The multivitamin supplement is a staple in many people’s lives, but is it really necessary? Can it even harmful? I break it all down in this episode of the podcast.

TIME STAMPS:

YouTube:

00:46 – A multivitamin sounds great…in theory.

04:50 – What’s wrong with most multivitamins.

13:27 – Supplements vs. real food.

16:04 – Which multivitamin ingredients you are wasting money on?

22:52 – The multivitamin I take and why.

31:59 – The serving size tells you a lot.

Audio:

04:15 – A multivitamin sounds great…in theory.

08:19 – What’s wrong with most multivitamins.

16:56 – Supplements vs. real food.

19:33 – Which multivitamin ingredients you are wasting money on?

26:22 – The multivitamin I take and why.

35:28 – The serving size tells you a lot.

ARTICLES RELATED TO THIS PODCAST:

The Definitive Guide to the Multivitamin Supplement: What Is and Isn’t Worth Your Money and Why

The Definitive Guide to Vitamins and Minerals

What did you think of this episode? Have anything else to share? Let me know in the comments below!

Transcript:

[00:00:00] Hey, it’s Mike. And this podcast is brought to you by legion. My line of naturally sweetened and flavored workout supplements. Now, as you probably know, I’m really not a fan of the supplement industry. I’ve wasted thousands and thousands of dollars over the years on worthless supplements that Basically do nothing.

And I’ve always had trouble finding products actually worth buying. And especially as I’ve gotten more and more educated as to what actually works and what doesn’t. And eventually after complaining a lot, I decided to do something about it and start making my own supplements. The exact supplements I myself have always wanted a few of the things that make my products unique are one that are 100 percent naturally sweetened and flavored, which I think is good because while our official sweeteners.

May not be as harmful. Some people claim there is research that suggests regular consumption of these chemicals may not be good for our health, particularly our gut health. So I like to just play it safe and sweeten everything with stevia and erythritol, which are natural sweeteners [00:01:00] that actually have health benefits, not health risks.

To all ingredients are backed by peer reviewed scientific research that you can verify for yourself. If you go on our website and you check out any of our product pages, you’re going to see that we explain. Why we’ve chosen each ingredient and we cite all supporting evidence in the footnotes. So you can go look at the research for yourself and verify that we’re doing the right thing.

Three, all ingredients are also included at clinically effective dosages, which are the exact dosages used in those studies that prove their effectiveness. This is very important because while the molecule might be proven to, let’s say, improve your workout performance, not all dosages are going to improve your workout performance.

If you take too little, You’re not going to see any effects. You have to take the right amounts. And the right amounts are the amounts proven to be effective in scientific research. And four, there are no proprietary blends, which means you know exactly what you’re buying when you buy our supplements. All of our formulations are 100 percent transparent in terms of ingredients and dosages.

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I make my living primarily as a writer. So as long as I can keep selling books, then I can keep writing articles over at muscle. For life and legion and recording podcasts and videos like this and all that fun stuff. Now I have several books, but the place to start is bigger leaner, stronger if you’re a guy and thinner leaner, stronger if you’re a girl.

Now these books, they’re basically going to teach you everything you need to know about dieting, training, and supplementation to build muscle. Lose fat and look and feel great without having to give up all the foods you love or live in the gym grinding away at workouts you hate. And you can find my books everywhere you can buy books online like Amazon, Audible, iBooks, Google Play, Barnes Noble, Kobo, and so forth.

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I hope you enjoy it and let’s get to the show.

Hey, this is Mike from muscle for life and welcome to another episode of the podcast. In this episode, I want to talk about the multivitamin supplement. A lot of people have asked me to continue the little series I was doing on supplements and I got sidetracked and did a couple episodes on other things.

So I’m going to get back on track with the supplement series in this episode. Let’s talk about multivitamins. They’re very popular. I’ll see you later. [00:04:00] They’re also a bit controversial. You’ve probably seen news stories that say, if you take a multi multivitamin, you’re harming your health or you are increasing your risk of, getting various disease or even dying earlier and so forth.

