January 19, 2025 • 21 mins
Do you ever feel compelled to drop your money on expensive supplements like Sea Moss Grass and Greens Powders you see getting advertised on social media? In this week's episode of The FIT(ish) Podcast, host Phoebe Parsons sits down with sports dietitian Aidan Muir from Ideal Nutrition, to unravel the truth behind supplements, nutrition, and the real science of fueling your body. Whether you're hitting the gym, running a marathon, or just want to feel your best, this episode is packed with the no-nonsense, actionable tips you need to take your nutrition game to the next level. Get ready to get smarter with your diet, ditch the guesswork, and fuel your body the right way!
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Visit the Ideal Nutrition Website
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Apogee Production. Welcome to fit Ish. I'm Phoebe Parsons and
this is the podcast that proves that you don't have
to choose between staying fit and having fun. Welcome back
to the podcast, Aiden Muir from Ideal Nutrition. I want
to start by saying, what's up.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
That's terrible?
Speaker 1 (00:29):
That is so shocking? That is the biggest dad joke.
And if you are listening you would have obviously seen
the title of the episode. Today we are talking about
supplements and more specifically, what is a waste of money
when it comes to supplements? Because one of the things
I absolutely love about a New Year is how motivated
everyone is around their health and fitness. And obviously as
(00:51):
a dietitian, this is something that you would see nutrition
wise and as a group fitness instructor. The gyms are
packed to the raffers in January and I love it.
But people have the tendency to run like a bulleter
gate and they don't need to. I feel like there
is so much overcomplication when it comes to setting fitness
and wellness kind of goals, and I think a lot
(01:12):
of it also comes down to supplements. And I know
that this is something that's kind of rife on social media,
particularly TikTok. I swear to god TikTok is single handedly
responsible for sea moss grass. Yeah, like everyone is just
chugging spoonfuls of sea moss grass. So I want to
talk to you about red light green light supplements. But firstly,
(01:33):
what supplements do you take? If you take any?
Speaker 3 (01:36):
I suppose, Yeah, we could go heap since this. I
don't take heaps of supplements consistently. The only one I
take consistently is creating. And I've just taken that almost
every day for like ten years now or something like that.
Speaker 1 (01:47):
Oh so you were on the bandwagon way before everyone
else was.
Speaker 3 (01:50):
Yeah, and this will fit into like a framework I'll
talk about later. But one of the reasons why creating
makes a lot of sense to people is it is
very difficult to get the optimal amount through food. Using
a specific example, we get it through red meat as
the main source, but you need to eat like a
heel of red meat per day to get the optimum
mat So that happening not happening for many many people.
And it's yeah, it's probably it's not worth pursuing for
(02:12):
many people. I wouldn't recommend it for many people. So
there's this like suboptional amount that almost everyone will have.
We can address that. The bigger question for anybody who
listening is like, is that a someone you should take?
Like it helps with people who care about lifting weights
and getting stronger, it helps with a few other things,
but like, if you aren't going to be one of
the people who specifically benefits, even if you did have
(02:34):
a suboptal intake, that's still fine too.
Speaker 1 (02:36):
Yeah, And I think this again is something that comes
down to Supplements are very personalized. They're what you're lacking
potentially in a diet or whatever. That's kind of where
you need to take them from. But again, supplements are
not a magic pill. They are not a quick fix,
and a lot of the time they are very very expensive.
So I want to start with one in particular. And
(02:56):
you and I both did ins and outs of twenty
twenty five on our instagrams, and I was so happy
to see that we both had one of the same outs,
and that is green powder. Is Now I'm going to
fess up to the fact that I have taken and
endorsed green powders in the past. But when we know better,
we do better, and I actually found that greens powders
(03:16):
upset my stomach more than anything. Firstly, I eat so
many greens, so I don't even know why I was
supplementing with them. I think one of the reasons is
because I wasn't very good at drinking water, so my
greens powders were strawberry flavored and I found it easier
for me to drink water. But you don't need.
Speaker 3 (03:33):
Greens powders, no, one hundred percent, So like very big
on Firstly, one, everyone trying to get more in through food,
like getting more vegetables in, even if you don't like
vegetables like few things like one, do the best you can.
But then too, some things in life are hard. Sometimes
things are just hard, so trying to get more vegetabls in.
But then two, even if you weren't getting enough in,
like I even have a small preference towards a multivitamin
(03:54):
as the first option, even before greens powders, because this
is part of what's specifically designed for to cover gaps.
Like I don't recommend a multivitamin as a general thing
for everybody, but if you had a lot of gaps
in your diet. That's probably the first thing I look
at considering.
Speaker 1 (04:07):
Yeah, and when you look at the price point of
some of these greens powders, and the one that my
mind goes straight to ag one, Oh my god, it
is one hundred and eighty five dollars for three hundred
and fifty grams.
Speaker 2 (04:18):
So I want to talk about that as well.
Speaker 3 (04:19):
Going to the money bit specifically, it's very rare for
me to like point to a specific a specific brand,
but they do so much influencer marketing and it's very
easy to find how much they pay influenceers likes Pree
well documented and that makes obvious sense that they have
a massive margin if they're paying influencers heaps of money,
which ever means by definition it has to be significantly
(04:40):
more expensive than needs to be.
Speaker 1 (04:42):
Yeah, and the supply and demand issue, like you can't
really get it in Australia. I did a little Google before.
It's actually quite hard to get in Australia. You've got
to pay for the international shipping and blah blah blah.
But I was just so rattled to think that people
are paying one hundred and eighty dollars for some Greens powders.
You know what's cheaper. A family bag of spinach from
coals is five dollars and it actually tastes go yeah, insane. Okay,
(05:08):
the next one we've already mentioned is sea moss grass.
Now every influencer and their goddamn dog is taking sea
moss grass. And I don't know the name of the brand.
