#508 I Researched 100+ Supplements - Here's My Breakdown

Siim Land (0:00)

I spent the last five years researching over a hundred of the most popular supplements. You might be wondering, why would I do that? Well, I was doing research for my upcoming book, The New Science of Supplements, and I wanted to figure out what's actually true and what's complete nonsense about supplements. Because the problem with supplements is that most of the information online is not based on real science. So in this video, I'm going to break down the supplements that are most effective and most evidence based, the ones that have the least convincing evidence, and the ones that are in the promising category, but not proven yet. All right, so let's go through the supplements. We'll start with the top evidence supplements, basically the supplements that have the most evidence and particularly evidence from human clinical trials, because that's a higher standard of evidence than relying on animal studies or some observational studies or something like that. So actual human randomness controlled trials. So in this list, I'll go through the list of supplements that have a more evidence base from human clinical trials. Number one, creatine, probably the most researched supplement in the world, has probably over a thousand studies probably by now. And everyone knows creatine is a muscle building supplement or it supports physical exercise. But the biggest evidence for creatine comes from increasing power, not necessarily muscle mass or even muscle strength. The biggest benefit of creatine is that it increases muscle power and speed and explosiveness. So you have pretty much like an extra gear when it comes to speed and power, because it helps to recycle or produce like this phosphocreatine that is used for muscle contractions. Then the second biggest evidence from the human studies is reducing muscle damage. So basically helps with better recovery. And yes, if you recover faster, you have bigger muscle power, then yes, it will also translate to bigger strength. And slightly increased muscle mass. But creatine alone without resistance training does not build muscle. So you need to have some aspect of this resistance training to still build muscle when supplementing creatine. And the muscle growth effect of creatine is not that large compared to the increased power and even strength for that matter. Then lastly, the biggest evidence for creatine, I would say, is the counteracting sleep deprivation. So it's gone viral pretty much over the last few years, that creatine helps to make up for lost sleep in terms of restoring your cognition to a normal baseline. When you're sleep deprived, over 20 hours of being awake, then your cognition drops, attention memory focus drops, and creatine helps to bring it back to baseline. Your brain uses a lot of creatine, so that's why it works the way it does work. We'll cover what needs more evidence for creatine and what's not proven by other supplements later, but we'll continue with the top supplements for this list. Azaxanthin, I would say the biggest evidence for azaxanthin is the skin UV protection that is a powerful antioxidant. It's a carotenoid that protects your skin against the UV radiation. UV radiation is the number one cause of skin photoaging, and over the course of decades, you would see a huge difference if you're chronically exposed to excessive amounts of UV radiation on your skin. Skin wrinkles, hyperpigmentation, sunspots, all those things. Azaxanthin, at least based on these clinical trials, would reduce some of that damage from the UV radiation. Now, this doesn't mean that the sun is bad. Of course, the sun is essential for health, and you need healthy amounts of sun exposure, but just increasing your skin's resilience against the sun is a good idea. Azaxanthin is one of the most proven and most powerful supplement to actually do that. In terms of skin anti-aging, then it does by protecting the skin against UV radiation. It also helps to postpone or reduce some of the wrinkle development from excess UV radiation.

It's not as proven as something like retinol or something else like that, obviously, but there is a decent amount of some human clingotrials showing that it does have some skin anti-aging benefits. Lowers inflammation. So arguably lowers the inflammation caused by the excess UV radiation in the skin, but systemically helps to also lower some inflammatory markers.

If you have normal or low inflammation levels, then it's not going to make a huge difference, but if you have higher inflammation, then it does appear to lower inflammation in humans. Eye health. So this is interesting as well because the carotenoids, they appear to accumulate a lot in these organs that have a lot of mitochondria, such as eyes or the brain, and as exempt, then also has been seen to have benefits on eye health. Lipids. So it does lower lipids a little bit. So like cholesterol. Haven't seen any evidence for triglycerides, but for LDL cholesterol, at least it does. So about the effects is very small, very modest. Aged garlic extract is the next supplement, and I think it goes very under the radar, the garlic, because it has some side effects. Like if you take blood pressure medication or blood thinners with garlic, then it can cause our contraindications.