Supplements
How to Take Micronutrients
How you take micronutrient supplements matters as much as the nutrients themselves. We explain why pulsatile dosing with cycles outperforms daily continuous supplementation.
Supplements
How you take micronutrient supplements matters as much as the nutrients themselves. We explain why pulsatile dosing with cycles outperforms daily continuous supplementation.
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We recently held an Instagram Q&A session about our products. One question came up: can you take Product X daily and "forever" at Dosage Y? Of course you can. Our products are safe and designed specifically so you can take them without any problems. But then the next question was: how do I (Chris, that is) take the Multi, for example? Personally, I take everything pulsatile – meaning not always the same amount daily, not always at the same time of day. Big surprise: "Whaaa, why would you do that?"
At this point, I always wonder if people have actually spent five minutes engaging with our concepts. Why do we write blogs and books in the first place? Take page 36 of Optimize Health, Boost Performance, chapter: "One Side of the Scale: the 'Power Law' or the Law of Interaction", quote: "We've just learned about human hunting behavior. It happens randomly, completely variable, and in phases – not chronically. Other hunters in the animal kingdom, mostly carnivores, behave similarly. Between hunts there are long pauses, and the stress is therefore acute – not chronic."
This brings us to deeper discussions about essential features of biological systems. For example: what characterizes metabolically healthy people? And what defines people with metabolic disease? The first group can completely empty the tank. They can maximize their energy reserves – body fat and glycogen stores – and deplete them fully with maximum power when necessary. Full reloading also works flawlessly and functionally. This shows up, for instance, in insulin secretion: people with metabolic dysfunction (pre-diabetes) always have excessively high insulin, but when it matters – when consuming a large amount of food and carbs – they can't produce enough.
Imagine a bellows. In metabolically healthy people, you'd see the volume being fully exploited: the air is completely expelled, then the bellows refills completely. In people with metabolic disease, though, the bellows is never fully emptied. On the contrary, it's always 80% full and has to struggle along with the remaining 20%.
You can also explain it using a car's RPM range. A healthy person, as a car, would use the full spectrum of RPMs, from bottom to top. Metabolically unhealthy people, in this analogy, would always be revved too high or too low, unable to access the rest of the RPM range – whatever that would mean for an actual car.
Which means, concretely: there's a lack of pulsatility, the exploitation of capacity ranges. One behaves opposite to the other. You can either stress systems in a pulsatile, massive way – fully – or something becomes chronic, continuously stressed, but then you lose intensity. What's decisive for biological systems is the degree of stress – the intensity. That's the measure of how well we adapt to situations, how well we cope. Aha. This actually brings us to another biological domain: training science in sports. Progress is only possible if we manage to stress the system maximally for a moment. But the training stimulus is only fully exploited when the body can fully recover. Regeneration. "Better 10% undertrained than 1% overtrained." Old athlete wisdom.
This plays out in terminology: we talk about metabolic flexibility and heart rate variability. These aren't concepts that stand alone. They result from exactly those biological laws mentioned above and describe those phenomena precisely. Just as tide ebbs and flows, so do many processes in the body. But we humans always think we need to install a permanent line for everything.
So I – having been supplementing substances in food for many years, even decades, deliberately creating surpluses or high availability for certain moments – think it makes sense not to take nutritional supplements constantly at the same dose daily, but to also build in phases where there's less. I think that's fundamentally a worthwhile goal for everyone.
Because, as usual: people learn nothing from their mistakes and instead repeat the same dysfunctional pattern in other life areas. In other words: first you wreck your body with some chronic behavior (e.g., smoking, stress, overeating, etc.) and then you think you need to continue with another chronic behavior (e.g., excessive exercise, radical dietary overhaul, high-dose micronutrient therapy, etc.).
Completely missed the point.
One interesting recent study we don't want to leave out. Researchers want to come up with something. They observe that one in seven people in the USA have kidney disease. Sometimes noticed, sometimes not. One in three are potentially affected. Since this is primarily a disease of aging, they wanted to test substances shown to slow aging processes in tissues.
According to the researchers, there are "many fancy substances that are extremely expensive." So what did they do? They administered a known, natural GSK-3 inhibitor – lithium – to mice in low doses. GSK-3 increases, for instance, when you're insulin resistant (surprise, surprise?). Insulin can't work properly and tissues age faster. Low-dose lithium apparently reverses this. As a result, insulin's healing effects can unfold again. And: the "results clearly show that low-dose lithium slows kidney aging in mice."
Cool or cool?