I'm not going to name and shame any brands, but
there's one branch in particular I've seen, and it comes
in three different colors. I don't know if that has
anything to do with different vitamins or minerals that might
be in the different jars specifically, but it's thirty five
(05:32):
dollars a jar and people scrunch up their face when
they swallow it, so it doesn't look like a very
pleasant experience. But firstly, what is sea moss grass as
a supplement, Like, what are you supplementing here?
Speaker 2 (05:44):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (05:44):
So it does contain like some potential beneficial like nutrients
like it has like seaweed is Like seaweed is well
known for being like very high in ideine specifically, but
like very few people are not having enough of that
when we go to seamos like once and you can
go like, look at all these like trace elements and
stuff like that. But similarly, you're getting that through food anyway.
You can get that in a much nicer way and
(06:04):
also cheap a way.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
So is it more of a micronutrient.
Speaker 2 (06:07):
It is, it's almost exclusively for micro utrients, which is
what it's.
Speaker 1 (06:11):
My god, that is insane because again I've seen them
in my local health food shop. They don't look appealing,
but I have nearly been sucked down that rabbit hole
because everyone's taking it, especially on TikTok. I'm like, do
I need to get involved in this? But also doesn't
look like it's appealing, all right. The next one is
bone broth. Now, bone broth is huge, and I feel
(06:33):
like people pedal the gut health component of bone broth,
and the one I'm thinking of can be around forty
dollars a jar. But there's like various levels of concentrate.
So there's like bone broth marine, there's a bone broth powder,
there's a bone broth body glue. It's called I have
tried the body glue and it is not cheap. It
(06:54):
is delicious, but to me it tasted like mayonnaise. So
I was like, is there actually a benefit in me
having this asides from the taste. But I also will
say if something tastes nice to me, I'm gonna still
buy it, even if it's not benefiting me anyway.
Speaker 3 (07:08):
Yeah, bone brof's complex, So we're definitely at a stage
where we don't have research showing that it helps gut health, okay,
and I personally would wait unless I really enjoyed just
having it or anything like that. The main benefit of
bone broth is the collagen content, and that's what leads
to pretty much all of the proposed benefits. It's just
a natural way of getting that versus say a collagen powder.
But where it gets complex is looking at other benefits
(07:31):
and also the amount, so it's hard to always know
for sure how much collagen is in that. For example,
in like the sports nutrition space, we sometimes look at
collagen potentially helping injury recovery, but it requires like a
specific dose that's relatively high, and bone broth wouldn't get there.
But if we look at like skin health, usually it
doesn't take that much collagen to find pretty consistent benefits
(07:51):
of skin health. So like if I was looking at
from that angle, if somebody had bone broth every day
and they weren't having any other collagen source before that,
their skin health probably does improve. So that's another factor
i'd chuck in.
Speaker 1 (08:01):
Okay, so even if you're having you know how you
can get it in the powder form and you just
mix it with hot water and you can sip on it.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
That's like, we're fun.
Speaker 1 (08:07):
Yeah, would that make a difference to the nutrients in
your body?
Speaker 2 (08:13):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (08:13):
So this is the complicated thing about with collagen. Like,
if we're talking about skin, a decent percentage of skin
is made up of collagen. The big question everyone should
have is how do we know the collagen and this
food go to our skin or where we need and
stuff like that. The short version I go to is like,
we just have heaps of studies looking at like collagen
and skin help, and we've seen this positive outcomesthme like,
(08:33):
I don't really care at this stage. But the logic
is that like the protein slash, collagen breaks down into
the individual amino acids that just happen to be higher
in skin. And there's also some of the collagen peptides
might remain intact and can be used for that too.
Speaker 1 (08:47):
What food is collagen naturally found in.
Speaker 3 (08:50):
So you hear people in like the Carnival Comunity talk
about like eating like nose to tail of animals, like
it's in like connective tissue and stuff like that. So
if you actually, if you look up how collagen's made,
it's like pretty gross how they actually do make it.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
But yeah, yeah, I've seen. I actually had a friend
who was a nutrition and she made me a bone
broth once from a carcass and I like, I shouldn't
have looked, but I did look, and I was like, God,
that is not yeah under tendant now, And you.
Speaker 3 (09:13):
Can see what it's easy for people to make a
compelling argument for the modern food supply, like having almost
no collagen because we're not eating those parts of animals,
like we're just eating the parts that don't contain that.
So like you can see why people can make an
argument for that.
Speaker 1 (09:27):
But then in terms of like a body a sorry,
a like the body glue one that's kind of like
a little dollip of mayonnaise or something, is that doing
anything or is that more just because I like the taste?
Speaker 2 (09:38):
Does it?
Speaker 3 (09:38):
When you look at the nutrition panels that say the
protein content, it probably would yeah, if it does and
it says a certain amount, like I would wager the
large change of those collagen and it did the exact
same as any other product that had that amount of protein.
Speaker 1 (09:49):
Okay, So looking at what persent skipping, Yeah, okay, that
makes sense. And then the last red light I want
to talk about is fat burners because I feel like
this is rife again, particularly at this time of year.
People look at fat burners like they are just a
quick fix, like they don't have to do as much
excess size or they don't have to clean up their diet.
They're like, well, I'm taking a bat burner, so I'm
going to wash my hands with the rest of it.
