I Tried Every Longevity Supplement So You Don’t Have To

The supplement industry sells you a feeling, not a result. Most men over 40 can’t name a single marker the bottle in their cabinet is supposed to move, they never measured it before they started, and they never go back to check. After a full year of blood panels with a physician, five supplements earned a permanent spot, one category got cut completely, and supplement spending dropped by about 23%.

In this video, Zac breaks down the results of a yearlong experiment run with his physician: a starting panel of more than 80 markers, follow-up panels throughout the year, and a wearable tracking sleep, HRV, and resting heart rate. The goal was simple: look for measurable changes in his bloodwork and see whether his real-world data supported them over the same stretch of time.

In this video, we cover:

About Zac Armstrong & No Hype, Just Standards: Zac Armstrong is a former Marine, Naval Officer, and F-18 Pilot who coaches executives and high-performing leaders to optimize their biological systems, overcome burnout, and achieve peak physical and mental performance using precision data.

Learn how to rebuild your health like a business:

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YouTube: @EmpowermentFitness TikTok: @Empowerment.Fitness

Transcript

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.