How did Zac test his supplements?

With a bar every bottle had to clear. He ran a full panel of more than 80 markers with his physician, hormones, cortisol, metabolic markers, inflammation, then follow-up panels across about a year, with a wearable tracking sleep, HRV, and resting heart rate the whole time. A supplement stayed only if a real marker moved on the panel and the tracker moved with it over the same stretch. One good night proves nothing; both pointing the same direction for weeks he called real. The result was spending cut by about two thirds.

Which five earned a place?

Vitamin D3, because his level was on the floor without any symptom and a real dose pulled it into range on the follow-ups. Omega-3s, because his index was low, as most men's is without fatty fish several times a week, and correcting it raised the index and lowered triglycerides together. Magnesium glycinate an hour before bed, which moved deep sleep first and HRV a few weeks later. A targeted B complex, only because a specific marker was high, pointed at a B shortfall, and came back down when it was fixed. And creatine, the most studied compound in the cabinet, which does exactly what it says for strength and lean mass.

What about NAD, NMN, and NR?

The most expensive thing he bought, and he bought it on a good story. He and his physician asked what it should move if it worked and looked downstream: HRV, resting heart rate, deep sleep, inflammation, metabolic markers. He retested and retested again and nothing moved; it did not help and did not hurt, it sat there expensively. The trap is that what NAD is supposed to do happens deep inside the cell and cannot be measured on a normal panel, so every claim is downstream, and downstream is exactly where he measured and found nothing. His rule now: he does not care about the mechanism if the outcome is not moving. If someone can run NMN and show the markers that moved, he is all ears.

Do greens powders fill nutritional gaps?

Not any his panel could find, at about $80 a month. Every micronutrient that improved had a specific compound at a real dose behind it: vitamin D from D3, the B marker from a targeted B complex. The greens were riding along taking credit. The label explains it: a proprietary blend with one total weight and a long ingredient list with no individual doses, and when a company will not state the dose it is usually because the dose is not worth stating. Worse is the psychology: the scoop makes a man feel he handled nutrition, so he skips the actual vegetables and never goes back to them. Collagen and turmeric fell in the overrated-but-harmless group: nothing moved, nothing hurt.

Why are testosterone boosters the one thing to stop buying?

Not the money; NAD cost far more. Across the year his total and free testosterone were flat on the blends, but the danger is timing. A booster catches a man at the exact moment he should be getting blood drawn and sends him the wrong way. A 47-year-old with energy, recovery, and drive gone has a real symptom picture with a list of causes behind it: low testosterone, thyroid, sleep apnea (badly under-diagnosed in men that age), insulin resistance, a medication he is already on. Instead of a panel that says which, he buys a tub, gives it ninety days, buys another brand, and a year is gone with the real problem unlooked at while he decides he is just getting older. What does the damage is the delay, and past 40 that time does not come back.

I tried every longevity supplement so you don’t have to

Q: What did magnesium teach him about reading a panel?

To stop reading only the red flags. His magnesium sat at the very bottom of the normal range with no asterisk, so anyone scanning for red ink would skip the line. The ranges are built from everyone who walks into a lab, which is not a healthy group, so normal is the average of a country that is mostly tired, overweight, and inflamed. Optimal is a higher bar, and many men are sitting at the bottom of normal with no idea there is a better number to aim for. Also: most shelf magnesium is oxide, cheap and barely absorbed; if magnesium ever gave you nothing but a trip to the bathroom, that was oxide.

Q: Should I copy this list?

No, and Zac says building his exact stack is the worst thing you could do. Everything in the episode is true and it is about him. If your vitamin D is already high you do not need what he needed; if your B marker is fine a B complex will do nothing. His list is the output of his panel; yours will look different, and there is no way to know how different until you measure. Nobody runs ads for a blood draw because there is no money in it, which is why ten men over 40 walk out of the same store with the same cart and none of them knows a single number of his own. Get your baseline first, and the stack mostly builds itself.

