't know where to find those. So they need a source for that. They need a comprehensive source. So, you know, that you're getting kind of all of the data, you know, perhaps not all of it, but maybe, you know, 89% of it that's available on something. Um, and then an unbiased kind of source of that information as well. And I really think that that is the unbiased part is one of the main, um, areas where examine stands out from any other source where you're going to find supplement information. And that's, you know, to be honest, obviously as their employee and a little bit biased, but you won't find unbiased supplement or nutrition information anywhere else. And so what I mean by unbiased is that at examine, we don't run ads, um, on the site. We don't take, um, ad or sponsorship money from supplement or nutrition companies. And then all of our research team, you know, including myself, we are required to be free of affiliations from supplement nutrition, health intervention companies. And so, and that way you can assure, you can be assured that, you know, when you're reading about a certain supplement on the site, we don't have any stake in that supplement. We are just here to tell you, does this work? Um, does it not work? Or, you know, somewhere in the middle, what is the direction of this, um, supplement to whatever outcome that you're interested in? So really just, you know, we, we all love this stuff too. I think that's kind of, uh, where part of the value lies as well. You know, I, I love reading research and it's, it's what I do all day and it's what everybody on the research team does. So we're interested in

finding the latest studies and we're interested in diving deep and kind of understanding the nuances of the study, um, and using that to kind of interpret our, um, to interpret the study and tell you what that means and what it means for your health or, or your goals. So definitely an important piece as well, because the results of a scientific study are clearly important. What did this study show? But if you, you know, don't know the, um, statistics, maybe underlying the statistics that were used in that study or the methods that were used in that study, um, the results might not actually mean much. So those are necessary contexts to understand the results of the study. And so we do that backend work for you. And then kind of, we tell you all of the important info that you need. So, so you don't have to read the study yourself essentially.

So it's one thing to be unbiased, right? And I think that's, that's like a necessity for a site like this to not have any affiliation that's pulling you in one way or the other, or, or, or kind of coloring an opinion, but it's another thing to have expertise in the topics. And this is one thing that I'm really curious just about your setup more from a business standpoint, but I think the listeners will find interesting. What like, can you kind of explain your team and your research team specifically and what gives them the expertise to be able to evaluate what we're calling this dizzying array of research that kind of comes across the board, because it's hard to be an expert in any one of those supplements that we just mentioned earlier, much less all of them. And then all of them in the different combinations.

So if you're giving somebody the pitch, right? Like why should they trust unbiased examine versus some unbiased opinion from somebody else versus an opinion versus a position statement or whatever, not that those are mutually exclusive, but like, what's the expertise piece of it and how does that fold into, into the, into the equation? Yeah. So it might almost help to, you know, to go, to go at that by kind of taking you through how maybe we go from somebody like me writing about a study to that studies content being like published on the examine site eventually. So there's like many layers before any kind of information gets, gets published on the site. So just from the expertise standpoint, the research team is comprised of people like myself.

So people who either have degrees in exercise science, some have degrees in nutrition or public health. We have people with expertise in gut health. We have people who are nutritionists, registered dietitians, so on and so forth. So a broad kind of base of knowledge. Not any of us is, you know, an expert in all of these things that we're writing about, but we have many people who are at least expert in kind of one of them, which, which definitely helps. Now, me being an exercise scientist, I do write about studies that I'm not an expert in. So I'll write about gut health on occasion or pregnancy or something like that, of course, because we don't have people who are experts in all of those topics. But then kind of what the next layer of that is, you know, when a member of the research team does some digging on a particular supplement or particular topic, the next step is another examined team member is going to review whatever we wrote. So that's kind of like the first layer. So somebody else who has different expertise than me, maybe an examined team member who has expertise in gut health, they're going to give that a review and just say, you know, what does this look like generally from a content level perspective? Is this kind of what the science says? Maybe they're going to read the paper and they're going to fact check kind of everything that I wrote about just to make sure, you know, all our checks and balances are in place. So double kind of layer of checking there. And then we have a team of medical copy editors, which is an incredible like resource as well. So everything on the website gets content edited by medical copy editors just to grammatically make things look good, but also,

you know, make sure terms are well defined terms are translated so that users can actually understand them, you know, so I'm not using like, very, very, very technical language that people just aren't going to understand. And then often, we do have outside medical reviewers as well, look at everything that we publish. So endocrinologists, for instance, you know, physical therapists, somebody like that, depending on what the content is, they're going to give that a review as well. So it is really not just somebody who knows a lot about the topic or knows, you know, a little bit about a topic, writing about it, and then we just throw it up on the site. There's, you know, lots of review going into every single thing that is published on whether it's a supplement or a diet that you're reading about. So you really know that there have been multiple sets of eyes on, on kind of whatever you're reading about. What? Okay. So I go through this with Research Essentials for Ultra Running, which is, you know, our research newsletter. How many people hours goes into a standard examine.com article, your standard two to 4000 word article that you produce on, you know, kind of whatever it is of what you've got, you know, hundreds on how many, how many person hours goes into that? Yeah, it would depend kind of on the content. So I think a standard article, I guess that, you know, that word length might be like one of our intervention pages where we're writing, you know, in depth about a supplement, like what's it used for?

What's or what are the benefits and things like that? Oh, gosh, that would be person hours. I mean, you know, maybe 10 to 12 person hours. That seems about right. Just from, you know, thinking about how long it takes me to write it, you know, back and forth. So I would say about 10 to 12 would be a kind of accurate estimation. That's what I was figuring. And so if the listeners can appreciate this context, right, it's a 10 to 15 minute read, right? That's, that's a pretty standard read. That's taking 15 hours or 10 hours on the low end to actually compile. That's a lot of expertise to actually go through. And what the kind of the distinction that I want to make is it's not just something that you're writing for your lay publication magazine that has to come out on a specific frequency every single week or every single month that maybe might get touched by an editor, right? They're just editing the content. Here you have multiple layers of review that are both editing, copy editing, technical editing, fact checking, scientific, you know, review, like all of those different kind of all of those different facets, which makes it a much more, it's just a much more complicated idea. And once again, it's something that I appreciate reading a lot of your content.

You're being examined.com. Yeah, right. And one of the fun things and kind of cool parts about working with a team of researchers is that we're, most of us aren't really hesitant to kind of disagree if we find something that we think is like an error with someone else's pieces. And typically, you know, most of us are pretty good at taking like that constructive criticism. So I think this is kind of important, you know, not just for examin, but for like our discussions about science in general. So we had an example a few weeks ago where I think I wrote one of our just study summaries. So I was discussing kind of the latest findings of a certain study. And I had a sentence in there about, you know, carbohydrate or excess carbohydrates and sugar can lead to insulin resistance. And somebody on the team had an issue with that because they just questioned, you know, is this, is this actually right? You know, this is kind of dealing with the carbohydrate insulin model of obesity, but couldn't excess calories in general, regardless of the source lead to obesity and insulin resistance.

And I agreed with what they said. And so it was kind of just an instance of, I'm not here to argue, but like, thanks for pointing that out. You know, I just, this was a sentence that I wrote. And sometimes you don't, you know, think twice about maybe, oh, you know, what, what else could I have, I have said here. So that's why it's important to have a second set of eyes there. And so we kind of had a little bit of back and forth about what sounds better, what should we put here instead? And then ultimately like ended up revising that sentence. So it was fun just to like talk back and forth. And I think it's important to have discourse like that and also be open to, you know, someone else's interpretation and then changing your mind, which is also important in science as well. Okay. So fun question for you. How much does the public push back on things that you have written? Like, oh my God, no, you're totally wrong on vitamin D or whatever it is. You're laughing because you know, because you know it's happened and I can imagine where it's happened from.

