Essentials: Developing a Rational Approach to Supplementation for Health & Performance

Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science based tools for mental health, physical health, and performance. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today, we're discussing supplements or more specifically a rational guide to supplementation. During today's episode, I'm going to give you a number of different, very specific questions that you can answer in order to decide whether or not you should be taking any so called supplements or not. As we head into today's conversation, I want to emphasize something very important, not just as it relates to supplements, but as it relates to all aspects of mental health, physical health, and performance. And that is, I take the stance that behavioral tools, that is specific actions that we take and specific actions that we avoid form the foundation of mental health, physical health, and performance. So things like viewing morning sunlight and exercise are behavioral tools. They don't require the ingestion of anything. Second to that, I would say the next layer is in fact nutrition. No amount of supplementation or non prescription compounds or prescription compounds for that matter can never compensate for poor nutrition, at least not for very long. Then on top of that, I would place what is typically called supplementation, although today I'm trying to expand that word to include not just things that compensate for food deficiencies or that are layered on top of food as a way to enhance the amount of nutrients that you could get from food. But as I mentioned before, compounds that are non prescription that can be for a variety of different purposes and many of which are not available in food. So, would place supplementation right on top of nutrition. Then past that, I would say prescription drugs, obviously prescribed from a board certified MD. That said, there are many instances in which people can either reduce their dosages of prescription compounds or can replace those prescription compounds with quality behavioral tools, nutrition, and supplementation, but there are many instances in which prescription drugs are the only route by which people can achieve the mental health, physical health, and performance goals that they wish to achieve. So I would place that as the fourth layer in this stack of layers directed towards mental health, physical health, and performance. Before moving further into today's episode, I want to emphasize a very important point, which is that I am not a physician, that is I'm not a clinician, so I do not prescribe anything nor am I going to do that today. I'm a professor, I review the research literature, I describe tools gleaned from the research literature and developed from the research literature. So I profess many things, but I do not prescribe anything and I think it's vitally important that anytime you are thinking of adding or subtracting any behavioral protocols, nutritional protocols, supplementation based …