What this episode says

The test every supplement had to pass: name the marker it is supposed to move, measure that marker before, retest with a physician reading the panel, and have the wearable (sleep, HRV, resting heart rate) move in the same direction over the same weeks.
Five earned a permanent place because a marker moved and the tracker agreed: vitamin D3 (a low 25-hydroxyvitamin D corrected on follow-up panels), omega-3s (omega-3 index up, triglycerides down), magnesium glycinate an hour before bed (deep sleep moved first, then HRV), a targeted B complex (only because a specific marker showed a shortfall first), and creatine (the most studied compound on the shelf).
Magnesium taught the reading lesson: it sat at the bottom of the normal range with no flag. Reference ranges are built from everyone who gets blood drawn, which is not a healthy group. Normal is the average of a tired, overweight, inflamed population; optimal is a higher bar.
NMN and NR, the most expensive items in the cabinet, moved nothing downstream over a year: HRV flat, resting heart rate flat, deep sleep unchanged, inflammation unchanged. Their mechanism cannot be measured on a blood panel, so every claim is a proxy for a proxy.
Green powders at about $80 a month filled no gap the panel could find; every improved micronutrient had a specific compound at a real dose behind it. A proprietary blend that will not state doses usually has doses not worth stating, and the scoop becomes permission to skip vegetables.
The category to stop buying entirely: over-the-counter testosterone boosters. Nothing in that bottle moved the hormone panel, and the hormone panel is a physician's conversation, not a supplement aisle.
Spending fell by about two thirds. The only reason any of this is knowable is a panel read by a physician more than once, which is why there is a doctor in the program and not just a coach.

I do not care about the mechanism if the outcome is not moving.

The experiment

Zac wasted thousands of dollars on supplements and did not know it until he stopped guessing and measured. This year he cut that spending by about two thirds, and there is one category he now tells any man over 40 to stop buying entirely. He knows which because he ran a real panel with his physician and gave it a full year. Most of the cabinet did nothing, and it was not cheap. He has paid for the experiment so you do not have to.

The trap

Almost every man over 40 is in it without knowing. If you cannot name the marker a supplement is supposed to move, and you have never measured it, you are not supplementing. You are paying a monthly subscription to treat a feeling, and the whole industry runs on that: you feel tired, foggy, a step slower than at 35, you grab something that promises to fix it, and you never go back to check whether it moved anything, because a feeling cannot be pinned down and the next bottle is right there.

So he did the boring version. A full panel north of 80 markers with his physician, hormones, cortisol, metabolic markers, inflammation, then follow-up panels across the year, with a wearable tracking sleep, HRV, and resting heart rate the whole time. A real doctor reading real numbers more than once. Every bottle had to clear one bar: a real marker had to move on the panel and the tracker had to move with it over the same stretch. One good night proves nothing. Both pointing the same direction for weeks is real.

The five that stayed

Vitamin D3. His level was on the floor and he felt nothing; it was just a number clearly too low. A real dose pulled it into a healthy range across the follow-ups. No drama; a deficiency he could watch get fixed on paper.

Omega-3s. His index came back low, as most men’s will without fatty fish several times a week. Correcting it brought the index up and pulled triglycerides down at the same time. Two markers moving together, both on the panel.

Magnesium glycinate, about an hour before bed. The form matters: most shelf magnesium is oxide, cheap and barely absorbed, and if you ever took magnesium and got nothing but a trip to the bathroom, that was oxide. This one taught him the most about reading a panel. His magnesium started at the very bottom of the normal range with no flag and no asterisk, the kind of line you skip if you are scanning for red ink. A few weeks after fixing it the number was where he wanted it and the tracker backed it up: deep sleep moved first, HRV came up a few weeks behind. The lesson underneath: lab ranges are built from everyone who walks in and gets blood drawn, which is not a healthy group, so normal is the average of a country that is mostly tired, overweight, and inflamed. Optimal is a higher bar, and many men sit at the bottom of normal with no idea there is a better number to aim for.