Yeah. I know what's happened, but I can't have site specifics. Like if you were to ask kind of our, our person who gets all the emails from examine users, they can tell you like horror stories. So I don't have any specific kind of examples of that. Occasionally she will post kind of one, like a screenshot of a comment and just, you know, like laugh about it in the, in our Slack channel. But yeah, I don't unfortunately have specifics on that. I haven't gotten any like pushback on like, you know, social media, but I think we do get individual emails from people from time to time. But, but in all seriousness, like we joked about it on the onset, you're wading into kind of danger, not dangerous waters, but waters that are kind of like rife with a lot of emotion, right? Because people, people get really serious about, you know, the supplements that they take and the stances that other people have and blah, blah, blah, blah. And it's very polarizing arena.

And I can't imagine like sitting in that arena day after day after day, coming up with essentially position stands is what you guys are kind of doing at the end of the day, coming up with the position stands in a polarized arena and the feedback that the, that kind of comes from that public, especially when a lot of the information that out that is out there is propagated so widely throughout podcasts and articles and things like that. If there's something that is counter to that, it, it, it, it just, I'm just, I'm just, I'm just, I just have this thing in my head where the person who curates that particular piece of the feedback has got to have a really thick skin. Yeah. But I also think that just when you're presenting most of what I'm doing in the other research teams doing, when we're writing about things is it's very like black and white. It's just like, what did this study show? And what didn't show? I mean, we don't even go so far as to really even recommend anything. Like we don't honor any of our supplement pages say, you should take this because the evidence shows this it's like, we'll provide you with an A through D grade. What's the direction? Does it show tendency to improve or decrease or, you know, not improve something. And it's like, it's a very kind of subject or objective way of presenting the information rather than subjective. So trying the best to take emotion out of it, you know, but like you said, it's a very emotionally chart. Nutrition is a very emotionally charged space.

So, but I think we do the best job that we can, you know, not having the ties to supplements or whatever. So you can't really have the criticism coming from there. And then just, you know, taking all the emotion out of it and just like, this is what the science says, take it a little bit, feel about it how you want. But that's what I appreciate about it is because it's very, it's, it's boring, right? I mean, it's just kind of, here's what it is. It's nothing more, nothing less. We're not going to try to try to extrapolate things and like, let the practitioners do the extrapolation and the implementation. That's one of the things that, that kind of like separation of church and state of here's what the research says. If you want to use this in this other context, you're going to have to make the leap as the athlete, as the practitioner, as the nutritionist, as the coach, as whoever is actually making that call, you're going to have to actually make that leap on the, on the implementation side. So I've always appreciated it. Um, one of the, like the high skill things that I think you guys do really well is curating the research.

And the reason I say that it's high skill is because a, there's a lot of it, but B, some of it's really good and other like the range and some of it is just crap. And unless you know, statistics really well, and you know, methods very well, which is not, that is not very commonplace. It's very hard to ascertain what is actually, what is actually like true, truly going on, uh, from the research. So I want you to kind of explain to the listeners how, how you and your team go about curating this research more as an educational piece for the listeners to understand so that when they might actually go about and read and read these things, they can kind of apply the same type of, same type of, uh, strategy. Yeah, for sure. So you got it, you know, spot on where I think the, as, as I read more and more research and as I've read more and more like nutrition and supplement research for examining, you just really get an idea of the landscape of like, there are some very bad quality studies out there. There are some very good quality studies and, you know, there's not really, you know, even in some of like the quote unquote premier journals, you know, you're going to find studies that, that aren't, that aren't great. So, um, that's just kind of been an interesting observation, um, you know, for, for doing this research, but yeah. So I think, you know, I'd examine the way that we kind of curate our research, I would say we, we try to put things into kind of three different buckets and then maybe I can tell you how we actually find the research for those. So if you go, you know, on the site, we kind of present all of the information about supplements in three different ways. So the first of those is something that we call like

supplement guides. And so these are pretty, pretty comprehensive, pretty thick, pretty dense reads. Um, but they're basically filled with depending on what outcome you're interested in, you know, what should you take, how should you take it? So there's information on dosages, um, timing in relation to exercise and whatnot for a variety of supplements. And these are kind of the areas that we've been asked about the most are the supplements that we've been asked about the most. So the listeners, you know, for them might be interested in like the, we have a muscle gain and exercise guide. So an exercise performance guide. So what, what supplements are good for exercise? And so any, you know, all the evidence that exists for whatever supplements we've did, you know, we found for performance and muscle gain, I'm going to go into that exercise guide. Um, and then we'll tier kind of the supplements. So there are supplements that would be, you know, very, very strong, kind of the primary supplements that you should take. There are some that may be more promising. Um, there are some that are more unproven and then there are some that are unproven and then some that are like inadvisable. You could, should probably stay away from these. And so, um, with the supplement guides, that's a very easy way for us to just show, here's kind of the top tier of what you should take. And here's then kind of the list below that of what might work in certain situations, what might be worth experimenting with, and then what's not worth it. So we have lots of supplement guides on the site. That's kind of one of the areas where we present information, um, on supplements. And then we have, um, the examine database. So with the new version two of examine, we have this database is where essentially,

it's just going to include randomized controlled trials and meta-analyses for any particular supplement that you're interested in. And so the database is just going to give you a grading, um, from a through D a being, you know, the strongest evidence D kind of being the weakest evidence, and then provide you with a grading for that particular supplement, either up, meaning it's going to improve whatever outcome you're interested in down. It's not going to improve that outcome. Um, and then kind of how strong it is. And that's kind of, uh, with like the effect size for like statistics, so strong effect, medium effect, uh, weak effect, or kind of like no effect for that. So the database is, um, a newer ish kind of addition where we've revamped that for all the supplements. And so, um, all of the studies that we find and eventually write about are going to go into that database and that's been being constantly updated essentially. So, um, the way that we update that is by doing kind of semi systematic searches. So for instance, uh, I actually just updated our magnesium database. And so I went into scholarly databases like PubMed, put in a search string, search for any randomized control trial that exists for magnesium, um, in humans, I guess that's an important thing to note as well. So in the database, we only include studies that are conducted in, um, people, not rats or in vivo studies. So like dish, uh, you know, cell studies or whatnot. Um, so we only include human studies and then meta-analyses as well, which essentially are just studies of

studies. So they lump together the results of many studies and present to you kind of the, the effect size for a supplement. So the database, we're always updating that, um, based on, you know, every, every probably few years, it's more often now, um, now that we've revamped it with V2. So we're, you know, always doing kind of systematic searches on various pages and making sure that the latest up-to-date evidence is kind of in there. And then the final one is like the study summaries. And so that's a pretty popular, um, area of the site. And so study summaries, those are less so going to tell you about maybe the effectiveness overall of a general supplement, but they're going to be just about a single study on a supplement showing you how the study was conducted, who it was conducted in, what was the outcome and what were the results of that study. So it can give you a good idea of, you know, if there's a particular, uh, population that you're interested in about that supplement was studied in, or, you know, you're interested in studies just in runners. And that study was done in runners that could give you a good idea of, you know, the context of that study.

So, um, that's kind of another way that we curate and put out research on the website. Um, so to gather all of the research for those, I mean, in general, the least systematic way that we're gathering that research is just kind of by eye, you know, so as a researcher, as I'm interested in all this stuff, I'm kind of always on the lookout just for studies that might appear. Maybe they pop up on my Twitter feed and I will post them in a Slack channel or put them in our database and write about it. Um, scanning the scientific journals. So they're kind of major journals and nutrition that are going to publish a majority of the stuff on supplements. And so you just scan the table of contents of those to find interesting studies. Um, a very good way that we find some of the more popular studies to write about on the site. Often if a study is big enough and it's in nutrition, it's going to get a lot of hype in the media or on social media or something like that.