Speaker 2 (10:11):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (10:11):
So as as somebody in the nutrition space, I obviously
get gifted a lot of supplements as well, and sometimes
this changes my perspective a bit on Like sometimes I'm like, oh,
if something's not harmful and it could have like a
one percent benefit, I'm getting it for free. Maybe I'll
take it with a fat burner. I wouldn't even do that. No,
I wouldn't because there's a few things so like they
will sometimes are different ingredients, but the main one that
(10:31):
would be doing the most is going to be caffeine. Yeah,
and that can increase our metabolic rate a bit and
our energy expansion. That can make it easy to be
in a death. So it could also suppress appatite a
little bit. But I'm like, is it worth increasing your
caffeine intake that much for the small benefit, like say
they increase your calorie expansion by like fifty to one
hundred calories per day, is it worth like having a
really high dose of caffeine for that that is higher
(10:53):
than you otherwise would want to have. I don't think
that's worth it. And then when you look at each
of the other individual ingredients oftentimes is mechanisms, Like one
of the ones that like we talked about brief the
offer is el carnotine. L carnotine technically helps with that
transportation of the body. That sounds promising. When you look
at supplementing el carnotine via like a powder or a
(11:17):
pill or anything like that, it just does nothing. Like
if you look at the outcomes of fat loss is
barely any change. But if you look at the mechanisms
where like you just trace like increases in carnosine levels,
not carnotine levels in the body, there's almost no increase,
so it's like it's it's just not doing anything.
Speaker 1 (11:32):
So if fat burners are things that are found in
those crazy pre workouts, like oxy shared and those things
that make your skin itch, and I feel like they're
the things that give pre work out a bad name.
Speaker 3 (11:40):
Yeah, to a agree, they are that oxy shreds like
a bit of a mix where it is like based
on that, but it's also marketed as a.
Speaker 2 (11:46):
Bit of a pre workout because it's like it was
super high caffeine. We might as well double up here
as well.
Speaker 1 (11:50):
So what's the difference then, between a fat burner and
a pre workout, because I like Also, for the record,
I don't take supplements. I probably should, but I don't.
I do have pre workout in the morning, purely for
the caffeine factor because I get up at four am
and it's too noisy to make a coffee in my
apartment at four am. So I do love a pre workout,
and I have a magnesium hot chocolate at night, not
(12:11):
for the magnesium, for the taste of the chocky obviously,
But I'm definitely not against pre workout. I love my
pre workout. But then what is the difference between a
pre workout and a fat burner.
Speaker 3 (12:21):
The difference is just going to be the other ingredients.
So like those fat burners will have something like el
kinatine or a few other ingredients that might be like
specifically there for fat burning reasons or at least marketing
around fat burning reasons. With pre workout, they will often
have a few other ingredients of designed to help improve
performance in the session. It's available, how much like these
things matter. But a good example of this would be
(12:43):
like cicill in mallet. It's something that like if somebody's
doing any intense exercise, I was going to last like
sixty to two hundred and forty seconds or something along
those lines. It should improve performance in that if they're
training pretty hard, because it improves blood flow. Yeah, and
even the improved blood flow like some people feel better.
Like if somebody's like doing bicep girls, like they'll get
(13:04):
a sick pump because they've got better blood flow.
Speaker 1 (13:06):
Yeah, And that's what we love. That's what we'd love
to see at the gym. I feel like it's those
little encouragements that keep you consistent. So again, I don't
want to yuck anyone's yum. If you're taking the supplements
and you feel like they're working for you or that
you enjoy them, keep taking them by all means. But
I also want to talk about some green light supplements
because you mentioned that you had a bit of a
bit of a framework, a bit of a framework for this.
(13:27):
So yeah, let's talk about some of the green light supplements.
Speaker 3 (13:29):
So the framework, which I've partly given away with the
creator anything, is if somebody is likely to have a
suboptimal intake of a certain nutrient that they could benefit from,
then a supplement could help. And it's intentionally vague, but
it's not that hard if we take a step back
and just look at it. For example, fish oil, we
see mixed reviews on weather fish oil as beneficial and
all that. Most people would say small positive benefit, Like
(13:51):
I think that's pretty well, Like that's the consensus. If
you get somebody who has almost no AMIGA three through
their diet, like they just don't have fish or fatty fish, ever,
they don't intentionally go out of their way to plant
based sources that could help with this. Fish or supplementation
makes sense. Yeah, if somebody is they get a blood
test and their vitamin D deficient and they're not going
(14:12):
to go and get heaps more sun and stuff like that.
Vitamin D supplementation makes sense, and you can just go
down the list of a lot of those things. It's
obviously harder to do that on an individual level. That Actually,
one thing I will go back to is the magnesium
on as well. Like statistically, like fifty to seventy percent
of the population would not get enough magnesium through food,
Like you could talk about it being a ev a
(14:34):
deficiency or a subclinical deficiency, which therefore means if the
majority of the population supplemented magnesium, they would have improvement
in some of their markets of health mostly.
Speaker 1 (14:43):
Yeah. Interesting, Okay, So, asides from creatine which you mentioned earlier,
do you have any green light supplements?
Speaker 3 (14:50):
Yeah, so let's go quickly, let's go creating obviously the
Fisher one specific vitamins if necessary, Vitamin C if sick,
like this is a I'll go a bit deeper on
this one. Vitamin C if you have a decent die
and stuff like that. Typically isn't going to help prevent
you from getting sick, but it might help you speed
up the rate of recovery a little bit. You can
interpret the research from two angles. The average finding and
(15:12):
research is that like people get better like a half
day quicker. And sometimes people are like, oh, that's nothing,
but I'm.
Speaker 1 (15:18):
Like, yeah it is.
Speaker 2 (15:19):
You just pop to capture. I think that's a really
easy win.
Speaker 1 (15:23):
Yeah, do you know what half a day of annual
leave is? If that's what you're taking, that is a huge,
huge win.
Speaker 3 (15:28):
Yeah, So vitamin C potentially the magnesum before bed one
is a really interesting one in terms of we have
really promising research on people with insomnia. Like it's almost
like too good to be true, Like we see people
getting like an hour extra sleep in some of these studies,
so like really really promising. We have clear evidence that
people who have higher intakes of magnesium through food on
(15:49):
average get better sleep, but it's pretty hard to interpret
that because like what else are they doing. But what
we don't have is general person just wants to improve
their sleep, has magnesum before bed test that versus plus ebo,
see if there's any benefit, Like we don't have that.
We have heaps of people who have like got an
Apple watch or they track their sleep and they can
see that it's better when they take it, But that's
(16:09):
kind of skewed because you know what you've done, Like
you know.