A targeted B complex. On the list only because a gap was found first: a marker sitting high that points to a specific B shortfall. The B complex brought it down. The number said he was short, and the same number moved when he fixed it.

Creatine. Simple. It earns its place on strength and lean mass, is the single most studied compound in the cabinet, the safest and most proven thing on the shelf, and does exactly what it says.

The thread under all five: a marker moved and the tracker agreed. And the only reason he knows any of it is a physician reading the panel more than once, which is the entire reason there is a doctor in Executive Health Edge and not only a coach.

What got cut

NAD precursors (NMN, with NR stacked on top for a stretch). The most expensive thing he bought, and the exact mistake he is warning against: he bought it on a good story. He and his physician asked what it should move if it worked and went looking downstream: HRV, resting heart rate, deep sleep, inflammation, the metabolic panel. Retested, retested again. HRV flat, resting heart rate flat, deep sleep unchanged, inflammation markers unmoved. It did not help and did not hurt; it sat there expensively doing nothing. The specific trap: what NAD is supposed to do happens deep inside the cell and cannot be measured on a normal panel, so every claim is downstream, and downstream is where he measured and got nothing. His rule now: he does not care about the mechanism if the outcome is not moving. If someone can run NMN and show the markers, he is all ears. He gave it a year with a doctor and it could not survive the panel.

Greens powders, about $80 a month, sold as insurance for an imperfect diet. He brought that question to the panel: if this fills gaps, which gaps. Nothing in the micronutrient markers could be pinned on the greens. Vitamin D moved because of D3; the B marker moved because of a targeted B complex. Every good number had a specific compound at a real dose behind it, and the greens were riding along taking credit. The label explains why: a proprietary blend, one total weight, a long ingredient list, no individual doses. When a company will not tell you the dose it is usually because the dose is not worth telling. A couple of grams spread across fifty ingredients does not survive contact with real vegetables. What bothers him most is the psychology: the scoop makes a man feel he handled nutrition, so he stops thinking about it, skips the vegetables, and never goes back.

Overrated but harmless. High-dose collagen for skin and joints, which never had a marker attached to it in the first place; there is some evidence for specific peptides, but he could not point to a number it moved. Turmeric, sold as an anti-inflammatory, never touched his inflammation markers at the doses people take. Keep them if you like them; know you are getting a mild effect at best.

The one to stop buying

Testosterone booster blends. Across the whole year his total and free testosterone were flat on them. But that is not why they are the worst thing on the shelf; NAD cost far more, and if it were about dollars NAD would take the spot. NAD is a man optimizing at the margins and wasting cash. A testosterone booster catches a man at the exact moment he should be getting blood drawn and sends him the wrong way. Picture the man the tubs are built for: 47, energy gone, recovery gone, drive gone, something genuinely wrong. Behind that symptom picture sits a list of causes: low testosterone, thyroid, sleep apnea, badly under-diagnosed in men that age and wrecking everything downstream, insulin resistance, a medication he is already on. A panel would tell him which. Instead he buys a tub off a label, gives it ninety days, buys another brand because maybe the first was wrong, and a year is gone. Seventy dollars is not what it cost him. Twelve months of an untreated problem is, and a man deciding he is getting older while the answer sat in a blood draw the whole time.

Zac has watched it set up repeatedly. An anonymized client, an attorney in his mid-forties, arrived with daily brain fog, afternoon crashes he could set a clock by, and a body he was unhappy with. Hand that list to a hundred men over 40 and ninety say low testosterone. It was not his hormones. He had never really trained and was under-eating for the work he did. Fix the training and the food and the fog lifted and the crashes never came back. He walked in naming the thing he read online; the panel and the data told him what was actually going on. The blends are harmless to swallow. What does the damage is the delay, and past 40 that lost time does not come back.

