#242 Boost Your Energy and Become More Resilient - Shawn Wells

Siim Land (0:23)

Welcome to the Siim Land Podcast, my name is Siim Land and today our guest is Shawn Wells. Shawn is an author, speaker and nutritional biochemist who calls himself the ingredientologist. He has formulated over 500 supplements, foods, beverages and cosmosuticals. His new book, The Energy Formula, talks about optimizing mitochondrial health and energy levels. This episode is brought to you by the Metabolic Autophagy Master Class. It is the most comprehensive and in-depth program about applying the benefits of intermittent fasting and metabolic flexibility for both longevity and body composition.

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Shawn, welcome to the show.

Shawn Wells (1:13)

Thank you for having me on. I appreciate it.

Siim Land (1:16)

Yeah, so glad to speak with you. And you have like a very interesting, let's say, professional name for your profession.

You call us like the ingredient ingredientologist, which is a mouthful. But like, how would you describe it? And what is it?

Shawn Wells (1:32)

Yeah, that's a word I came up with for myself. I've been called the world's greatest formulator in the industry. I didn't give myself that name because I formulated about 500 supplements in the industry. But lately, I've been working on patenting ingredients. I've patented tea cream and dynamine that are very popular ingredients in about 700 pre-workout energy drink fat burners. I have about 15 ingredients that are out there like dihydroberberine, albava.

We can get into several of them. And obviously, there's a number of ingredients that are I can't speak about yet that are being studied. But I'm an ingredient guy and I'm a scientist of ingredients. I'm a dietitian. I'm a biochemist.

I'm excellent with intellectual properties. So I thought ingredientologist, the scientist of ingredients was a perfect name for me.

Siim Land (2:29)

Yeah, that's a really fascinating field. I would imagine that you're kind of looking at the kind of the real details about all the supplements. And I would imagine, yeah, like you do have like a very more nuanced perspective on all the supplements and these different products than the average person. Like the average person just looks at it and thinks that it's, you know, they don't really, they just don't go into the details and they just barely scratch the surface of whatever supplement they may be taking.

Shawn Wells (2:56)

Exactly. Exactly. And there's so much that's frustrating in the industry as far as bad players.

And that's something that I like to bring light to. And I just put out my book, The Energy Formula, that launched about two weeks ago, and it's a best seller. And that's a lot of what I get into in the book is ways to understand what's a good supplement and not a good supplement.

Siim Land (3:23)

What is maybe some of some brief overview about what would be like some good things to remember for people who are looking at a particular supplement?

Shawn Wells (3:32)

Proprietary blends would be one of the first things. I am not a big fan of proprietary blends. You'll hear, and that's like when you have like 10 ingredients, let's say, and then it's just list the dose of that blend.

I like full transparency to have like each ingredient listed as it's standardized with its, you know, what it's standardized to, the act of it's standardized to, the genus and species of that plant. The plant part, like if it's the root, the flower, the stem, whatever it is, and then the dose. And so that you can go look that up and see, is that the efficacious dose? Is that like you can go on examine.com or, you know, on PubMed and check out if that's a realistic quality dose.

But so many companies do these proprietary blends where they'll again have like 15 ingredients, 700 milligrams.

Siim Land (4:27)

Yeah.

Shawn Wells (4:28)

And what happens is you can have the first ingredient because it's listed in order of descending mass. Let's say the first ingredient is 699 milligrams of that 700 milligram blend. And then you have 14 other ingredients that are one milligram.

So people look on the label and they see, oh, it's got all these ingredients I want. It must be a great product. Meanwhile, it's basically worthless. It has one ingredient and it's worthless and that's legal to do. So I do not like proprietary blends and anything.

I it's definitely like going back to what I was talking about before, it's common to in the industry to let's say if it's a ginseng product, maybe it's the correct genus and species, but it's not ginseng root and it's not ginseng standardized to a certain compound like ginsenicide A or something. That costs a lot more money when they when you standardize it to a compound you extract for a certain compound. Also and when it's not the root which is the most expensive part and it's just whole plant, again you're not getting the benefits of ginseng but you can list it as ginseng. So those are some things to look for. Also one to look for is just when they make crazy claims like 880% more testosterone or something like that.