So let’s talk about it. So first let’s talk about the. Basic theory or the basic idea of taking multivitamin is good. And it makes sense. Your body needs a wide spectrum of vitamins and minerals to do everything that it does. And ideally, we would get all of these things from our diet. But the average western diet.

just isn’t there. A lot of people are deficient in different B vitamins and vitamin A and certain minerals like magnesium and zinc and vitamin D deficiencies are very common. And these deficiencies are also fairly common, even among people that eat decently. If you’re really taking the time to diversify your vegetable and fruit intake.

So if you are eating, a fair amount of leafy greens regularly, Which are high in certain type of molecules, your body needs and certain types of [00:05:00] micronutrients your body needs as well as our cruciferous vegetables, as well as colorful fruits and vegetables. The pigment in fruits and vegetables is very healthy for the body.

So if you’re eating stuff like, Peppers different, red peppers, yellow peppers, whatever, green peppers. If you’re eating colorful fruits, like I like blueberries and strawberries personally, those are my favorite colorful fruits. So I eat quite a few, quite a bit of blueberries and strawberries.

I also like bananas for potassium. But my point is you can plan your diet out to where you probably wouldn’t benefit from multivitamin at all. Like you’re going to, you would get everything you need from your diet. I’d say it’s possible. It’s going to be tough though, because one, it’s going to require that you’ve really micromanage your diet and micromanage your meal planning, which is pretty annoying.

And two the foods that you’re eating may not be as micronutrient dense as you think. So like for instance organic foods, certain organic produce in particular are known to be [00:06:00] more nutritious than the conventional than their conventional counterparts, but organic is expensive. So not everybody can do that.

And even then, we have a declining quality of soil and just the general nutritional value of food here in the United States has been steadily declining over the last several decades. And so it just makes it harder and harder to give your body the micronutrients that it needs, the nutrition that it needs to perform optimally.

And really what we’re talking about here is not surviving, but thriving the body. Human body is incredibly good at surviving. It can adapt to all kinds of sub optimal, living conditions, whether it be diet or, physical conditions or whatever. But that’s, our goal isn’t just to survive isn’t just to make it for a certain period of time before our bodies just fall apart and die.

The idea obviously is to thrive, is to flourish, to thrive. To, be healthy and be vibrant and be vital and mentally clear and able to focus and able to, enjoy life and do what we want to do. So the [00:07:00] idea of taking multivitamin in that context makes sense. If we, if a multivitamin were formulated well, then it could plug these holes in our diet and provide us with essential vitamins and minerals.

And other things that we’re not getting enough of in our diets and thereby improve our health and make us feel better and look better and so forth. And ideally a multivitamin would also help maybe mitigate some of the damage or downsides of our unhealthier habits, whether it be just maybe, getting too many calories, too regularly from junk foods that are just, devoid of maybe just sugar stuff or whatever, or smoking or drinking.

Or sedentary living, although those are very unhealthy habits that are never going to be overcome by supplementation alone, of course. The idea is at least if we are providing our bodies with adequate micronutrients that they can be resilient enough to not just fall apart if we don’t get everything right all the time.

That’s the idea. But the [00:08:00] problem is. It doesn’t matter how great an idea is. It all comes down to execution. And the majority of the multivitamins in the market today are, they’re just shitty. Some of my biggest complaints are one, they’re often stuffed with very large dosages of certain vitamins and minerals, and then very low dosages of others with no seeming there, there seems to be no logic to, to there was really no thought.

Put into these formulations other than price. Going with the cheapest forms of everything, and then just going with an amount that really just looking at it against the DRI and, in terms of, so that’s a daily recommended intake. So like a percentage. So if you saw that a multivitamin had, let’s say 5 percent of the DRI of something, You as a consumer, even though you don’t know why is the DRI, what it is, what does that really mean?

What does this do in the body? You would just perceive that as well. 5 percent that’s going to do nothing. So as long as those, DRI values are high enough on the formulation then that is just like something that you would perceive as, [00:09:00] oh this must be good. I’m getting, 75 percent of my DRI this vitamin or this mineral from this multivitamin, or in some cases getting more than DRI.

And a lot of people will assume that more of the, they know that vitamins and minerals and micronutrients are good, so they’ll assume that more of something good is better and that’s not necessarily true, which brings me to my next point. The next thing I don’t like about a lot of multivitamins in the market and that is that providing so like too low of something is obviously bad if you’re, if it has if a multivitamin contains too little of, let’s say vitamin D or vitamin K or zinc.