Do not build this list

The worst thing you could do with this episode is go out and buy Zac’s exact stack. Everything in it is true and it is about him. If your vitamin D is already high you do not need what he needed. If your B marker is fine, a B complex does nothing. His list is the output of his personal panel; yours will look different, and there is no way to know how different until you measure. Nobody runs ads for a blood draw because there is no money in it, which is why ten men over 40 walk into the same store and leave with the same cart, none of them knowing a single number of his own. Get your baseline. Get your numbers on paper. Let the list come out of that. Once you know your numbers, the stack mostly builds itself, and for most men it is the part that changes how they feel the fastest.

Transcript

Full text, timestamped

Auto-generated from the episode audio and lightly formatted. Each timestamp links to that moment in the video.

0:00 I’ve wasted thousands of dollars on supplements, and I didn’t even know it until I actually stopped guessing and actually measured what they were doing. This year I cut that spending by about 2/3, and there’s one whole category I’d now tell any man over 40 to stop buying completely. The only reason I know what to cut is that I ran a real panel with my physician and gave it a full year. And a few things earned a permanent spot. Most of it did nothing, and it was not cheap. I’ve already paid for this experiment so you don’t have to. So, let’s get into it. Here’s the trap almost every man over 40 is in. He doesn’t even know what he’s in. You can’t name the marker a supplement is supposed to move. You’ve never once even measured it, and then you’re not really supplementing anymore. You’re playing a subscription every month to treat a feeling. And that’s the whole industry what it runs on. You feel tired, you feel foggy, you feel a step slower than you were at 35. So, you grab something off of the shelf that promises to fix it, and you never go back to check whether it moved anything. Because a feeling is impossible to pin down, and the next bottle is right there. So, I

1:01 Did the boring version of this instead. I ran the whole thing with my physician Dr. Dubrow for about a year. We started with a full panel, north of 80 markers, hormones, cortisol, metabolic stuff with inflammation included. Then follow-up panels along the way to see what actually was moving. And I had a wearable going into the whole time, tracking my sleep, my heart rate variability, my resting heart rate. And the real doctor reading real numbers more than once. That’s the bar every bottle in the cabinet had to clear. A real marker had to move on the panel, and the tracker had to move with it as well over the same stretch of time. One good a night’s sleep proves nothing on its own, but both of them pointing in the same direction for weeks, that’s when I called it real. So, let’s start. Number one, vitamin D. Mine was sitting on the floor. I didn’t feel a thing. It’s just a number that was clearly too low. A real dose of D3 pulled it up into a healthy range over the follow-up panels. No drama to it. The deficiency I fixed I could watch [music] and get it fixed on paper. Number two, omega-3s. My index came back low, which most men’s will if they’re not eating enough fatty fish a few times a week. Correcting it

2:01 Brought that number up to where you want it, and it pulled my triglycerides down at the same time. Two markers moving together, both right there on the panel as it states. Number three, magnesium. And this is the one that taught me the most about actually reading a panel. I take it as glycinate. It’s about an hour before bed. Before matters here because most of what’s sitting on the shelf at the store is magnesium oxide. It’s cheap body barely absorbs it. And if you’ve ever taken magnesium and got nothing out of it but a trip to the bathroom, that was probably oxide. Magnesium is also where I learned to stop reading my panel only for the red flags. Mine started at the very bottom of the normal range. It wasn’t flagged, no little asterisk next to it. It was only if you’re scanning your report for the red ink, you skip right past that line and never think about it. A few weeks after I fixed it, it was up to where I wanted it, and the tracker backed it up. Deep sleep moved first, heart rate variability came up in just a few weeks behind this data. And here’s the part that nobody’s going to tell you. Those ranges is get built from everybody who walks into a lab and gets blood drawn. That’s not a healthy group