Speaker 2 (16:12):
That you're taking tich should help.
Speaker 3 (16:14):
But I'm at a point that I'm like, if somebody
doesn't have a super high magnesium intake through food, and
they have a magnesium form that doesn't cause issues. Being
oddly specific, but like a lot of people get diary
if they have like really high dose agazing, like they
use it for a conspection management And I'm like, oh, patience. Yeah,
so like you like, if you avoid the types that
are going to cause symptoms and you don't go stupidly high,
(16:36):
there's no downside and you might get better sleep. Like
we don't know for sure, but like if you had
the spare money and you had the inclination to it,
I could see logic in that.
Speaker 1 (16:44):
Yeah, I get it. And I feel like just the
general consensus and the general theme is if you feel
good and there's nothing that seems to be a red
flag in your health or your nutrition, then you don't
need to take a powder or a pill or a
drink of any kind.
Speaker 3 (17:02):
Yeah, And I think that's why it's interesting, going back
to the fact that it's like I've been reading met
this stuff like ten plus years. Yeah, and cree teens
only want to take consistently.
Speaker 1 (17:09):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (17:09):
I do have a lot of free products that are
sent to me and stuff like that. I'm like, oh,
there'll tell totally there's no downside. Which also makes me
think if somebody has a lot of money, they don't
really care about this, and it's like, take whatever you want.
I don't mind as long as it's not detrimental. But
some of these things will have a small increase. But
where it becomes a slippery slope is it is so
easy if you have a low bar for what you
consider taking, Like if every time you hear something's good,
(17:32):
you go take it, Like you just end up taking
twenty plus things and it gets out of hand as well.
Speaker 1 (17:35):
Yeah, I agree because I have the tendency to go
down that path as well. And I've been very lucky
in my roles in the past. I also do work
in marketing, and I've worked in health and fitness marketing
for about twelve years, so I have had a lot
of products sent to me, a lot of things like
that sent to me as well, and I can get
very sucked in and very excited and again and I
like the taste of something maybe you'll take it, but
not necessarily for the health benefits, maybe just for the taste.
(17:58):
And I think that's okay if you do it in situ,
but don't ever use these things to like replace adding
some spinach to your lunch or to your dinner. It's
kind of like if there was a pill you could
take that was like eating chocolate, but you weren't going
to actually have the chocolate, would you take it? No,
because you eat chocolate because of the taste.
Speaker 3 (18:18):
Like, yeah, I've seen like Ted talks on that I
haven't got to deepend this, but like people talking about
like if we could like just replace all of our
food with a pill that ticks every box?
Speaker 2 (18:26):
Like should you do that? Like does that make your
life better?
Speaker 1 (18:29):
Yeah? No? Well, to wrap it all up in a
beautiful little bow, then, what is one piece of advice
you would give to everyone listening to this episode about supplements?
Speaker 3 (18:38):
I would say, be selective and pick and choose stuff
based on the things that are very likely to have
a high probability of helping you. I wouldn't take twenty plus.
I also wouldn't completely swear of supplements at all. Like
there's a lot of people out there who completely avoid
ssuplines because I think they're bad and they only want
to get through natural sources, and then they're not getting
it through natural sources. And I'm like, you could have
an easy win here.
Speaker 1 (18:59):
In terms of if you wanted to like have a
good place to start, would you recommend going and getting
all your bloods and all those things like that done
to see where your deficiencies and things like that are.
Speaker 3 (19:08):
Yeah, So blood test is a great start one like
that'll help, particularly for stuff like vitamin D in specific
your help with like vitamin B twelve and a few
have those other ones. It gets tricky for some other ones,
like for example, magnesium will almost never show up as
deficient on a blood test in Australia. It seems pretty
hard to test magnesium in other ways like they test
there's a different like red blood cell tests that they're
use in America to test it more effectively. But I
(19:31):
use that point about being like, you can't actually assess
your magnesium intake that way. You can't assess cousium intake
that way either, because if you don't have enough calcium
through food, your body just starts stealing it from your
bones to keep your blood levels good. So if you
get a blood tests it's still good, but you're getting osteoprocess.
Speaker 1 (19:46):
Ah, that is so sneaky.
Speaker 3 (19:48):
Yeah, so that's one thing. The other one that this
is more sports specific. But if anyone's like looking at
like performance enhances for like gym or sports or anything
like that, the AIS has this framework where it's like
the AIS Sports Supplement its framework where they do it
in tiers, where it's like the A tiers that like
consistently has been shown to be beneficial, the B tire
is stuff that might be beneficial under certain circumstances. And
(20:10):
you've got like C and D, which is like either
this has been proven not to work but it's safe,
or this has been proven not to work and it's
potentially unsafe. And if you'll look at a new stuff,
won't like it could take two seconds just like look
on that list and be like, oh, that's in the
D category. Probably won't take that.
Speaker 1 (20:24):
For example, Oh my god, I'm going to have to
get you to send me that link and I'll pop
it in the show notes if anyone listening who wants
to check that out, because I am now fascinated, I'm
going to go look at that list now sounds good. Well,
thank you so much. Can you let everybody know where
they can find more about you?
Speaker 3 (20:37):
So two options. The first one is the Ideal Nutrition podcast.
Are really highly encouraged listening to that. I go a
bit deeper on nutrition stuff there, but I like it,
so I hope you guys do too if you listen.
And on Instagram it's aid and Underscore, the underscore Dietitian.
I post five maybe seven times a week, we'll see,
but I post pretty frequently on there too.
Speaker 1 (20:55):
I love it. You're one of my favorite accounts to follow.
That's why whenever you post something that really picks my interest,
I'm like, hey, send you an email. Game on the show.