Then it’s not serving its purpose. The purpose isn’t to take us from very deficient to slightly deficient. The purpose would be to go from any deficiency or regarding, to sufficiency. And then you have super doses of other vitamins and other minerals that in some cases can be harmful.

And this is why the multivitamin has gotten a bad rap and has taken a beating in the media is because mainly because of antioxidants, actually. In, in vitamin E is a [00:10:00] commonly, it’s commonly high, it’s, you’ll find it in high doses in many multivitamins. And this is probably because antioxidants are generally perceived.

To be good and anti cancer and that you’re great for your body and yet you should yield these antioxidant rich foods and you should take all these antioxidant supplements because it, prevents oxidative damage and it’s good for slowing down the process of aging, blah, blah, blah.

And there’s truth. Yes. In some of the in, in the basic idea that your body. That’s what, yes, that those are some of the things the antioxidants do in the body. But the problem is super dosing antioxidants can actually be harmful and especially a certain type of synthetic vitamin E that is used in many multivitamins.

So when you super dose that there’s research that suggests that. That alone could increase the risk of dying. Essentially, it’s all cause mortality, dying from any cause. And that’s where a lot of these new stories have come from saying, Hey, if you take a multivitamin, you might be increasing your risk of death.

[00:11:00] So you’ll find a lot of vitamin E in, in multivitamins and you’ll also find it in a cheap synthetic form. And not that all synthetic vitamins are worse than natural vitamins. In some cases they’re even better. Like I believe it’s vitamin B5 is the synthetic form has been shown to be absorbed better than the natural form.

That’s also, I would say that’s a slight aside, something that is more in the marketing of multivitamins. They’ll try to sell you on, Oh because these are food based this is a food based multivitamin. It contains no synthetic vitamins or minerals. It’s better for you.

And that’s not true that can be true depending on the product, but you can’t just say that generally it’s like the all natural claim that’s used on food. It just means nothing appealing to nature is. It’s an easy way to increase the perceived value of something because a lot of people assume that the more natural something is, the better it is for the body, but that’s not necessarily true.

Anyways, back to the antioxidants, you also find vitamin C in very high doses because it’s an antioxidant. And again, it’s one of it’s just markers playing on people’s perceptions. So [00:12:00] if people think that taking high amounts of vitamin C is good for them. Even if the supplement companies know that it’s, there is no benefit to it.

You don’t need to be taking, a couple grams of vitamin C a day unless you’re sick, but on a day to day basis, you don’t need to be taking a ton of vitamin C. However, if people think that vitamin C taking a lot of vitamin C is good for them, then there are a lot of supplement companies.

They’ll just go. Matt, who cares what’s good and what’s not good. This is what people, if we can play that angle and increase our sales of that product by 8%, let’s do it. And of course that’s just, shitty people being shitty, but that’s, I don’t know, that’s the industry.

That’s the space. Another example of a vitamin that you can find overdose and multivitamins is vitamin A, a synthetic form called retinol, that it was once thought that having, that taking large amounts of retinol was good for you, but now newer research shows that it can harm your liver. The point is that’s why multivitamins can be harmful.

And that’s why a multivitamin formulation has to be created [00:13:00] carefully. And it has to be created with the target, who you’re going to be selling it to in mind in terms of what their diet is and which multi, which vitamins and minerals. It should be higher and which should be lower and you don’t, it’s not just, Hey, let’s just stuff a bunch of stuff in this and let’s just, fill it full of antioxidants so we can say that in the marketing copy, then people are going to think it’s good for them and take it.

And that’s really the general approach of creating multivitamins and it sucks obviously. And another reason why many multivitamins are Just subpar or worse is they don’t contain much of anything beyond the essential vitamins and minerals. Many multivitamins, I should also mention if we’re talking essential vitamin minerals are missing very important ones altogether.

Like I had mentioned earlier missing vitamin D or having way too little. If you look at there’s a guy’s name, his name is Dr. Michael Holick and vitamin D research has been his life’s work and thanks to him. What used to be the D. R. I. Of maybe four or five hundred I use a day.