3:01 Of people. So, normal just means the average for a country that’s mostly tired, overweight, and inflamed. Optimal is going to be a higher bar, and it’s the one that you actually want. A lot of men are sitting at the bottom of the normal with no idea there’s a better number to aim for. Number four, B complex. And this one only earned its spot because we found a gap first. There’s a marker that’s going to be sitting there that’s high on my panel, and a high one points at a specific vitamin B shortfall. So, a targeted B complex brought it back down, and the number told me I was short. Didn’t that same number move once I fixed it? That is the only reason it’s on this list. Number five, creatine. This one’s simple. It’s earned its spot on strength and lean mass, and it’s the one single most studied compound in the whole cabinet. It’s the safest, most proven thing on the shelf. It does exactly what it says it does. So, that’s the thread under all five. Everyone has earned its place the same way. Our marker moved and the tracker agreed. So, that’s the keep list. Before I flip it around and show you what I would cut, one thing. The only reason I know any of this about my own body is that I’ve measured it with a

4:03 Physician reading the panel. That’s the entire reason there’s a doctor in what I do and not just a coach. If you want your own numbers run and read that way and a list that comes out of your blood instead of a guess, that’s what the executive health edge is. The link’s in the description. If that’s not you, stay right here because the next part is where I save the most money. So, the single most expensive thing I was buying was NAD. That’s NMN. For at a stretch there, I was stacking NR on top of it. That’s a big longevity darling right now. The one every podcast is selling for cellular energy and for slowly aging down. Now, I’ll be straight with you because this is the exact mistake I’m telling you not to make. I bought this one on a good story. I never had a single marker tell me I did anything. So, my physician and I asked the obvious question. If it were actually working, what should it move? And we went looking downstream. Heart rate variability, resting heart rate, deep sleep on the tracker, inflammation, or the metabolic panel markers on the panel. I retested and then retested again. Nothing was really moving. You know, HRV was still flat, resting heart rate flat, deep sleep unchanged, and inflammation markers didn’t budge. It didn’t help me and it didn’t hurt me. It just kind of

5:04 Sat there expensively doing absolutely nothing. And there’s this specific trap with this one thing. The thing NAD is supposed to do happens way down inside your cells. And you can’t really measure that on a normal blood panel. The blood panel is a proxy for a proxy. So, the most expensive thing on my whole shelf is also the one where the real mechanism is almost impossible to ever verify. Every claim about it is downstream. And downstream is exactly where I measured and I got nothing. So, here’s the rule I live by now. I don’t care about the mechanism if the outcome isn’t moving. It’s supposed to do something I can measure. And if I can’t measure a single thing changing, it doesn’t matter how good the story is behind it. If somebody can run NMN and show me the markers that moved, hey man, I’m all ears, okay? But I give it a year with the doctor reading my panel and I got almost nothing to show for it. The most expensive thing I owned and it couldn’t survive the panel. Next, my favorite, green powders. This is about 80 bucks a month for me and the whole promise is that you’re covering your nutritional bases when your diet isn’t perfect. Insurance for a scoop, right? So, I brought that exact question to the panel. If this is filling the

6:04 Gaps, then what gaps are they filling? We looked right at the micronutrient markers and nothing moved that I could pin down on the greens. My vitamin D moved, but that was a real dose of D3 doing that work. You know, a couple other markers moved, but this was targeted B complex. Every good number on my panel had a specific compound behind it at a real dose. The green powders was just riding along, taking credit for the work the other bottles were doing. And once you read the label closely, you’ll see why. It’s a proprietary blend. One total weight of this whole scoop and a long list of ingredients that no individual chose on any of them. So, you’ve got no real idea if you’re getting a meaningful amount of anything. Just a little sprinkle of 50 different things. When a company won’t tell you the dose, it’s usually because the dose isn’t worth telling you about. A couple grams of powder spread across a giant ingredient list with good marketing on top of it. That’s nowhere close to surviving real vegetables. But, the part that bothers me the most is the psychology of it. A green powder makes a man feel like he handled his nutrition, so he just stops thinking about it. You’re paying 80 bucks a month for permission not to fix your diet. The scoop lets you skip the actual