I'll pop all of those links in the show notes
as well. Thank you so so much, Aiden, as always
had a pleasure to talk. Thanks, thank you, Thank you
so much for listening. Guys. I really hope you enjoyed
the episode, and don't forget to help a sister out
by following the podcast on Apple or on Spotify or
(21:18):
wherever you listen to your podcasts. Rate it, write me
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That's going to be events, going life first, so much
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(21:38):
online community
Apogee Production. Welcome to fit Ish. I'm Phoebe Parsons and
this is the podcast that proves that you don't have
to choose between staying fit and having fun. Welcome back
to the podcast, Aiden Muir from Ideal Nutrition. I want
to start by saying, what's up.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
That's terrible?
Speaker 1 (00:29):
That is so shocking? That is the biggest dad joke.
And if you are listening you would have obviously seen
the title of the episode. Today we are talking about
supplements and more specifically, what is a waste of money
when it comes to supplements? Because one of the things
I absolutely love about a New Year is how motivated
everyone is around their health and fitness. And obviously as
(00:51):
a dietitian, this is something that you would see nutrition
wise and as a group fitness instructor. The gyms are
packed to the raffers in January and I love it.
But people have the tendency to run like a bulleter
gate and they don't need to. I feel like there
is so much overcomplication when it comes to setting fitness
and wellness kind of goals, and I think a lot
(01:12):
of it also comes down to supplements. And I know
that this is something that's kind of rife on social media,
particularly TikTok. I swear to god TikTok is single handedly
responsible for sea moss grass. Yeah, like everyone is just
chugging spoonfuls of sea moss grass. So I want to
talk to you about red light green light supplements. But firstly,
(01:33):
what supplements do you take? If you take any?
Speaker 3 (01:36):
I suppose, Yeah, we could go heap since this. I
don't take heaps of supplements consistently. The only one I
take consistently is creating. And I've just taken that almost
every day for like ten years now or something like that.
Speaker 1 (01:47):
Oh so you were on the bandwagon way before everyone
else was.
Speaker 3 (01:50):
Yeah, and this will fit into like a framework I'll
talk about later. But one of the reasons why creating
makes a lot of sense to people is it is
very difficult to get the optimal amount through food. Using
a specific example, we get it through red meat as
the main source, but you need to eat like a
heel of red meat per day to get the optimum
mat So that happening not happening for many many people.
And it's yeah, it's probably it's not worth pursuing for
(02:12):
many people. I wouldn't recommend it for many people. So
there's this like suboptional amount that almost everyone will have.
We can address that. The bigger question for anybody who
listening is like, is that a someone you should take?
Like it helps with people who care about lifting weights
and getting stronger, it helps with a few other things,
but like, if you aren't going to be one of
the people who specifically benefits, even if you did have
(02:34):
a suboptal intake, that's still fine too.
Speaker 1 (02:36):
Yeah, And I think this again is something that comes
down to Supplements are very personalized. They're what you're lacking
potentially in a diet or whatever. That's kind of where
you need to take them from. But again, supplements are
not a magic pill. They are not a quick fix,
and a lot of the time they are very very expensive.
So I want to start with one in particular. And
(02:56):
you and I both did ins and outs of twenty
twenty five on our instagrams, and I was so happy
to see that we both had one of the same outs,
and that is green powder. Is Now I'm going to
fess up to the fact that I have taken and
endorsed green powders in the past. But when we know better,
we do better, and I actually found that greens powders
(03:16):
upset my stomach more than anything. Firstly, I eat so
many greens, so I don't even know why I was
supplementing with them. I think one of the reasons is
because I wasn't very good at drinking water, so my
greens powders were strawberry flavored and I found it easier
for me to drink water. But you don't need.
Speaker 3 (03:33):
Greens powders, no, one hundred percent, So like very big
on Firstly, one, everyone trying to get more in through food,
like getting more vegetables in, even if you don't like
vegetables like few things like one, do the best you can.
But then too, some things in life are hard. Sometimes
things are just hard, so trying to get more vegetabls in.
But then two, even if you weren't getting enough in,
like I even have a small preference towards a multivitamin
(03:54):
as the first option, even before greens powders, because this
is part of what's specifically designed for to cover gaps.
Like I don't recommend a multivitamin as a general thing
for everybody, but if you had a lot of gaps
in your diet. That's probably the first thing I look
at considering.
Speaker 1 (04:07):
Yeah, and when you look at the price point of
some of these greens powders, and the one that my
mind goes straight to ag one, Oh my god, it
is one hundred and eighty five dollars for three hundred
and fifty grams.
Speaker 2 (04:18):
So I want to talk about that as well.
Speaker 3 (04:19):
Going to the money bit specifically, it's very rare for
me to like point to a specific a specific brand,
but they do so much influencer marketing and it's very
easy to find how much they pay influenceers likes Pree
well documented and that makes obvious sense that they have
a massive margin if they're paying influencers heaps of money,
which ever means by definition it has to be significantly
(04:40):
more expensive than needs to be.
Speaker 1 (04:42):
Yeah, and the supply and demand issue, like you can't
really get it in Australia. I did a little Google before.
It's actually quite hard to get in Australia. You've got
to pay for the international shipping and blah blah blah.
But I was just so rattled to think that people
are paying one hundred and eighty dollars for some Greens powders.
You know what's cheaper. A family bag of spinach from
coals is five dollars and it actually tastes go yeah, insane. Okay,
(05:08):
the next one we've already mentioned is sea moss grass.
Now every influencer and their goddamn dog is taking sea
moss grass. And I don't know the name of the brand.
I'm not going to name and shame any brands, but
there's one branch in particular I've seen, and it comes
in three different colors. I don't know if that has
anything to do with different vitamins or minerals that might
be in the different jars specifically, but it's thirty five
(05:32):
dollars a jar and people scrunch up their face when
they swallow it, so it doesn't look like a very
pleasant experience. But firstly, what is sea moss grass as
a supplement, Like, what are you supplementing here?