We now know that [00:14:00] a much safer or much better baseline intake for everyone is 2000. I use a day and there are there’s research that suggests maybe even as much as 5000. I use a day would be a good baseline for adults. And in some cases, people need more like my body genetically. Needs more vitamin D to cause you can get blood tested and that’s really the best way to know.

If you really want to know how much vitamin D your body needs, you can get blood tested so you can find out how much D3 is actually in your blood and what do you have to take in terms of supplementation to get there. For me, it’s about 10, 000 I use a day. That’s just how my body is. I’m not in the sun, even though I live in Florida.

I’m in this office all the time, so I’m not out in the sun much. And that’s, that’s the main, that’s the main way that you’re going to get your vitamin D through, natural sources. You have to be out in the sun because there’s interactions in the body with cholesterol that, that creates vitamin D when you’re in the sun.

But if you’re not in the sun, you can get vitamin D. In small amounts in certain foods, certain fish and [00:15:00] dairy. But again, you’re not gonna get enough. If if a multivitamin contains 400 or 500 I use of vitamin D per serving, that’s too low. A lot of multivitamins don’t contain vitamin K, which is a very common vitamin deficiency.

And vitamin K was once thought to just be the bone vitamin. But now we know that it has a much larger and much more important role in the body. And kale is a good source of vitamin K. The the, if you’re going to get it in your, through your diet, again, that’s something you’re going to have to do.

Intentionally, you’re going to have to go say, I’m going to eat these foods regularly because that’s how I’m going to get my vitamin K. A lot of people don’t do that. You’re not going to find vitamin K in a lot of multivitamins because it’s very expensive in terms of for just a single vitamin.

Many multivitamins don’t contain enough zinc. Many multivitamins don’t contain enough magnesium and on. That’s, there’s a problem with just the basic formulation of that’s, that would be the bare minimum that we would expect from multivitamin is at least have a well formulated collection of essential vitamins and minerals.

So at least, help give our [00:16:00] bodies what we’re not getting from our diet, which by the way, don’t think that a multivitamin, a good multivitamin could ever replace. Fruits and vegetables which is obvious. Those are obviously the primary sources of micronutrients in your diet. And the main reason for that is the natural sources of vitamins and minerals contain not just the vitamins and minerals, but other molecules that interact with those vitamins and minerals that you’re not going to get from supplementation.

Really a multivitamin supplement or a green supplement, which I’ll talk about in the next podcast, it’s meant to supplement your diet. It’s not meant to replace. Foods that you should be eating to just live healthy. Like the standard government recommendation for adults, if I remember correctly, it’s about two or three cups of vegetables a day and two, two cups of fruit a day.

And that’s what I eat personally. So I get there with my lunch is a big salad. Dark greens and onions and peppers. And then at dinner I eat [00:17:00] about another two cups of vegetables these days. It’s a lot of Brussels sprouts because I also know that my body has a heightened need for cruciferous vegetables and I like Brussels sprouts.

So I do that sometimes though. I do cauliflower. Sometimes I do broccoli. And then it’s also, there are mushrooms in there onions in there, garlic. So a pretty diverse group of vegetables is, and I, that, that’s planned. Fortunately I like those foods, so it’s easy for me to do it.

And then in terms of fruit, I have about, I would say close to a cup of strawberries every day. I have a banana and I have about a half a cup of blueberries every day. And That there are my fruits and vegetables and everything else. I have meat and I have grains of some kind. Usually these days it’s oatmeal and I have, what am I forgetting?

I have some Greek yogurt. I have some almonds to get some good fat. In addition to the saturated fat that I’m getting, to get some unsaturated fat, I like almonds. I also have some chocolate every day, which has some [00:18:00] unsaturated and some saturated fat. So those are the basic, there’s my, my, my diet.

And I also do take a multivitamin, and I’ll explain why and which in a minute. The bare minimum that we’d ask for a multivitamin is okay, we’re gonna eat our, we’re gonna eat fruits, we’re gonna eat vegetables, but we, that doesn’t necessarily mean we’re going to have all the micronutrients at the right levels.

