Five Supplements Dr. Rhonda Patrick Prioritizes

I see that Mary is asking about my latest list of top daily supplements. You know, I just went on— I was a guest on Mark, Dr. Mark Hyman's podcast, and I talked about this. I think, I think I sort of have a, a top 5, so to speak, where if you're really on a limited budget and you really are looking for that 20% effort that's going to give you 80% of the benefit I really think omega-3 fatty acids, so you want to have at least, you know, 1.5 to 2 grams a day to get you to a high Omega-3 Index, which has been shown in studies if you supplement with that dose. Vitamin D supplement, anywhere between 2,000 to 4,000 IUs a day. You want to make sure your levels are around 40 nanograms per milliliter, between 40 and 60.

2 very important ones, a multivitamin really I think is important because it covers all the bases a lot. It's basically insurance where you're not, sure that you're getting all the right amounts of micronutrients that are important for not only short-term function, but also just important for a lot of physiological functions that are important to delay age-related decline, whether we're talking about cognitive decline, you know, age-related cancer, cardiovascular diseases, a lot of different pathways that micronutrients play a role in. So I think a really good multivitamin sort of covers those bases. And then, I've really gotten back on the sulforaphane train and I take— so, sulforaphane is a very, very unstable molecule.

So, glucoraphanin is the precursor to sulforaphane and it's packaged often with the enzyme myrosinase, which is also unstable. And oftentimes then when you when you take the tablet in, you know as you're digest digesting it as it makes its way to the microbiome, the myrosinase enzyme gets activated when you chew it when it's broken down. Sorry, usually aren't chewing the tablet, but it's broken down, so you're getting a lot of sulforaphane. So I take Avmacol, which has really been published in many many different studies. It's very effective, and I take at least two of those a day because I think sulforaphane is. Very beneficial for a lot of reasons. One, it increases glutathione, the body and brain's major antioxidant system. It also it detoxes a lot of compounds that we're exposed to.

I think BPA is one of them. It hasn't been directly shown. There's a lot of indirect evidence, and there's a lot of reasons why I believe that BPA and other plastic chemicals are being detoxified with sulforaphane, including the fact that sulforaphane has been shown to activate the very enzymes that do detoxify and make BPA. Become excreted through urine. So that's another reason why I take it as well as other air pollutants and stuff that we're exposed to. So I think that's another really important top supplement and then magnesium would be— would be the last one.

So magnesium, you know, is an essential mineral that's important for over 300 different enzymatic reactions including repairing damage to our DNA which is essential for not only cancer prevention but just normal function of our cells. When we start to accumulate too much DNA damage, our cells start to not function properly. So, and when this happens in a stem cell, stem cells start to die, then you start to lose your stem cells, which are really critical for replenishing cellular, you know, populations within a certain organ or tissue. So, I think those are my top 5 supplements that I think that just if you had to kind of go down to the bare essentials, those would be it.