Supplements

A multivitamin is insurance against gaps, not a performance supplement, and I do not expect to feel anything from it. This one is a single capsule with methylated folate, CoQ10, and lutein included.

It replaced the Thorne Basic Nutrients 2/Day, which is a perfectly good product. One capsule a day is just easier to actually take than two.

Taken with food by preference — it is fat-soluble, so a meal helps absorption and largely prevents the fish burps.

Unlike most of this list, omega-3 status is measurable — see the note on the Omega-3 Index. If you are going to take it, it is worth testing at some point rather than assuming.

Lemon flavour for the usual reason. Fish oil that has gone off announces itself.

Plain curcumin absorbs badly enough that most cheap turmeric capsules are close to pointless. The phytosome form binds it to a phospholipid to get around that, which is the only reason I take this one rather than a generic.

Ubiquinol is the already-reduced form of CoQ10, which absorbs better than plain ubiquinone and costs more for that reason.

Urolithin A is produced from pomegranate compounds by gut bacteria, and only some people’s microbiomes make a meaningful amount — which is the argument for taking it directly rather than eating more pomegranate. The research on mitophagy, the process of clearing out worn-out mitochondria, is the interesting part.

The price is the real objection, and it is why this took a while to get to. If something here has to go when I am cutting back, it is this one.

I take this with L-theanine every night before bed, and have for years. It’s straight off Huberman’s sleep toolkit, which lists 200 mg of magnesium bisglycinate — the product I use is that, sold as “glycinate.”

I know it works for me because I stopped once to get clean bloodwork. Within a few days my sleep was noticeably worse. That’s the whole reason this pair sits at the top of the list instead of somewhere in the middle.

Two things worth knowing before you copy it: magnesium gives roughly one in twenty people an upset stomach, and Huberman’s own advice is to start with one supplement at a time — or none — rather than adding five at once.

The other half of my nightly pair with magnesium glycinate. Huberman’s sleep toolkit gives a range of 100–400 mg; I’m at 200 mg and haven’t had a reason to move off it.

The caveat that actually matters: skip theanine if you get intense dreams, sleepwalk, or have night terrors. Huberman drops it himself when the dreams get vivid. I haven’t run into that, but it’s common enough to mention before you try it.

The dose depends on what you want out of it. 5 g a day is the long-standing number for strength and muscle performance, and it is what almost every tub on the shelf is scooped for. The cognitive and brain-health work — which is what Darren Candow spends most of his time on — generally uses 10 g and up. I want both, so I aim for 12 g.

Timing does not matter much. Buy monohydrate and ignore the rest: Layne Norton puts it in the top tier of supplements that do anything at all, and separately points out that synthetic and food-derived creatine are the same molecule, so “naturally sourced” on a label is marketing. Rhonda Patrick’s one filter worth applying is independent product verification.

Kept here as history rather than as a complaint. Thorne is a solid brand and this is a good multivitamin; I just moved to the one-capsule Pure Encapsulations version.

The formulation is the point: sulforaphane is not stable enough to sell directly, so you need glucoraphanin together with active myrosinase to produce it. Most sulforaphane products skip the enzyme and do much less as a result.

I still think it is worth taking. I stopped because I did not like the taste, which is a personal problem rather than a knock on the product.