So the erythritol study that was just published might be a good example. You know, people were freaking out about that. So we should definitely write an in-depth piece on this. Um, and so that's, you know, obviously just like eyeballing things. I kind of collect studies as I see them as does most of the research team. Um, but then as I mentioned before, we're just performing systematic searches kind of of the literature every so often, um, to make sure we snag everything that's related to a particular supplement. So if you go in like a database like PubMed and type in curcumin and a bunch of other different, you know, um, related terms, then you can basically gather anything published since whatever date on curcumin. And then we extract that data manually, um, half automated and we're working on kind of that, but most of it's manual. So we're going to extract data on population results, um, kind of the dose used and things like that. So all that information is then going to go to the database and yeah, it's a lot of work, but, um, we have a decent team and people who are pretty productive. So it takes quite some time, but it's definitely, um, we have it kind of down to somewhat of a science and that helps to, um, make things a little bit more quicker from the research side.

So that's a shit ton of work. Like I've total kudos to your team. Like I'm going through all the steps and in my head and I can, I can appreciate how, how hard it is to actually do that. Even when you know all the tools and how to create the search terms and PubMed and things like that. But within the supplement guides itself, one thing that struck out is that you're only using randomized controlled trials and meta-analyses, correct? Correct. So you're not using anything and in humans. So no observational studies, no case studies, nothing with an animal model, nothing with it, nothing that was done in a Petri dish. Why is that? So why is that so important? Cause that's a hard line that you're kind of drawing that eliminates a lot of work because a lot of work is in Petri dishes, right? Or in an animal model.

Why are you guys drawing that hard line and saying the only studies that, that even rise to the level of being considered are the randomized control trials and meta-analyses in humans? Yeah. So the human aspect, you know, is just because, you know, this isn't to discount, you know, there, there's a lot of value in animal research and cell kind of Petri dish based research. I mean, that forms a lot of the mechanistic evidence we have about certain compounds. It kind of is the first step for a lot of then supplements to go into the next phase to then be studied in humans, you know, especially with like pharmaceutical research. So we, you know, first, just to say, first off that like animal research, cell research is important, but when it comes down to it, most people really don't care about whether the supplement improved, uh, time trial performance in the, in a rat, or if it, you know, increased, uh, blood flow in an isolated, uh, carotid artery from a rat or something in a Petri dish. I mean, and it's not only that they don't care about it, but I think that there is, you know, there's a value in knowing those things, but there's limited, you know, translatability and applicability to, to humans. And so, especially when it comes to things like supplements, because you have the issue of, you know, the dose that was used in the animal model may not be even scalable to a human. Maybe they use something that was way, you know, in fit in a physiological dose in a rat, it would not be anything that a human could even consume in a single sitting. Therefore it might not even have any value.

The artificial sweetener studies are great. That's a perfect, yeah, that's a perfect example because it's like a lot of those where they, you know, tied artificial sweeteners to cancer risk. It's like they fed those things, you know, you'd have to drink two 12 packs of diet Coke a day to get the amount of artificial sweeteners that they, they gave those rats. So definitely a good point there. But then also just, you know, just the physiology of, you know, an animal versus like a human, if, you know, if maybe instead of a supplement, a fasting example might be an example here, but they show all these intermittent fasting studies and rodents. It's like, we fasted these rodents for 18 hours and they did an 18 hour in a six hour. Well, an 18 hour fast for a rodent is like a four day fast for a human. So it's, what does that, you know, what does that even mean? And it's hard to, to translate that. So we just feel that the human studies are going to provide the most direct, most applicable information for people.

And it's what they really care about most. They want to know what happens, you know, when someone like me, a person uses this supplement. And then the randomized controlled trial aspect, you know, when it comes to scientific studies, randomized controlled trials are considered to be the gold standard. And, you know, that doesn't mean that every randomized controlled trial is perfect. Far from, there's some really bad randomized controlled trials out there. And then meta analyses. Again, if you have a meta analysis of randomized controlled trials, it's, you know, essentially just a very, very, very large randomized controlled trial with a lot of other statistics kind of implemented in there. So in supplement research, you know, the, the randomized controlled trial is the gold standard because you need to compare whatever you're interested in studying to a placebo, because if you don't, you're essentially just running a before and after study on a supplement. And that introduces the possibility of the placebo effect, which obviously is a real thing.

But if you want to know, actually, is this compound having an effect or is it the placebo effect? That's why you give some people an inactive placebo and you have to compare the supplement to that. So if you don't, you know, these people could have improved by taking curcumin for four weeks, but was that just due to them taking the supplement and the placebo effect impacting their physiology or did curcumin actually do something? So, um, a lot of studies are done and, you know, statistics again, matter here. And that's like another huge weird area, because if you have a control group and this was like an issue, there was a recent ice bath study that got published, a cold plunge study where they had a control group, but they didn't compare the intervention group to the control group.

They just compared the intervention group before and after to themselves. And so, I mean, really, when it comes down to it, it's a useless, if you don't compare your intervention to the control, it's a useless study and it doesn't mean anything. So similar with supplements, you know, you got to have a control. And so that's why we choose to only do those randomized controlled studies. And then at the observational studies association studies, again, those are important for generating hypotheses, but we're not going to include them in the database because those have a lot of, you know, things that can confound the findings and whatnot and limitations with that. So, so I bring that up because it's an interest. It's a, it's obviously you guys have chosen it because you feel like it's the correct hard line. It might make you a little bit slow to the table when new things come up just because of the research timeline and to do a randomized controlled trial to, it takes a longer period of time than a minute than many of the other study types.

And obviously to do a meta analysis, you have to have the studies out there in the first place to study them, but from a, Hey, we really know that there's an effect here or there's no effect here. Those are, as you mentioned, the gold standard ways to do it. And my, my only two cents to add to this is whenever people who are, who don't read research for a large part of their, either their living or just their hobby, whenever they ask me for the, the research that proves whatever it is, right? Which we can get into that vocabulary if we want to, I just send them to the meta analyses. I just send them right there. They're easy to read. You know, that there's been the kind of an extra step of curation within all of those. And not that all of them are, all of them are flawless. That's far from the case, but I just send people there just because it's the easiest thing for people to understand. They don't have to get too weeded in the methods within the individual studies themselves.

And they can just kind of like take the highlights for, you know, what they're worth. Yeah. And I mean, that's the best, I think the meta analyses is, I think it's good of you to just point them towards that because as I mentioned earlier, you know, if, if somebody comes or, or if, you know, somebody is asking the question, Oh, does this supplement work? You can do a quick Google search and at least find a single study that says, yes, it works with a meta analysis is doing is, you know, it might include 20, 30, 40 studies, probably the study that you found, the individual study that you found, and it's going to lump all those together. What is the majority of the evidence say, like what direction and what's the effect size for this supplement? So they're way more valuable than individual studies. Of course, with a meta analysis, what you gain in kind of like the statistical power you lack in generalizability, maybe because the meta analysis might include people with different diseases. It's going to include people, you know, of different training statuses and, you know, healthy adults, men and women. And so you can't just say, you know, all these participants are exactly like me, but again, kind of when you average everything together, it does help to at least, you know, make that more of a little bit more of a melting pot. So.

Yeah. You mentioned an interesting point here that I always like to bring up to people is, is you can always find a study to prove your point. And you can always find studies that have, that are looking at purportedly the same thing that have different directional arrows. One's positive, one's negative, one's positive, one's neutral, one's negative, one's neutral. You can always go and find those out. And in almost all cases, not all, but almost all cases and using meta analyses for all their flaws helps you get a general directional arrow on the preponderance of evidence. So let's peel that apart really quick because I want the users to kind of, I want the users to kind of come away with it or the listeners to come away with a toolkit for how they can, you know, start to kind of do this themselves and, and, and choose supplements that may or may not work for them. So my, my observation of this is people ask me questions based on the hype cycle and the question inevitably starts with what are your thoughts on and ends with the supplement that's in the hype cycle. That's how people are deciding whether or not to take things and, and for better or for worse, that's just the way it works.