Speaker 2 (05:44):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (05:44):
So it does contain like some potential beneficial like nutrients
like it has like seaweed is Like seaweed is well
known for being like very high in ideine specifically, but
like very few people are not having enough of that
when we go to seamos like once and you can
go like, look at all these like trace elements and
stuff like that. But similarly, you're getting that through food anyway.
You can get that in a much nicer way and
(06:04):
also cheap a way.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
So is it more of a micronutrient.
Speaker 2 (06:07):
It is, it's almost exclusively for micro utrients, which is
what it's.
Speaker 1 (06:11):
My god, that is insane because again I've seen them
in my local health food shop. They don't look appealing,
but I have nearly been sucked down that rabbit hole
because everyone's taking it, especially on TikTok. I'm like, do
I need to get involved in this? But also doesn't
look like it's appealing, all right. The next one is
bone broth. Now, bone broth is huge, and I feel
(06:33):
like people pedal the gut health component of bone broth,
and the one I'm thinking of can be around forty
dollars a jar. But there's like various levels of concentrate.
So there's like bone broth marine, there's a bone broth powder,
there's a bone broth body glue. It's called I have
tried the body glue and it is not cheap. It
(06:54):
is delicious, but to me it tasted like mayonnaise. So
I was like, is there actually a benefit in me
having this asides from the taste. But I also will
say if something tastes nice to me, I'm gonna still
buy it, even if it's not benefiting me anyway.
Speaker 3 (07:08):
Yeah, bone brof's complex, So we're definitely at a stage
where we don't have research showing that it helps gut health, okay,
and I personally would wait unless I really enjoyed just
having it or anything like that. The main benefit of
bone broth is the collagen content, and that's what leads
to pretty much all of the proposed benefits. It's just
a natural way of getting that versus say a collagen powder.
But where it gets complex is looking at other benefits
(07:31):
and also the amount, so it's hard to always know
for sure how much collagen is in that. For example,
in like the sports nutrition space, we sometimes look at
collagen potentially helping injury recovery, but it requires like a
specific dose that's relatively high, and bone broth wouldn't get there.
But if we look at like skin health, usually it
doesn't take that much collagen to find pretty consistent benefits
(07:51):
of skin health. So like if I was looking at
from that angle, if somebody had bone broth every day
and they weren't having any other collagen source before that,
their skin health probably does improve. So that's another factor
i'd chuck in.
Speaker 1 (08:01):
Okay, so even if you're having you know how you
can get it in the powder form and you just
mix it with hot water and you can sip on it.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
That's like, we're fun.
Speaker 1 (08:07):
Yeah, would that make a difference to the nutrients in
your body?
Speaker 2 (08:13):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (08:13):
So this is the complicated thing about with collagen. Like,
if we're talking about skin, a decent percentage of skin
is made up of collagen. The big question everyone should
have is how do we know the collagen and this
food go to our skin or where we need and
stuff like that. The short version I go to is like,
we just have heaps of studies looking at like collagen
and skin help, and we've seen this positive outcomesthme like,
(08:33):
I don't really care at this stage. But the logic
is that like the protein slash, collagen breaks down into
the individual amino acids that just happen to be higher
in skin. And there's also some of the collagen peptides
might remain intact and can be used for that too.
Speaker 1 (08:47):
What food is collagen naturally found in.
Speaker 3 (08:50):
So you hear people in like the Carnival Comunity talk
about like eating like nose to tail of animals, like
it's in like connective tissue and stuff like that. So
if you actually, if you look up how collagen's made,
it's like pretty gross how they actually do make it.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
But yeah, yeah, I've seen. I actually had a friend
who was a nutrition and she made me a bone
broth once from a carcass and I like, I shouldn't
have looked, but I did look, and I was like, God,
that is not yeah under tendant now, And you.
Speaker 3 (09:13):
Can see what it's easy for people to make a
compelling argument for the modern food supply, like having almost
no collagen because we're not eating those parts of animals,
like we're just eating the parts that don't contain that.
So like you can see why people can make an
argument for that.
Speaker 1 (09:27):
But then in terms of like a body a sorry,
a like the body glue one that's kind of like
a little dollip of mayonnaise or something, is that doing
anything or is that more just because I like the taste?
Speaker 2 (09:38):
Does it?
Speaker 3 (09:38):
When you look at the nutrition panels that say the
protein content, it probably would yeah, if it does and
it says a certain amount, like I would wager the
large change of those collagen and it did the exact
same as any other product that had that amount of protein.
Speaker 1 (09:49):
Okay, So looking at what persent skipping, Yeah, okay, that
makes sense. And then the last red light I want
to talk about is fat burners because I feel like
this is rife again, particularly at this time of year.
People look at fat burners like they are just a
quick fix, like they don't have to do as much
excess size or they don't have to clean up their diet.
They're like, well, I'm taking a bat burner, so I'm
going to wash my hands with the rest of it.
Speaker 2 (10:11):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (10:11):
So as as somebody in the nutrition space, I obviously
get gifted a lot of supplements as well, and sometimes
this changes my perspective a bit on Like sometimes I'm like, oh,
if something's not harmful and it could have like a
one percent benefit, I'm getting it for free. Maybe I'll
take it with a fat burner. I wouldn't even do that. No,
I wouldn't because there's a few things so like they
will sometimes are different ingredients, but the main one that
(10:31):
would be doing the most is going to be caffeine. Yeah,
and that can increase our metabolic rate a bit and
our energy expansion. That can make it easy to be
in a death. So it could also suppress appatite a
little bit. But I'm like, is it worth increasing your
caffeine intake that much for the small benefit, like say
they increase your calorie expansion by like fifty to one
hundred calories per day, is it worth like having a
really high dose of caffeine for that that is higher
(10:53):
than you otherwise would want to have. I don't think
that's worth it. And then when you look at each
of the other individual ingredients oftentimes is mechanisms, Like one
of the ones that like we talked about brief the
offer is el carnotine. L carnotine technically helps with that
transportation of the body. That sounds promising. When you look
at supplementing el carnotine via like a powder or a
(11:17):
pill or anything like that, it just does nothing. Like
if you look at the outcomes of fat loss is
barely any change. But if you look at the mechanisms
where like you just trace like increases in carnosine levels,
not carnotine levels in the body, there's almost no increase,
so it's like it's it's just not doing anything.