So at least, we want that supplement to bring everything up to where it should be to, to the healthy, normal range. Now that even like doing that is not very expensive. Creating that product is not very expensive. It just takes, thought and it takes research and it takes time. If you were to do it, let’s say, I don’t even know actually what the cost per bottle would be for just that alone, but I can tell you it wouldn’t be an expensive product.

If you want to make a great product, you have room to add more things in to it. So what else should be added? Many multivitamins, they just add. Proprietary blends of crap. Some of them have BCAAs, which makes no sense. Why? There’s no reason to supplement BCAAs if [00:19:00] you’re eating enough protein.

Unless you’re training fasted, I’ve talked to a lot about this, but the average person on a day to day basis, especially the average person, working out that knows a bit about dieting, that’s eating enough protein does not need any BCAAs. You also find enzymes, the digestive enzymes in multivitamins, which again, The average person with a healthy gut doesn’t need to get digestive, doesn’t need to supplement digestive enzymes.

Your body produces these enzymes and unless you have a problem, you’re, it produces everything it needs and you’re not going to gain anything from. Adding those to, your supplementation probiotics. Sometimes you’ll find some probiotics and multivitamins. And again, if you have a gut problems, probiotics, we know that, scientifically speaking, they can definitely help.

There may be benefits for people with healthy guts. We don’t know. This is a line of research that it’s just, it’s ongoing. But how probiotics are sold, a lot of probiotics are sold as if, this is guaranteed to help you. If you have a healthy gut, this is [00:20:00] guaranteed to help you.

This is, it’s going to boost your immune system. It’s going to help you lose weight. It’s going to improve your skin, your hair, blah, blah, blah. And that’s just not true. Again, there may be. Benefits to healthy people, but we just don’t know yet. So if you’re going to sell probiotics, honestly, that’s how you have to sell it, which obviously isn’t very compelling, which is why you don’t see that.

Ironically, I’m working on a meal replacement shake. And actually the formulation is done. So now we’re getting samples going and it’s going to contain probiotics. And, but that’s how in the sales copy is this is basically going to be the pitch. It’s going to be, Hey, so here’s this research that we know that if you have any, gut issues or certain types of gut issues like IBS type things or whatever, probiotics can help.

If you have a healthy gut. We don’t know, but it’s possible. And here are the possible benefits. And then we’re including them in this product also because it’s a mirror placement shake and it’s going to be a high calorie shake. And if it is going to help you digest it at all, then, and if it is going to help with any sort of absorption or anything, then [00:21:00] great, they’re not super expensive.

I’m putting them in there with my fingers crossed, basically. You’ll also find some of the added stuff in multivitamins. You’ll find like proprietary blends of fruit and vegetable powders, which again, we’ll talk about greens supplements in the next podcast, but yeah, that’s fine. You can just eat your fruits and vegetables or you can get them powdered, but when you have a hundred milligram, proprietary blend of fruit and vegetable powders, it’s going to do absolutely nothing.

If you were taking. I would say 20 grams, 15 to 20 grams a day of certain fruits and vegetables, certain powdered fruit and vegetables that, that could definitely help. Again, it wouldn’t replace your fruit and vegetable intake because it’s not the same fresh vegetables. It’s not the same as, eating vegetables that have been powdered or even fruit that’s been powdered.

But I would say that at least that could help. But I, a hundred milligrams is not going to do anything. Sometimes you’ll also find stuff that’s supposed to help your body detox. Like it’s supposed to [00:22:00] detox your liver or, help your kidneys detox or whatever. And that’s bullshit. If you just go to Legion, go to legionathletics.

com and search for detox. You’ll see an article that I wrote on this subject and the long story short is yes, we’re exposed to a lot of toxins in our environment and a lot of poisons. And yes, we know that some of these toxins lodge in fatty tissues, but it’s, you can’t just. Take, a supplement to get rid of it.

You can’t even need not necessarily even just, exercise sweating doesn’t necessarily get rid of them. So that, that’s the long story short in detoxing. A lot of people, they turn to detoxing as just a way to rapidly lose weight. And that’s just starvation dieting, which I mean if you want to do that, okay, you can do that, but you don’t have to take, you have to waste money on detox supplements.