I heard it on a podcast. I heard so-and-so athlete do it. I saw some research pop up in time magazine or on CNN or kind of whatever. So what are your thoughts on this based on that single information point kind of leading them to, to, to use something? How, how should athletes go about choosing a supplement? So not based on what Joe Schmo is doing or what they saw on CNN or what I've sent them on a meta analysis, how, how should athletes actually go about determining what supplements are, are right from them? What's a, what's a, what's a reasonable framework to start from? Yeah. So what not to do, for one, I think is to not just take the blanket, you know, just take blanket claims made by whatever health influencer or magazine article or Tik TOK influencer, whatever, because one of my main, I, it's like a huge pet peeve of mine. And every time, like I'm listening to a podcast or something and I hear this, I like scream and want to throw my phone, but you know, it's like the claim it's very common. You know, most people are deficient in X and I found this for myself, found this out for myself.

Oh, okay. I mean, for one, you know, to say that most people are deficient in X, well, based on what evidence and, you know, how, you know, how can you just kind of say that? And then, then they're using kind of the personal story that, Oh, I found I was deficient in this too. And so then I started supplementing with this. Okay. I guess it's fine to say that. I think that it's kind of a dishonest marketing tactic. Um, but you know, that aside, I don't, you shouldn't just take the claim that most people are deficient in this to assume that you're deficient in something and that you need to supplement in it. So if somebody is telling you, you need to take something, then really, you know, ask yourself, do I need this? And actually go out and determine whether you do need it or not. Because when it comes, you know, when it comes down to it, oftentimes the person who's telling you that you're deficient in this is also providing you with a solution. They're going to give you the supplement that you need to not be deficient in that, or their, you know, sponsor is a supplement that's going to correct your deficiency. So there's kind of a, you know, a conflict of interest there to, to say the least. So the first thing is don't assume you're deficient and don't just take something because everyone else is taking it. I think that's the first, first and foremost, kind of number one rule. So when you're looking to figure out what you should supplement with, or at least should look into, I think the first kind of thing to ask is what are your individual needs? Um, when it comes to supplementing the, the reason most people supplement or most people should is that you're deficient in some nutrient. So maybe we'll just use, you know, uh, iron as an example here. So if you are experiencing

symptoms of an iron deficiency, you go to the doctor, get a blood test for ferritin and hemoglobin and iron, and you figure out that you are actually deficient in iron. Well, okay. You should probably supplement with iron because you're deficient in iron. So need-based number one, if you're deficient in something, um, figure out, you know, what you're deficient in, if you are deficient in anything, maybe you're not, maybe you're one of the lucky ones who isn't deficient in something. So, but once you figure out your need, I think then the next question to ask is, can I get this nutrient from my diet? Oftentimes a supplement isn't required. If it's something like iron or something like calcium, um, oftentimes a few minor dietary changes can make the difference and make you, you know, not deficient in that. It's not going to occur overnight. You know, you can't just eat a red, a steak, um, and then you're going to be iron replete the next day. But I mean, if you aren't somebody who eats red meat and you start then eating red meat, you may be able to increase, you know, your iron levels and become not iron deficient anymore. Um, something like calcium, maybe just adding more dairy to your diet. So can I fix this deficiency using, you know, my, my diet? And if that's the case, then you don't need to buy a supplement. Cause when it comes down to it, I think on the whole, uh, dietary changes are often going to cost less than a supplement will. Um, plus you get to eat food instead of just pop another pill, which is kind of boring anyway. So, you know, I'd rather eat a steak than take an iron supplement, but that's just me. So, um, and you know, this can be done with a simple blood test. Most blood tests now you can get,

uh, they don't cost that much. Um, so determining kind of nutrient deficiencies, hormone deficiencies, things like that. Um, most people have kind of access to that. Um, and it's not, it's not incredibly expensive. So, and then I think aside though, from maybe a nutrient deficiency, you know, I can speak of needs in a nutrient deficiency sort of way, but also, you know, what are your needs as an athlete, maybe in terms of what are you deficient in? That's not a nutrient. So, you know, as listeners will know, you know, as an athlete, it's not just nutrition that's going to impact your training, but your sleep, your stress levels, um, you know, things like that. Um, maybe even as an athlete, you are dealing with something like high blood sugar or high blood pressure, maybe it's like familial or something like that. So, you know, where is kind of the bottleneck in your training? Um, maybe it's sleep. So we'll just use that for an example. Maybe your training's great. You have a very consistent training schedule. You're motivated, your diets great. You're not deficient in anything, but what's kind of really holding you back is, you know, you're not able to get good quality sleep. You're having trouble falling asleep at night. So your need there would be sleep. And so should I consider supplementing with something that's going to help me sleep?

Again, asking the question, can I fix this via lifestyle first? Can I, you know, stop using screens before bed or can I, you know, eat further away from bedtime? What can I change in my life? That's going to let me sleep better. If that doesn't seem to be helping, then you can sit there supplementing with something and then maybe look into supplements that might be proven to help you sleep, improve quality of sleep, help you fall asleep faster, something like that. So the needs can be nutrients, but they can also be needs for your training or whatnot, you know? Um, so determining your need or needs plural, and then kind of go about looking at evidence, um, for whatever supplement might actually help your need in that area. I think that's kind of number one. Can I, can I re can I take a shot at rephrasing that? Maybe we can bat this around a little bit.

Yeah. Cause once again, I take the, I take this from a coaching practitioner standpoint, which is way different than a health perspective. And you guys have a broader umbrella than that. But from a coaching standpoint here, here's how I've always approached it. First off, I asked the question, what problem are you trying to solve? Or what situation are you trying to improve? And those are different because the problem you're trying to solve is kind of, what you were focusing on earlier. I have a nutrient deficiency. I have a known nutrient deficiency in iron, vitamin D or kind of whatever. Okay. We recognize that as a problem. That's different than the situation that you're trying to improve. This is more of an ergogenic aid. Do I want to improve? Do I want to improve my high intensity interval workout? Do I want to be able to improve the amount of volume that I can sustain over long periods of time and using and use some sort of supplement to, in order to do that? That's the first question I ask. And then I ask, is it worth actually improving or solving? Because some problems don't need fixes.

Some things don't need to be improved. And that's a really weird statement to actually make. But some training improvements that you actually make aren't material at the end of the day, or worth kind of chasing around to actually improve. Then I go through the steps of kind of what you were just about to get into. Can I get from, can I get it from diet? Can I go through a different type of intervention? How do I actually analyze the before and after effects of the intervention that I'm actually going to use? But I start with the context of what am I actually trying to solve? Or what am I trying to improve? And sometimes there's multiple pieces of those. And are they actually worth like taking this freaking hard hammer to the problem, which is in many cases, it is very difficult. It's expensive. It takes long periods of time. And it's, as we were mentioning at the onset of the podcast, difficult to navigate. So is it actually worth that effort? And then kind of going through the, okay, what are the reasonable? That's when I go to examine.com. That's when, no, seriously, that's when I pull you guys in. It's after I've gone through those first two steps. And then I go to the reviews. And then I go to examine.com.

And maybe I'll use it to answer the second part of it. Is it worth doing it to try to see what the reasonable amount of performance improvement or how much I can move the needle on a deficiency or kind of whatever? That's how I take it as a, as kind of a coach practitioner, which is a little bit of a reframe of your, your, your initial framework there. Yeah. No, I think that's important as well. And also just thinking about the, the potential for improvement or the magnitude of improvement, not just for the supplement, but like for yourself. So, you know, sure. Like as a, as an endurance athlete, like you would like to increase your VO2 max, but I mean, if you're sitting with a VO2 max of 75 mls per kg, like maybe the supplement is, has great evidence for improving VO2 max, but am I going to improve my VO2 max? So, I mean, if you're kind of, if you're optimizing your VO2 max already through training, this supplement is not going to get you anywhere, like for improving your VO2 max or something like that. So it kind of related to your point, but it's just like, even if you would like to improve this, or that's like your main goal, improve my VO2 max or whatever, what's my, but you know, what's my wiggle room and is this, you know, supplement even going to produce that improvement? Like, yeah, it might improve VO2 max in somebody from 40 to 44, but in somebody at 75, you know, it might make no difference.