Speaker 1 (11:32):
So if fat burners are things that are found in
those crazy pre workouts, like oxy shared and those things
that make your skin itch, and I feel like they're
the things that give pre work out a bad name.
Speaker 3 (11:40):
Yeah, to a agree, they are that oxy shreds like
a bit of a mix where it is like based
on that, but it's also marketed as a.
Speaker 2 (11:46):
Bit of a pre workout because it's like it was
super high caffeine. We might as well double up here
as well.
Speaker 1 (11:50):
So what's the difference then, between a fat burner and
a pre workout, because I like Also, for the record,
I don't take supplements. I probably should, but I don't.
I do have pre workout in the morning, purely for
the caffeine factor because I get up at four am
and it's too noisy to make a coffee in my
apartment at four am. So I do love a pre workout,
and I have a magnesium hot chocolate at night, not
(12:11):
for the magnesium, for the taste of the chocky obviously,
But I'm definitely not against pre workout. I love my
pre workout. But then what is the difference between a
pre workout and a fat burner.
Speaker 3 (12:21):
The difference is just going to be the other ingredients.
So like those fat burners will have something like el
kinatine or a few other ingredients that might be like
specifically there for fat burning reasons or at least marketing
around fat burning reasons. With pre workout, they will often
have a few other ingredients of designed to help improve
performance in the session. It's available, how much like these
things matter. But a good example of this would be
(12:43):
like cicill in mallet. It's something that like if somebody's
doing any intense exercise, I was going to last like
sixty to two hundred and forty seconds or something along
those lines. It should improve performance in that if they're
training pretty hard, because it improves blood flow. Yeah, and
even the improved blood flow like some people feel better.
Like if somebody's like doing bicep girls, like they'll get
(13:04):
a sick pump because they've got better blood flow.
Speaker 1 (13:06):
Yeah, And that's what we love. That's what we'd love
to see at the gym. I feel like it's those
little encouragements that keep you consistent. So again, I don't
want to yuck anyone's yum. If you're taking the supplements
and you feel like they're working for you or that
you enjoy them, keep taking them by all means. But
I also want to talk about some green light supplements
because you mentioned that you had a bit of a
bit of a framework, a bit of a framework for this.
(13:27):
So yeah, let's talk about some of the green light supplements.
Speaker 3 (13:29):
So the framework, which I've partly given away with the
creator anything, is if somebody is likely to have a
suboptimal intake of a certain nutrient that they could benefit from,
then a supplement could help. And it's intentionally vague, but
it's not that hard if we take a step back
and just look at it. For example, fish oil, we
see mixed reviews on weather fish oil as beneficial and
all that. Most people would say small positive benefit, Like
(13:51):
I think that's pretty well, Like that's the consensus. If
you get somebody who has almost no AMIGA three through
their diet, like they just don't have fish or fatty fish, ever,
they don't intentionally go out of their way to plant
based sources that could help with this. Fish or supplementation
makes sense. Yeah, if somebody is they get a blood
test and their vitamin D deficient and they're not going
(14:12):
to go and get heaps more sun and stuff like that.
Vitamin D supplementation makes sense, and you can just go
down the list of a lot of those things. It's
obviously harder to do that on an individual level. That Actually,
one thing I will go back to is the magnesium
on as well. Like statistically, like fifty to seventy percent
of the population would not get enough magnesium through food,
Like you could talk about it being a ev a
(14:34):
deficiency or a subclinical deficiency, which therefore means if the
majority of the population supplemented magnesium, they would have improvement
in some of their markets of health mostly.
Speaker 1 (14:43):
Yeah. Interesting, Okay, So, asides from creatine which you mentioned earlier,
do you have any green light supplements?
Speaker 3 (14:50):
Yeah, so let's go quickly, let's go creating obviously the
Fisher one specific vitamins if necessary, Vitamin C if sick,
like this is a I'll go a bit deeper on
this one. Vitamin C if you have a decent die
and stuff like that. Typically isn't going to help prevent
you from getting sick, but it might help you speed
up the rate of recovery a little bit. You can
interpret the research from two angles. The average finding and
(15:12):
research is that like people get better like a half
day quicker. And sometimes people are like, oh, that's nothing,
but I'm.
Speaker 1 (15:18):
Like, yeah it is.
Speaker 2 (15:19):
You just pop to capture. I think that's a really
easy win.
Speaker 1 (15:23):
Yeah, do you know what half a day of annual
leave is? If that's what you're taking, that is a huge,
huge win.
Speaker 3 (15:28):
Yeah, So vitamin C potentially the magnesum before bed one
is a really interesting one in terms of we have
really promising research on people with insomnia. Like it's almost
like too good to be true, Like we see people
getting like an hour extra sleep in some of these studies,
so like really really promising. We have clear evidence that
people who have higher intakes of magnesium through food on
(15:49):
average get better sleep, but it's pretty hard to interpret
that because like what else are they doing. But what
we don't have is general person just wants to improve
their sleep, has magnesum before bed test that versus plus ebo,
see if there's any benefit, Like we don't have that.
We have heaps of people who have like got an
Apple watch or they track their sleep and they can
see that it's better when they take it, But that's
(16:09):
kind of skewed because you know what you've done, Like
you know.
Speaker 2 (16:12):
That you're taking tich should help.
Speaker 3 (16:14):
But I'm at a point that I'm like, if somebody
doesn't have a super high magnesium intake through food, and
they have a magnesium form that doesn't cause issues. Being
oddly specific, but like a lot of people get diary
if they have like really high dose agazing, like they
use it for a conspection management And I'm like, oh, patience. Yeah,
so like you like, if you avoid the types that
are going to cause symptoms and you don't go stupidly high,
(16:36):
there's no downside and you might get better sleep. Like
we don't know for sure, but like if you had
the spare money and you had the inclination to it,
I could see logic in that.