Just, eat just eat 200 grams of protein a day. That’s it. That’s all you get. And do that for five days. Like a, a protein sparing modified fast type of thing. If you would really want to do that, of course, that’s not something I recommend. It’s not I just, I think starvation dieting is silly.

Just be patient, do it right. [00:23:00] And you don’t have to suffer through eating no food for a week or whatever. So you’ll find a lot of other ingredients in multivitamins stuff with no scientific research to back why it’s there. The main point is just to create a long label, a padded label, a padded ingredients list, where when you look at it as a consumer, again, like I was saying earlier, it comes back to perception.

It’s all just about perceived value. If you were to see a multivitamin with a small number of ingredients you might instinctively think that is less valuable than a multivitamin with a long list of ingredients. And this applies to supplements in general. This has been part of the supplement game for a long time is have a massive list of ingredients.

You’ll find this with fat burners a lot too, where you’ll have, five proprietary blends that have 20 ingredients each. So it’s just an insane amount of ingredients. But what you don’t know is, you can list an ingredient. On a proprietary blend. If there’s less than a milligram of it. There could be basically nothing of of the majority of those and don’t think companies don’t do this because they do a proprietary blend.

That first ingredient, [00:24:00] it’s predominance by weight. So that first ingredient means that there’s the most of that in the product. Out of anything else. And then the second, or at least in that blend, the second ingredient is the second most, but that first ingredient could actually be 99 percent of the blend.

So if the first ingredient is something cheap and then you have a bunch of other stuff that comes after it and some of it might be expensive and good stuff, it may be one milligram of each and yes, companies do this. So that’s, the multivitamin that, that’s gives you the big picture of the multivitamin supplement and why for the, for a long time I didn’t take any multivitamins.

And then I found two, I found one by a company called garden of life that was decent. And then there was another by source naturals that also was decent, but they were just okay. I felt like they were good enough to buy, but they didn’t. Excite me. So I made my own and that is the name of the product is triumph.

And if you’re familiar with me and my work, of [00:25:00] course, you’ve heard of Legion, that I have a line of supplements and you probably know the story of how it came about, which is basically this what I just told you about multivitamins. That’s basically the long story short with everything we have.

We have a protein powder, we have a pre workout, we have a post workout. So I always had this problem of Not really not being able to find supplements that I, myself, as I became more educated really could even justify buying and using myself, let alone recommending to others. And there was an opportunity.

I saw an opportunity there. To cut out the middleman of wholesalers and the whole wholesale retail model is really what makes it impossible to make good supplements because of the margins that are required. If you buy something at GNC for 40, it was produced from anywhere from let’s say two to 4 and that’s a standard retail margin.

That’s how the retail world works because the amount of because of the margins that each player wants, the manufacturer, the wholesaler, the retailer. So when you mark it all up, mark it all up. And it comes to you, the consumer, you’re now at eight to 10 [00:26:00] X generally. And, in some cases in supplements, it’s actually, I’d say eight to 10 X is probably a general across the board retail supplements can be even higher because it’s just a shit industry.

So I saw an opportunity to cut out all the middlemen have an online business direct to consumer and just put all that money that would normally be taken by the middlemen and just put it into creating better products. And it’s gone very well. And People have responded very well and the products have become very popular and you can find them on review sites and whatever, and you’re not going to ever find products like them in GNC or vitamin shop because the margins aren’t there.

I guess if they were to buy directly from me, we probably could make some of them work but that’s not how they work. They work through wholesalers. And distributors and that’s it. So I created my own multivitamin. I’m not going to give a big pitch on it. If you want to check it out, it’s called triumph.

Go to legionathletics. com. You can look at it. 22 essential vitamins and minerals including ones that are expensive like vitamin K, K one and K two. vitamin D. And minerals like I was saying [00:27:00] earlier, zinc and magnesium in actual good dosages. And there are a lot of work and a lot of thought was put into the vitamins and minerals in the product.

And then there are 14 additional. Ingredients that also confer quite a few health benefits that a lot of people buy separately. And that was also something that I wanted to do when I was working on this multivitamin. And it’s not just me. I have people that work with me on this of course because I’m I’m informed, but I’m not a scientist.