Yeah. Okay. So, so we've got this initial part of it. And then, then the next step is, is how do I actually go about improving or fixing whatever the problem is or whatever the situation is? And your first question is, is can you get it from diet? I think that's a really good, that's a very, very good way, practical way to look at it because supplementation is just that it's supplementing, not replacing what is that, what should actually be coming from the diet. Yeah. And, but I think that with the supplements, there's kind of like this emerging thing with supplements now where it's changed to being, it used to be something that you took to correct a deficiency or supplement the diet. But now it's like, like you mentioned before, people are taking things to be ergogenic. So taking things that you can't get from the diet, you know, I don't, I don't have anything in my diet that contains tonka, I'll leave for my testosterone, or, you know, I'm not just mixing that within like my smoothie. So, you know, or whether it's, you know, like something like CoQ10 or resveratrol or whatever. So there's like these supplements that can just be added on top of the diet to optimize my least favorite, yet most favorite word to use to optimize. So it's like, there's, you know, there's the supplementing what it used to be and now what it is, but maybe that was a little bit of a divergence, but so determining, yeah, what determining how to determine like what you should take, obviously, you know, you could go somewhere like examine and see which supplements are listed for the particular

outcome that you're interested in. But, you know, obviously then the easy part is sort of finding the names of a certain supplement. So I want to improve my strength or my aerobic endurance and examine tells me I should take nitrates that I should take maybe creatine, even for, even if I'm an endurance runner, and maybe I should, you know, supplement with whey protein. So something like that, maybe I identified three supplements that might be like worth taking. So I think if you've identified your area, you've identified kind of what supplement might work, I think that you should ask yourself a couple of questions. So does the supplement work or what does the supplement work for? And then for whom does it work for? Because, you know, we may list certain supplements that are good for exercise, but what kind of exercise are they good for?

And what population has this been shown to be good for? So there are lots of supplements. And we even mentioned a few briefly at like the beginning that in untrained people, they might, you know, have a significant benefit. Nitrates is actually like beetroot juice is even kind of one of those. So you give people with heart failure or peripheral artery disease, people with very low exercise capacity, something that increases nitric oxide increases blood flow. Well, their exercise capacity goes way up because their limitation is blood flow during exercise. That's what's limiting them. They can't simply get enough blood flow, deliver enough oxygen to their muscles to support exercise for a long time or support high intensity exercise. But, you know, elite athletes or even relatively trained people, blood flow is not their limitation. You know, the limitation is kind of at like the cellular level. So beetroot, nitric oxide, it might, it might not help with that. Their problem isn't getting, it's not blood flow delivery. It's, you know, kind of at a different, a bottleneck there for exercise performance. So I think that's an important question to ask. And most of the time you can find information even on our site, or if you're reading a meta-analysis and, you know, what population this was studied in, what were the characteristics of the population? Did they have cardiovascular disease?

Were they trained? Were they untrained? You know, like most of the people listening, you're probably way more trained than the average person. And so if you read a study in a sedentary population, you know, it might, it might not perfectly translate to you. So you want to ask for whom does this kind of improve? And then what does the performance outcome, you know, what performance outcome does it improve? And I think that's an interesting kind of issue because, you know, we can just broadly say something like aerobic endurance or VO2 max. So nitrates improve aerobic endurance. Well, okay. So think about what the test was used in the lab for this study. They probably did either a time to exhaustion test on a indoor cycle or like an ergometer. They might've done like a time trial on the cycle ergometer or they might've done like a 3000 meter run on the treadmill or something like that.

So, you know, does that translate to the event that you're interested in? So if it improves aerobic endurance or lactate threshold and a cyclist in the lab during a time trial, how does that apply to your road marathon race or to your ultra marathon race where not only does environment come into play, but the physiology of running and cycling is different. So yes, VO2 max and lactate threshold are the same physiological parameter. But if a supplement improves that in the lab, in this modality, is it actually going to translate to the modality that you're interested in? So that's kind of important as well. And, you know, most of the time we will, you know, when I'm writing about studies, I'm going to tell you what, what type of modality exercise modality they used. Um, it's probably either going to be a treadmill or a cycle, um, you know, an ergometer or something like that. So, but the outcomes matter, you know, if, if it improved your mile time trial, you know, for an ultra runner, they don't really care that this improved your mile runtime. Sure. It's running performance, but it's not the kind of running performance that you're interested in. So that's an important question to, to ask as well. Um, other things, of course, like, you know, was it studied in males and females, just males, just females, you know, that's always an issue and, um, an area to, to look at as well. Um, and then I think after you kind of look at those specifics, then we can get into the, let's actually get this supplement and use it. Um, I didn't know if you have any questions, maybe I can stop before I go there. No, let's, let's kind of get into that

because we've gone through this, like, okay, we've decided we want to use this. It's going to make a material difference in whatever we're trying to solve or whatever we're trying to improve. We've decided that we've already optimized our diet. So we're going to go the supplementation route, whether it's, we're correcting a nutrient deficiency or we're going to use an ergogenic aid or whatever now comes, how do I find the right one and the right dosing? Yeah. So that's just going to be all about kind of like trial and error, really? I mean, ultimately that's the only way that you're going to be able to determine if a supplement works for you. So I would say if you are interested in multiple supplements, maybe you're just interested in one, but if you're interested in trying multiple things, the best thing that's going to be to do, um, is first to try one at a time. So if you were to order three different supplements and take them all at once, and you notice a, you know, observable effect, how do you know what supplement that benefit or, you know, maybe negative side effect was due to. So the only, you know, good way to evaluate the effectiveness as a supplement is to kind of run your own trial on it, order some first find a high quality supplement. And, you know, I won't mention brands and that's kind of research that people can kind of do on their own to evaluate the quality, but, um, you know, try something for two to three weeks, you know, that gives it enough time for you to kind of evaluate it during different scenarios. Um, it's probably most supplements are something that you should take

for a while. So it's chronic versus like acute supplementation. There are things like, um, maybe like caffeine that sort of, it's not like a supplement for weeks before you see an effect. It happens right away, but, but, um, you want to take something for a few weeks, take it before exercise a couple of times, um, see how it impacts your training, see how it impacts your, how you feel, how you sleep, um, emotions, any, anything like that. You know, I mean, as kind of objective as you can be as possible, that's great. But sometimes people just evaluate subjectively how the supplement is making them feel, how it's making them, um, train and how it's making them perform. But I would recommend just testing something out for, for two to three weeks. Um, and then maybe stopping it for a while and then seeing what happens when you don't take the supplement. Do you feel worse? Do you feel the same? Do you feel better? Um, so, you know, it does take a little bit of time if you're actually to go about it this way, but if you're really interested in seeing if this works for you and whether it's worth making the investment and using the supplement for a long time, I think that it's kind of a small time investment of a month or so to actually evaluate whether the supplement works. Um, cause again, oftentimes, you know, it's, it's easy to just start taking something and say, Oh, this is great. It has to be due to the supplement, you know, and likely, you know, even if you just took it one time and feel better, that could likely be more of a psychology thing versus an actual, you know, effect of the supplement.

So, and then again, if you're interested in doing multiple things or want to stack supplements on top of one another, then after a few weeks of one supplement, you can add something else and see kind of what the additive effect of that supplement is, um, and do your own trial and error there regarding dosage. I would say start off with the lowest recommended dose when you first get a supplement. And then after a few, maybe a week or two of that dose move up and kind of see how you feel after that, I would definitely recommend starting low and then working towards maybe the upper end of whatever the recommended dose is. Um, I wouldn't recommend, you know, ever going above the recommended dose for a particular supplement. So, um, just doing that methodical approach again is, is the best way to determine if you don't want an adverse side effect. There's very low risk kind of with most supplements, but you know, they're different people have different tolerances to certain ingredients. So start low, move up high and kind of see how that, how that impacts things, how you feel and how you perform.

