Are Your Supplements OVERHYPED, *Toxic* & Downright DANGEROUS Or Are Pills Just Better Living Through Science? A Debate With Robyn Openshaw & Dr. Jeffrey Bland

**Ben Greenfield** (0:00)
My name is Ben Greenfield, and on this episode of the Boundless Life podcast.

**Robyn Openshaw** (0:05)
You don't want to go eat M&M's, a lot of you people would never touch an M&M, but you don't know how processed your protein is, and it's the bars and the powders. It's a billion dollar industry.

**Dr. Jeffrey Bland** (0:15)
Protein, you may be consuming 100 or more grams a day, so that gives a greater delivery potential for trace contaminants like cadmium that comes out of certain agriculture in Asia.

**Ben Greenfield** (0:27)
Welcome to the Boundless Life, with me, your host, Ben Greenfield. I'm a personal trainer, exercise physiologist and nutritionist, and I'm passionate about helping you discover unparalleled levels of health, fitness, longevity and beyond.
Well, I've been looking forward to this show for a couple of months. It's always interesting trying to get two people on a podcast instead of one, especially when it is a kind of a debate podcast. I'm always careful with that word because I don't want this to turn into, I don't know, some kind of like a Pierce Morgan people shouting at each other type of show. But basically, I read this book, it was written by my friend and former podcast guest, Robyn Openshaw. It's called Take Daily, and the subtitle is How Supplements Hijack Your Health. Now, Robyn has been kind of an icon in the nutrition industry for quite some time. I even let her retreat with her in the Swiss Alps at the Swiss Mountain Retreat. So I kind of perked up when I saw this book, and it's all about a bunch of warning signs when it comes to supplements. And I thought, gosh, it would be interesting to hear Robyn discuss the ideas in this book with somebody who's also in the supplements industry, but perhaps a little bit more on the pro side of supplements. So I reached out to another former podcast guest of mine, Dr. Jeffrey Bland. And Dr. Jeffrey Bland is known as basically the founder of the functional medicine movement. And beyond that, as he and I have talked about in previous podcasts that we've done, he also has been involved in the supplements industry, including, for example, a fish oil, a few immune regulating compounds based on Himalayan tartar buckwheat. And so I would categorize him as a little bit more pro-supplement and Robyn as a little bit more anti-supplement. And we're going to have a fun chat about that today. So Robyn and Jeff, welcome to the show.

**Robyn Openshaw** (2:50)
Thanks. Good to see you guys.

**Dr. Jeffrey Bland** (2:51)
Thank you. I'm looking forward to it as well.

**Ben Greenfield** (2:54)
Yeah, absolutely. And by the way, if you're listening and you want to check out this book or you want to check out the show notes, go to bengreenfieldlife.com/supplementsdebate.
That's bengreenfieldlife.com/supplementsdebate. Okay, so Robyn, I want to start with you because I think last time we were hanging out years ago, you weren't necessarily like against supplements, but you're definitely after reading this book, not a fan of them. What changed along the way?

**Robyn Openshaw** (3:27)
Yeah, so first of all, let me just qualify that and say, it's not that I think that all supplements are bad.
I don't know, 97, 98% of them, largely due to the supply chains. And since I saw you last, this is actually funny that you bring up our retreat at Swiss Mountain Clinic, Ben, because where I decided, I've got to do the deep dive and I've got to write a book about this. Because I'd been researching it for years. In fact, one of my earliest exposes on supplements was the fish oil industry, where I'd gone to Expo West and I came across this whole entire aisle, like 30 companies, and they were all Chinese. And I like stopped and talked to somebody who spoke English. I was like, what is this? What is this? And she said, this whole aisle is the chemicals that deodorize and purify the fish oil so that you don't have that rancid oil burp. And she said it just super matter of factly and I was like, what? So this was literally 15 years ago plus. And many other experiences like that, I'd definitely been questioning, poking around, doing research. But what happened at Swiss Mountain Clinic, Ben, that you don't, I don't think you know this, but two years ago I went and they now have a blood purification, you know, it's called aneosthesis. They have another one called hemo-absorption therapy that literally is quite mainstream that they use in, you know, emergency rooms or whatever. So they're doing these two different blood filtration technologies. I just did the aneosthesis one. I didn't want the one that, you know, was really hardcore and for mostly like cancer patients, poisoning patients. But I did the aneosthesis and the bag of petrochemical looking garbage that came out of my blood, that you could literally look at it in the light and you could see sort of this like rainbow like shimmer to it. I was like, I feel like it's like those mud puddles that you saw as a kid that you're like, there's petrochemicals in here, right? Like somebody spilled some gas somewhere and ended up in this puddle. It was like that. And I was looking at everybody else's because I take 30 people at a time to the clinic. And that's what made me go, okay, I have been the biggest supplement eater of all times. Ben, you are too. Okay, I've sat next to you with your duffel bag of all your gadgets and pills at conferences. And I'm always like, what's he got in there? But like I could be you probably and probably not you, but like almost anyone else for how many supplements I've taken.