Speaker 1 (16:44):
Yeah, I get it. And I feel like just the
general consensus and the general theme is if you feel
good and there's nothing that seems to be a red
flag in your health or your nutrition, then you don't
need to take a powder or a pill or a
drink of any kind.
Speaker 3 (17:02):
Yeah, And I think that's why it's interesting, going back
to the fact that it's like I've been reading met
this stuff like ten plus years. Yeah, and cree teens
only want to take consistently.
Speaker 1 (17:09):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (17:09):
I do have a lot of free products that are
sent to me and stuff like that. I'm like, oh,
there'll tell totally there's no downside. Which also makes me
think if somebody has a lot of money, they don't
really care about this, and it's like, take whatever you want.
I don't mind as long as it's not detrimental. But
some of these things will have a small increase. But
where it becomes a slippery slope is it is so
easy if you have a low bar for what you
consider taking, Like if every time you hear something's good,
(17:32):
you go take it, Like you just end up taking
twenty plus things and it gets out of hand as well.
Speaker 1 (17:35):
Yeah, I agree because I have the tendency to go
down that path as well. And I've been very lucky
in my roles in the past. I also do work
in marketing, and I've worked in health and fitness marketing
for about twelve years, so I have had a lot
of products sent to me, a lot of things like
that sent to me as well, and I can get
very sucked in and very excited and again and I
like the taste of something maybe you'll take it, but
not necessarily for the health benefits, maybe just for the taste.
(17:58):
And I think that's okay if you do it in situ,
but don't ever use these things to like replace adding
some spinach to your lunch or to your dinner. It's
kind of like if there was a pill you could
take that was like eating chocolate, but you weren't going
to actually have the chocolate, would you take it? No,
because you eat chocolate because of the taste.
Speaker 3 (18:18):
Like, yeah, I've seen like Ted talks on that I
haven't got to deepend this, but like people talking about
like if we could like just replace all of our
food with a pill that ticks every box?
Speaker 2 (18:26):
Like should you do that? Like does that make your
life better?
Speaker 1 (18:29):
Yeah? No? Well, to wrap it all up in a
beautiful little bow, then, what is one piece of advice
you would give to everyone listening to this episode about supplements?
Speaker 3 (18:38):
I would say, be selective and pick and choose stuff
based on the things that are very likely to have
a high probability of helping you. I wouldn't take twenty plus.
I also wouldn't completely swear of supplements at all. Like
there's a lot of people out there who completely avoid
ssuplines because I think they're bad and they only want
to get through natural sources, and then they're not getting
it through natural sources. And I'm like, you could have
an easy win here.
Speaker 1 (18:59):
In terms of if you wanted to like have a
good place to start, would you recommend going and getting
all your bloods and all those things like that done
to see where your deficiencies and things like that are.
Speaker 3 (19:08):
Yeah, So blood test is a great start one like
that'll help, particularly for stuff like vitamin D in specific
your help with like vitamin B twelve and a few
have those other ones. It gets tricky for some other ones,
like for example, magnesium will almost never show up as
deficient on a blood test in Australia. It seems pretty
hard to test magnesium in other ways like they test
there's a different like red blood cell tests that they're
use in America to test it more effectively. But I
(19:31):
use that point about being like, you can't actually assess
your magnesium intake that way. You can't assess cousium intake
that way either, because if you don't have enough calcium
through food, your body just starts stealing it from your
bones to keep your blood levels good. So if you
get a blood tests it's still good, but you're getting osteoprocess.
Speaker 1 (19:46):
Ah, that is so sneaky.
Speaker 3 (19:48):
Yeah, so that's one thing. The other one that this
is more sports specific. But if anyone's like looking at
like performance enhances for like gym or sports or anything
like that, the AIS has this framework where it's like
the AIS Sports Supplement its framework where they do it
in tiers, where it's like the A tiers that like
consistently has been shown to be beneficial, the B tire
is stuff that might be beneficial under certain circumstances. And
(20:10):
you've got like C and D, which is like either
this has been proven not to work but it's safe,
or this has been proven not to work and it's
potentially unsafe. And if you'll look at a new stuff,
won't like it could take two seconds just like look
on that list and be like, oh, that's in the
D category. Probably won't take that.
Speaker 1 (20:24):
For example, Oh my god, I'm going to have to
get you to send me that link and I'll pop
it in the show notes if anyone listening who wants
to check that out, because I am now fascinated, I'm
going to go look at that list now sounds good. Well,
thank you so much. Can you let everybody know where
they can find more about you?
Speaker 3 (20:37):
So two options. The first one is the Ideal Nutrition podcast.
Are really highly encouraged listening to that. I go a
bit deeper on nutrition stuff there, but I like it,
so I hope you guys do too if you listen.
And on Instagram it's aid and Underscore, the underscore Dietitian.
I post five maybe seven times a week, we'll see,
but I post pretty frequently on there too.
Speaker 1 (20:55):
I love it. You're one of my favorite accounts to follow.
That's why whenever you post something that really picks my interest,
I'm like, hey, send you an email. Game on the show.
I'll pop all of those links in the show notes
as well. Thank you so so much, Aiden, as always
had a pleasure to talk. Thanks, thank you, Thank you
so much for listening. Guys. I really hope you enjoyed
the episode, and don't forget to help a sister out
by following the podcast on Apple or on Spotify or
(21:18):
wherever you listen to your podcasts. Rate it, write me
a review, and if you want more finish, we do
have a private Facebook group. There is going to be exclusive.
Q and A is happening with my guests in that group.
That's going to be events, going life first, so much
fun stuff happening. Just look up fit ish in brackets
on Facebook and you can be part of the Finish
(21:38):
online community
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