Let me take this opportunity to add in something, which I feel is mission critical, especially for, uh, athletes who are any, any, in any sort of anti-doping program is that when you're choosing a particular supplement, you have to have it have, have to have it have either NSF certified or informed, uh, choice certified. And I think that there, is there one or two others that, uh, have actually kind of recently, uh, come across the wire that I'm not familiar with. I always go with NFF and sorry, NSF or informed choice. Those are the two that I always look at. Yeah, definitely. Those are the kind of the only two that I'm, that I'm aware of as well, but yeah, that's definitely an important thing to add as well. You know, check, check with whatever agency, if you're being tested, you know, making sure that this thing is prohibited or not prohibited rather. And maybe that it's allowed in that, you know, if you take to have a dose, it's going to like flag some sort of test.

But also from the, also from the lay for the lay audience perspective, you're, you know, that you're getting what you think you're getting, which is a huge problem in the supplement industry is sometimes you think you're getting X and you're really getting X plus whatever the leftovers from the previous batch that was blended in the same, in the same container actually was. So make it a choice. You're going to pay a little bit more because those certifications cost the supplement manufacturers money to actually, you know, send their supplements to and get them tested and things like that. You're going to pay a little bit more, but it's worth it. Yeah, definitely, definitely worth it. Especially if it's something like, you know, your, your career or even like a, if you're an amateur athlete or something, it depends on your, you know, competition status depends on it. Certainly worth the extra price. So Brady, you mentioned the, one of the things to test in this individual N of one test, we've gone through all the whole thing and now we're going to test it on ourselves is actually testing for potential reversibility. So you go, you go on the supplement, let's just say you find a benefit placebo or not, but what you actually recommend is going off of it and seeing if for whatever reason, that effect either has a legacy to it or it actually reverses. Why is that important? Well, yeah, so important because for one, I think again, it removes the potential confounding effect of maybe this is just due to me. I started something new. I started a new routine.

I started taking a different supplement and is that making me perform better or feel better? Or is it, you know, actually an effect of the supplement? So if you take it again, if you take it and feel worse, that could be due to the placebo effect as well. So there's always that, but I think it's important just to go on and off just to see one, how you feel, but two I think with any supplement, there's actually probably, it's probably a good idea to do some sort of downtime and not take a supplement at one dose forever. So go through periods where you're not taking that supplement, even if you plan to take it again in the future, take a week off of it or, or, or two, so that you don't develop a tolerance, which can sometime occur. You kind of reset your receptors for whatever, maybe compound that supplement is working with. So I think that's kind of important as well. So there's a lot of talk about caffeine kind of in this area where, you know, should you do a caffeine withdrawal before like a race and then up your caffeine before the race? I don't actually think there's for caffeine, at least any kind of evidence to kind of support that caffeine withdrawal. Good news for most people. It doesn't seem to have a better effect if you don't do it for two weeks and then use it again. But, um, you know, it, it's going to be individual again, you know, that's just kind of on the whole. So, um, okay. So we're going to, we're going to pivot a little bit and you brought this up using a stack or a combination of supplements. So there's one way that you can tell you to say, listen, I'm deficient in iron. I'm going to take iron. Another way you can

say is, listen, I'm going to take iron plus vitamin C, right? Because there's some sort of, you know, advantage for taking those two, uh, those two together. And then you get into the proprietary blends of, I have 50 things and the green powders is the, is the, are the best examples of this. I have 50 things that I'm going to take kind of all at once. And I kind of, I'm going to like turn the floor over to you to describe maybe what the positives and negatives of any one of those strategies are either taking it singly, taking it with something that might be synergistic or just using the shotgun approach. And I'm going to take everything. Yeah. I think the single, the single supplementation is going to be the best for just a few reasons. One of them we already mentioned. So taking a single supplement, a single ingredient is going to allow you to know that if something happens, it was just due to that one single ingredient that you took. Um, but it's also the best option because when, you know, especially for the supplements that we, we haven't examined, we are only reporting results of studies that studied that single ingredient in isolation. So if you're reading a study about curcumin or nitrates or tart cherry juice, this study, all of the evidence that we have compiled for that supplement is just, they ran a study on tart cherry juice or nitrates or curcumin. They didn't combine it with another vitamin. They didn't combine it with another herb. Um, we actually purposefully exclude any studies that do co-supplementation. So if I'm reading a study that curcumin co-supplement with vitamin E,

we don't, we don't have that study in our database because again, co-supplementation, that's it's unable, you're unable to determine, was it the vitamin E? Was it the curcumin? Was it the synergistic effect of both? So, so for single supplementation, you know, you, if you're single, you know, if you're reading about evidence for something, um, likely that ingredient was studied in isolation, it's very rare that some sort of supplement is studied within a blend or even individual like brands of supplements. They're often not studied. It's often an ingredient or an extract of something that's studied. So if all the evidence for this compound has been studied just as that single compound, then you should probably just take that compound because there's not really a lot of knowledge on how it interacts with what else, um, whatever else with other vitamins, because it was studied in isolation. So I think you're, you're getting the, you know, that, you know, whatever supplement you're taking is validated in a study, if you're just doing it singly, whereas say, if you're doing a proprietary blend, we use that as an example. So the blend, I mean, for one, you can't really know what, how much of a certain compound or ingredient is in there. And that's why it's, you know, proprietary. So if it contains, you know, ashwagandha and curcumin and whatever, they often don't even report, you know, what, um, how much of each is in there. So it's kind of impossible to determine that you often even don't know if the ingredient listed in that blend is in

there. Um, sometimes it might not be, I mean, if you read some of these like analyses that they do of these blends, sometimes they find that they're contaminated with stuff. Sometimes they find that they don't even contain half as much as what they report on it. So it's kind of just a crap sheet. If you're getting like a proprietary blend versus an extract or something like that. Um, and then regarding the stacks, I think those can be, those can be useful. Um, again, you might have to explain like what a stack is. Yeah. So yeah. Stack is, it's not really like a scientific term, but a stack kind of just refers to taking multiple supplements like at once in hopes that they will provide some sort of like synergistic maybe effect people use stack. Again, there's no like a formal definition of it, of like a supplement stack, but the way that I kind of think about it is just like, I'm going to stack these supplements to achieve a better benefit than I would with one supplement alone. Um, and that kind of rests on the theory that whatever, you know, the mechanisms of each of those say three individual ingredients are actually going to be the same or better when you combine them together. So it's really, it's based on theory and speculation, not as much scientific evidence. So, you know, the theory that, Oh, well, nitrates improve blood flow and creatine improves muscle contractile ability. So together I should be able to just like lift way more and creatine and nitrates might actually be, that might've been a bad example. Cause I might actually be a decent supplement stack to use. Um, but just in general, I think, um, you know, it, it relies on this

assumption that all of the mechanisms are going to be the same when you combine all these ingredients, which sometimes might not, might, uh, not be the case. Um, they're rarely supplement stacks are rarely ever studied. Uh, so it's usually just this works and this works and this works. Why not throw it all together? It should, they should all work. And then they should somehow synergize often using some sort of like story about brain neurotransmitters interacting with each other and like something like that. So it's often a fun story, but whether that actually happens kind of has yet to be determined. Cause as I mentioned, the stacks often aren't like studied, uh, done together. Well, so the dirty little secret, I can be more cynical than you cause I'm completely removed from the industry, Brady. So the dirty little secret on the stacks side of things is it's just a way for supple. It's not just, but it is a way for supplement manufacturers to simply create product differentiation in a very competitive, hyper competitive marketplace. It's very boring to sell vitamin C and isolation, iron and isolation, beetroot juice and isolation because there's nobody, you know, the, the blending of these supplements are stacking them. There's very little barrier to entry and all of that. And if you create something that's super fancy and appealing, there's not a lot of, you know, there's not a lot to kind of like stand in your way because everybody's using the same manufacturing equipment and all of the, and it just kind of comes out in pill form and gets in, and, and gets branded the same thing to, to, in a different flavor exists on the proprietary blend