7:05 Vegetables and then you never go back and eat them. Then there’s a group I just call overrated, but harmless. These did nothing for me on paper. They’re not going to hurt anybody. So, I’m not going to stand here and yell about them. High dose collagen for skin and joints. The problem is it never really had a marker attached to it in the first place. And that’s the issue with half the stuff on the shelf. There is some real evidence for specific collagen peptides, so I won’t truly trash it. I just couldn’t point out to you a single number that it moved for me. Turmeric, [music] the same story. It gets sold as an anti-inflammatory and the dose that most people take it at, it never once touched my inflammation markers. If you like it, keep taking it. Just know you’re getting a mild effect at best, way below what the label is probably promising you. None of that stuff costs you much, and none of it really hurts you, which is exactly what makes the next one different. It’s the only thing on the shelf where the real cost has nothing to do with the price tag. The one to stop buying, testosterone boosters. So, the one I tell any men over 40 to stop buying tomorrow is these testosterone booster blends. They’re all junk. It’s a whole category of stuff that’s just not

8:06 Going to help you out in any shape or form. My panel across the whole year, my total and free testosterone were both flat. The blends did nothing, and that’s not the reason they’re the worst thing on the shelf. Look at NMN. Costs me way more. If it was just about dollars, that NAD takes the worst spot easily. But, the money isn’t the thing that makes this the most dangerous. NAD is a man optimizing at the margins and wasting some cash. A testosterone booster catches a man at the exact moment he should be getting a blood drawn, and it sends him in the wrong path. Picture a guy that things are built for. He’s 47. His energy’s gone. His recovery’s gone. His drive is gone, and something is genuinely wrong. That’s a real symptom picture, and there’s a whole list of possible causes sitting behind it. Could be low testosterone. Could be his thyroid. Could be sleep apnea, which is badly under-diagnosed in men that age, and it wrecks everything downstream from it. Could be an insulin resistance. It could be a medication that he’s already on. He could get a panel that tells him which one it actually is. Instead of buying a tub from some guy’s photo on a label that gives him 90 days. Then he buys another one because, “Hey, maybe the first one was just the wrong brand.”

9:06 And now that’s a year gone. That’s 70 bucks he spent at least one time. And what it really cost him was 12 months of untreated problem, and a man deciding he’s just getting older when the answer is sitting in a blood draw the whole damn time. I’ve watched this exact thing set up so many times. One of my clients, an attorney in his mid-40s, came to me. Whole list. Brain fog every day. Afternoon crashes he could set by a clock. Wasn’t happy with his body. You hand that list to 100 men over 40, and 90 of them are going to say low testosterone. It wasn’t his hormones. He never had really trained. He was under eating the amount of work for what the work he was doing. And once we fixed the training and the food, the fog started lifting and those crashes just never came back. He walked in naming the thing he read about online and the panel and the data told him what he was really going on. So, that’s why it’s the worst thing on the shelf. These blends are basically harmless to swallow. What does the damage is the delay. The months a man loses on a bet on the tub off the shelf while the real problem goes unlooked at. And past 40, that lost time is the part you don’t get back. Get your own baseline. I just walked you through

10:07 Everything I cut out and I kept. And the worst thing you could do is go out and build my exact list. Everything I told you is true, but it’s about me. It’s not a prescription for you. If your vitamin D is already high, you don’t need what I was needing to take. If everything is fine with you, you might not need a B complex. It’s going to do nothing for you. My list is just an output from my personal panel. Yours is going to look different and there’s no way to know how different until you actually measure. Nobody runs ads for a blood draw because there’s no money in it. The industry keeps you guessing. Ten men over 40 walk into the same store and walk out more or less the exact same cart with not one of them knowing a single one of his own numbers. So, don’t go build my stack. Go get your baseline first. Get your own blood drawn. Get your own numbers down on paper and then let your list come out of that. Once you know your numbers, the stack mostly builds itself. That’s the part that’s yours to control. And for most men, it’s the part that changes how you feel the fastest. And if you’re sitting there wondering whether this problem really is your testosterone, that’s exactly the question I take apart next. And the answer is the same as

11:08 Everything you just heard. It comes down to a panel and a physician. It’s not something you buy off the shelf. It’s stuff on the street now. Let’s go watch it.