And so I’ve worked with scientists on this and I’ve had a lot of ideas of my own and then I’ve. obviously gotten a lot of help. But so there are, the idea is okay, we have quite a bit of money that we can spend on adding additional things. So let’s add things that will work synergistically with the vitamins and minerals in some cases.

And then also just what is the purpose of this multivitamin? Okay, so it’s for active people. And what do we want out of it? We want to have more energy. We want to sleep better. We want to recover faster. We want to perform better. So what can we [00:28:00] add? You only can go so far with vitamins and minerals, of course, but there are a lot of other things that you can, a lot of other supplements that you can take that people do take that is by separately.

Of course, it just adds up. So if if you have your basic multivitamin and then you also are taking eight other things, in this case, triumph has 14 additional ingredients. You’re obviously one, it’s going to be super expensive and to your cabinet is just going to be, you’re going to need a pantry just for your supplements alone.

Go, you can go check it out. And that’s the multivitamin. Now that I, that’s all I take. And it’s become very popular. You can check it out on Amazon. If you want to see reviews, people love it. Probably the most common benefits that I hear from people is more and more energy, more mental clarity, sleeping better.

And just feeling better, better mood. And that’s not surprising because when you go look at what’s in this product there and all the scientific research is linked on our website. Of course, you can go see for yourself. Those are the effects that, most people are going to experience. Of course, there are non responders with everything, but the [00:29:00] research shows, if you go look at the literature, that when you take this.

You should expect this effect. And of course, everything is also included clinically effective dosages, which means the actual dosages used in clinical studies. And that’s a very important point and something that I’ve, I harp on a lot because I want to educate consumers and I want you as a consumer, even if you don’t buy my multivitamin, I want you when you’re evaluating other multivitamins and other supplements to be keeping this in mind, that even if something appears to be science based.

And the ingredients appear to be based by on actual research. Okay. Beta alanine. Yes, that should be in a pre workout. That makes sense. But how much is the key? You can’t just take any random amount of beta alanine and expect to see the results in clinical studies. You need to take the amount used in studies.

So that’s something of course, with Legion, with my supplements, we that’s our, one of our. Core values you could say in terms of products is everything needs to be [00:30:00] science based and at clinically effective dosages. We’ve had to drop ingredients from products from formulations that I would have loved to have, but I wouldn’t have been able to put enough because when you look at the research, that’s in some cases you need quite a bit to really justify its inclusion in a product and be able to justify.

I wouldn’t say like when I’m, I want to be able to, when I’m marketing and selling, I want to be able to make very clear, definitive, hard sell type of statements. I want to be able to say, research shows this will do this and not have to beat around the bush, not have to lie. So to do that, we need to make sure that we’re, we have enough.

And if anyone educated looks at the copy and really looks at the research can say, that’s an accurate statement. That’s an honest statement. And we’ve heard from a lot of people. That PhDs and people that work in biochemists and stuff that have written us just to say, you guys are doing it right.

I’m impressed. Wow. This is a really good product. It’s sold very honestly. [00:31:00] The research is you cite good research. blah, blah, blah. So we have to stick to that standard. Like for example, in, I don’t remember triumph was a while ago, but I remember a recent example. I have a green supplement, which again, I’ll talk about green supplements in the next podcast because it’s similar.

The idea sounds good, but the execution is poor. And so I want to do it my own way kind of thing. But I wanted to include, I was talking earlier about the. pigment in fruits. So the pigments, the fruits contain colorful fruits and vegetables contain something called it’s an anthocyanin is the name of the molecule.

And these are very important in the body and they confer a wide variety of health benefits, but the process of extracting them, if you want to just have pure anthocyanins. In a product, it’s so expensive that at a dosage that I felt comfortable with and there was a, I could say is a clinically effective dosage.

It was going to cost 30 a bottle for my green supplement just for that alone. So I killed it. And what I didn’t do is just puts like other companies, I didn’t just put powdered blueberries in there just because [00:32:00] then people know, and you’ve probably heard the blueberries contain antioxidants. You may have heard they contain high amounts of anthocyanins and you go.

Oh, that’s good. And you would may have looked at the label of Genesis, which is my greens product and see, Ooh, it has blueberries. That’s good. But to the to reach the amount of anthocyanins that you need to reach through just powdered blueberries alone, it becomes, it’s not possible. You’d have to, you’d have a scoop of blueberry powder alone.