side. And my personal opinion on this, I don't mind mentioning this is if you ever see a proprietary blend in something, run away, just run, don't pass, go turn around 180 degrees and run the opposite way. Because in almost all cases, not all cases, in almost all cases, the company that's putting a proprietary blend out is doing so to hide the amount of the expensive ingredients and put less of them in, in what is normally a biologically irrelevant dose. So they're underdosing everything that's expensive in order to keep the product, the, the, the price down yet they get to claim the benefits of the, the benefits of that particular component of the proprietary blend. So if you ever see that, this is just me being kind of skeptical on the situation, but it's actually true as well. There's something to hide. They're usually hiding the dosing. They're usually hiding the dosing because it's more, uh, because it's more effective or because it's, uh, they're hiding the doses because it's going to be more expensive. And so you should just run the other way, irrespective of the whole combination doing, you know, this, this, that, or the other. I've had a longstanding rule with that. If I ever see a proprietary blend and I've had friends who've created proprietary blends from like, even in hydration products. Right. And I've, I've argued with them ad nauseum, just tell me how much sodium citrate is in there and tell me how much sodium chloride is in there.

That's, that shouldn't be proprietary. That's dumb. Like there, there's somebody that I've told that very specifically to, because they had a proprietary sodium blend in their, you know, electrolyte drink. So that's my two cents on the dirty little secret behind the, in the nutrition industry, specifically with stacks and proprietary blends is you got to watch what you're, you're normally not getting what you paid for nor necessarily what's on a label. No, I would totally agree to that. I don't have much to add besides the fact that yeah, you're, you're, they're, they're filling it with the filler, the less expensive ingredient. And, uh, yeah, I think that's a good rule of thumb to kind of stay away from the proprietary blends, especially if they're sold in gas stations marketed as like a male enhancement pill. Don't take those. We do not recommend those. Those are the worst. Okay. Let's let, let's end on a positive note. This is going to come right back to the beginning, right? Cause we ranked our supplements, uh, at the beginning and I'll certainly go through mine and you can go through yours. What would be on your must have list since you've curated it all, man, you're an endurance athlete yourself. You're super curious about this.

You you're the one kind of doing the, you're, you're getting your elbows dirty in the, in the muck of all of this research. What would be at the top of your list? You can pick three, four, five, whatever, specifically for an endurance athlete or an ultra marathon athlete. Yeah. So it's gonna unfortunately be kind of like a short list. Um, but I think I'll separate them maybe into like for actual kind of race performance and then kind of for maybe muscle recovery type stuff. So I think that for actual race performance, you know, if you're, if you tolerate it well, caffeine is one of the best, one of the most well-known ergogenic aids out there. Um, there's not really anything that it doesn't seem to actually improve. So 200, 400 milligrams, if you're more tolerant, maybe a little bit more, but you know, you want to be careful with that, um, beforehand about 60 minutes. And then, you know, even if you're doing a caffeinated gel or something during a race, maybe every, every 60 minutes kind of re up on caffeine, 30 to 45 minutes, maybe even, um, re up on caffeine. So caffeine, number one, I think nitrates, B juice, I think that has some decent evidence. Um, if you want to take that before exercise, the good thing about beet juice, I, you know, aside from the cost of purchasing it, there seems to be no harm in beet juice. I mean, it's quite a natural, uh, substance. It does turn your urine, uh, alarmingly red color. So just be warned if you've never used it before. Uh, the first time that I had beet juice, I, I took, I drank some before, uh, indoor 3000 meter race in college. And I got back to the dorm room and I went to the

bathroom and it was dark red and I was scared because I thought I was pissing blood and I was like, Oh wait, I had to be juice. So just be warned for anyone interested in, uh, using that. And then I think bit alanine, um, seems to be pretty well supported as well. Um, and that would kind of, I think, end my list. Maybe, um, the, we mentioned sodium bicarb at the beginning. And if you're interested in improving high intensity kind of race performance, um, I think beta alanine or sorry, sodium bicarb would, would be up there as well, but that may not be as applicable to somebody doing ultra marathon distance race. I'm not sure that there's kind of much evidence to, to support that there. Um, and then for recovery, you know, I think tart cherry juice for muscle soreness seems to maybe reduce a little bit of that. So that could be helpful if you're doing a stage race, want to improve muscle recovery or something like that. Um, reducing that soreness and muscle damage, tart cherry juice or tart cherry extract seems to be beneficial. Um, whey protein, that's not typically thought of as a supplement, but I think that's, you know, if you're in certain situations, if you're getting enough protein from diet may not be beneficial, but as a supplement, um, you know, if you can't meet your protein needs in a meal, whey protein, definitely beneficial. Um, and I'll add, you know, I, I rated this as pretty low and I think the evidence is kind of emerging for exogenous ketones, but maybe not for exercise performance. They seem to have a cognitive benefit that could be undervalued maybe currently. And I think that for somebody in endurance sports, they might be

beneficial. Um, I've tested a few during like races and things like that. And they seem to have some sort of kind of mood elevating effect. Um, the performance data is definitely not as strong, but I mean, if there could be a cognitive boost and some sort of enhanced focus with taking the ketones, I think that could have, um, some sort of advantageous effect for, for runners, endurance athletes. So that would be, that would be my list. I'm going to send you a preprint of some ketone cognitive benefit that I ran across the other day. If you promise to like, keep it under your hat. Nobody in the audience asked me for it. I'm just doing it for Brady. There you go. You can put it in your vault. I'm giving you, I'm giving, I'm giving you the heads up that this is coming out because you're going to have to, you're going to have to look at it. I don't have much to add.

Honestly, that was kind of like my list, except on the sodium by carb, uh, piece of it. First off, I think it's worth emphasizing that the use case with very high intensity exercise needs to be that, that emphasis needs to be there. And the second thing is that the delivery mechanism has always been problematic. This is literally on my desk right now. I'm going to show, Oh shit, it's falling apart. I'm going to show it right here, but this is Martin's new sodium bicarbonate. Oh yeah. I had to read about that stuff. That has, that has come out. So I, I bought it with my own frigging 60 bucks, 60 bucks for four interventions. That's an expensive intervention. Yeah. It's an expensive intervention. That's basically, yeah, it's like exogenous ketones, you know, it's like 25 bucks a pop. Yeah. It's an expensive intervention. And I, and once again, this is like, is it, is it beneficial? You're getting it in a workout or in a high intensity race, like the Olympic, you know, 1500 meter final. Hell yeah. Like I'm taking a $15 intervention for that. Am I going to do it for my 800 meter repeats on the Tuesday night track club? Sure. You know, if you want to do it, go hog wild, but you know, that's your 15 bucks. Um, uh, but my point with that is, is the delivery system has always been problematic and there have been attempts to get around taking it orally, which that's what I used to do when I was in college, 25 years ago, running an 800 meter in the thousand and the 1500 is I just happened to be able to tolerate sodium bicarbonate. So I could take baking soda and I can mix it in water and take it right before my race. And it didn't, it just

didn't, it just didn't affect me. My teammates was not a totally different case. So they weren't very good candidates for it. And now you have a transdermal delivery system with the PR lotion. And now Martin's kind of coming into the fray. So I would say if you can get the right delivery system, which is still unknown, that's the caveat that I'll add to the sodium bicarbonate. Cause we know it works, but we know it comes with more problems than it is worth. So if you can get around those problems, either if you can just tolerate it like me, or you can get around the problems like Martin system or the lotion system or whatever, if those actually work, then great, go for it. Yeah. Interesting. I'll have to try out that sodium bicarbites. I saw some stuff floating around and I think somebody even mentioned me on Twitter about it, but I haven't yet explored that. Yeah. You know, what's interesting is, is like, we've always had this like sneaking, this is pure speculation, people like, so just take, this is for what it's worth that outside of the high intensity stuff that there might be an ergogenic effect with sodium by with sodium bicarbonate use.