That’s why I wanted the molecule itself too expensive, have to kill it. So that’s enough about pitching my stuff. If you want to check it out, just go to legionathletics. com. You can check out the multivitamin triumph and you can, if you want to preemptively check out green’s product, it’s Genesis.

But that’s basically a long story short with multivitamins. Probably something else also worth mentioning is the amount of servings, amount of capsules that a multivitamin is. How many do you have to take a one a day? Because the point is you only can fit. Everything has volume.

Obviously, you only can fit so much in a, in one. If you’re taking one cap or one tab a day, it’s not going to contain very [00:33:00] much. And in terms of pressed tablets, I know that there are also concerns about how much, how well are that, are they digested? And and then of course absorbed. So what, how much is your body really getting out of that one tab a day?

I know that there are, I’ve seen, just news stories, little random things here and there of people having half. digested, like pooping out half digested multivitamin pills. Which obviously, you know, if you already have one tab, which is not going to have very much in the way of micronutrients in way of anything.

And then you’re only able, your body only got through half of it before it exited you. Then how valuable is that really now in the case of my multivitamin, you take eight a day if you want full dosages of everything that sounds like a lot, but you take four at breakfast and four, you could be at lunch or I do breakfast and dinner just to space it out because your body takes time for your body to absorb and it’s good to split it up like that because your body can only absorb so much of especially certain vitamins and minerals at one time, like water soluble, okay.

Vitamins like B vitamins, for instance, if it’s [00:34:00] just going to pee out excess. So the idea is that you, that’s all, that’s why, for instance, also same thing with vitamin C. If you’re sick you don’t want to just super dose vitamin C in one go. You don’t want to take 10, 000 vitamin C at a time. It’s much smarter to take about a gram of vitamin C every hour.

Cause then your body’s able to absorb it, use it, absorb it and use it and have a constant elevated level of vitamin C in the body, which is shown to help the immune system and help, beat sickness. So same concept is with my multivitamin, just multivitamins in general, if they do have, a considerable amount of.

Stuff in them. That’s splitting up that intake makes sense. And in, in the pills themselves with triumph with mine are not super large. They’re normal pills, but we cut it off at eight because we should, we could have went less. Again, this is a matter of perception of people. Yeah, of course they would say, Oh, taking two pills or taking one pill instinctively, it’d say, I’d rather take one pill a day or two pills than eight pills.

Maybe not thinking about it. What’s the purpose of this supplement? Is it to just take one pill? Is it [00:35:00] to take the least amount of pills or is it to get the most benefits out of it? I personally, I probably 10 pills or even why, like taking pills doesn’t bother me. It’s about how much can I get out of this product?

And we got the formulation finally to a point where the price made sense and we’re really happy with all the ingredients, but it was eight pills a day. I said, Oh whatever, let’s just put it out there and get feedback from people. And fortunately people have come to, I guess the same conclusion as me is it’s not a big deal.

You take four pills and breakfast, four pills at dinner and look at the benefits that look at everything you’re getting that. That far outweighs the negative of having to take pills. So keep that in mind with other multivitamins is the less pills you’re taking, the less stuff is in it. That’s just a fact.

All so I think that’s everything. If you have any questions, you can put them down below on YouTube. Although it’s hard for me to get to all of those because YouTube’s comment management system sucks. So better is to head over to my website and throw, put a question on the AMA that’s linked on the front page or just tweet me [00:36:00] or send me an email or whatever.

and I’ll be happy to get back to you. I hope you liked the episode and next week we will talk green supplements. I have to check my calendar. I may have one or two more supplement ideas to talk about. And then we’ll move on to other stuff. Also you can let me know what would you like to see?

I’m going to be putting some time into. Planning out the podcast a bit more for this year. What type of guests I want to go after and, how can I make it better? So anything you want to share with me on that is I’m all ears. So again emailing me is a good way to, to make sure that I see it or dropping a comment anywhere on the website.

Really? Oh, I will see it because discuss, which is the comment. Management system that I use is quite good. It all can run through my email so I don’t miss anything. All right, so that’s it for now and I will see you next week. Thanks again.

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