So in an ultra marathon situation, very low intensity, right? Because of the sodium loading, because there's so much sodium in it and it shifts the plasma volume that somehow you get some sort of thermoregulatory effect from that. Now, once again, that's more mechanistic speculation than anything else. But the people who have been using this for a while outside of the intended application, which is high intensity exercise and outside of that intended application would be low intensity, longer endurance stuff. The theory that it might work and people feel better in air quotes, for those of you that are not watching the YouTube version is just simply because of all the sodium. I mean, it's sick for the dosing that I need. It's five to six grams of sodium that I'm ingesting. That's a lot. Five to six grams of sodium that I'm ingesting in order to get the right amount of bicarbonate in my system to make a, uh, to make a difference. That's a, that's a lot. That's not immaterial. That's not anything that you should use chronically, right? So, so anyway, just watch out for it. Nobody should be using that intervention once, once or five times a week. You should be using it like once or twice a week at the very most. For sure. And something else interesting about the sodium bicarb actually related to exogenous ketones actually is they, I think they did some studies and I don't have to read this one again, but they actually did, they co-supplemented the sodium bicarb with exogenous ketones and then showed that that sort of unlocked the performance effect of exogenous ketones. So taking them without, there's no performance improvement taken with bicarb. There was an improvement that's hypothesized to be due to

the, so ketones are very acidic molecules. And so acid, we don't want acid to be high when we're exercising. That's going to impair, you know, muscle contractile ability. So the sodium bicarb buffer the acid and exogenous ketones, allowing them to, you know, do what they're supposed to do and enhance performance. Again, just one study there, but kind of an interesting tie-in, I guess. Too much mechanistic speculation to end this podcast on. Okay. I got to give you the final word, man. Give the listeners the pitch. Like why should they become subscribers to examine.com? Because you mentioned that you're not getting any revenue from advertising or anything like that. You're getting revenue from people saying, I think this is a worthwhile service. I pay for it. I think this is a worthwhile service. I'm going to plunk down whatever tier that I think that I want down for this unbiased, you know, curated, cold information. What's the pitch? Like what can users expect or what can listeners expect? Yeah. I mean, I'll kind of go just back to the very short sentence that I mentioned earlier, but you know, if, if you're interested in figuring out what works for your health and you know, the best evidence behind it, that's what we're here for. And you're going to get the latest evidence. You're going to get the most comprehensive evidence possible from people who really love and people who really care about reading this stuff and sharing it in a way that is digestible. I really don't think that there is a more kind of user-friendly digestible source of information about nutrition on the internet. And that's what examine is. And plus you'll,

they'll be up to date on all the latest data. So you can impress your friends and outperform your competition. What are the, give the listeners a little bit of a sense of like, what are the tiers cost and what, what is included in each one of those? Yeah. So the examine monthly membership, we currently lowered the monthly membership to $19 a month. So that's down from, it was, I believe, $28 a month. So $19 a month gets you the examine plus membership and that will unlock anything on the site. So you'll get access to the supplement guides. You'll get access to the study summaries that we publish now daily. Actually, it used to be a monthly thing, but it's, it's a monthly now. So we, you'll get access to all those. You'll get access to pretty much anything else that's on the site. So $19 a month, pretty small investment for your health. We also have yearly memberships and lifetime memberships available. And the price of those currently is, is escaping me. But I think I got you, I got you 15 bucks a month for, for the year, 15 bucks for a month for the year.

And here you go, people. Once again, I, I pay for this. So Brady doesn't have me under the gun. I'm not getting a commission. You're not going to be able to go and like, you know, coop 20%, get 20% off or anything like that. I'm not in on the take 800 bucks, 799 for lifetime access. If I were in coaching as a career professional, which I am, that's one of the best investments you can make. 800 bucks for lifetime access to this stuff. As long as you guys keep doing it, there's my caveat. You guys don't go out of business. No plans on stopping. So that honestly, from an investment standpoint, I ran across that and just knew and researched, uh, uh, research for this interview, I was kind of shocked. And when I look at that as a professional investment, I spend a lot of money on professional education and kind of whatever.

That's one of the better ones out there in my opinion. Yeah. And I mean, if you think of just it, even just looking at the monthly membership, you know, what, what do you pay for? What do you pay for Netflix per month? What do you pay for Apple music? It's a small investment in your health. You know, obviously that's a, you know, funny pitch. Those things are obviously fun as well. Good to have Netflix, but it's, you know, for the investment in your health and for the, for the amount of information, you know, we talked at the beginning about just how many people hours goes into producing just one page of content or one study summary. I mean, it's, you know, for that monthly, for the monthly price that you're paying, you are just getting an, you know, a remarkable amount of kind of information that takes a lot of people hours and a lot of passion goes into it. So it's, um, you know, it was likely is going to be a worthwhile membership for, for anyone, regardless of kind of what your goals are.

So, well, Brady Homer, first off, thank you and your team there for what you guys do. You make my life and profession as a coach a lot easier because I get to be more time efficient because you guys can come to the table with an initial, like call the research. But, um, thank you guys for what you do for the entire community, because I do think that the supplement industry as a, as a whole is a really difficult one to navigate. And it's also one that is likely to continue to spiral out of control with potentially deleterious effects on the, on the public from taking either contaminated supplements or supplements in the wrong doses or things that are just deleterious to health, even at, at low doses. And if you guys can provide, continue to provide a service that can cut through a lot of that clutter more, like more power to you.

I hope your subscriber numbers continue to go up and up and up because it is a service to everybody. So I personally and professionally, uh, thank you guys for what you do. And thank you for coming on the podcast today. Absolutely. I appreciate you having me on, on, on behalf of examine and, you know, we, we also appreciate kind of the, the work that you're doing. And, you know, even when I just see all of your posts on Twitter, it seems like you're also fighting the good fight in terms of trying to provide people with the best evidence out there. That's not, uh, contaminated for lack of a better word with kind of, uh, industry funding or whatnot. So I appreciate, you know, I'm all, it's always fun to talk to you and talk to you about kind of the, uh, supplements and nutrition because you kind of understand the landscape as well. So it's, it's great to talk to somebody who shares similar views to us at examine. I appreciate the sentiment, man. We're trying, we'll keep fighting the good fight.

Absolutely. All right, folks, there you have it. There you go. Much thanks to Brady for coming on the podcast today. Always appreciate his perspective. And as I mentioned, uh, at the very end of the podcast, I appreciate what he and his team does over examine.com. Once again, I'm not on there. Take it all. I'm a user. I like it. I like it as a service. I think is a good resource out there. Links will be in the show notes to all of the stuff that we talked about coming up on the podcast in the next few weeks will be more discussions around supplementation. In fact, the next podcast is coming out next week is going to be on one of the ones that I get the most questions on. And that is creatine supplementation for endurance athletes and specifically for ultra marathon athletes.

Is it actually worth it? Y'all make sure you stay tuned and check it out next week. If you like this podcast, the very best thing that you can do is share it with your friends, share it with your training partners and share it on social media. That helps get the good word out with all the information that we are bringing to the table. Very grateful for all the feedback that I get when I'm out in the community. So please, you can help this podcast out by simply sharing it with your homeboys and homegirls. It means a lot to me personally, and I hope they get a lot out of the information. All right, folks, that is it for today. And as always, we will see you out on the trails.