How to Build a Smarter Supplement Stack

Nick Urban [00:00:01]:
You’re listening to High Performance Longevity. The show exploring a better path to optimal health for those daring to live as an outlier in a world of averages. I’m your host Nick Urban, bioharmonizer, performance coach, and lifelong student of both modern science and ancestral wisdom. Each week we decode the tools, tactics and timeless principles to help you optimize your mind, body and performance span things you won’t find on Google or in your AI tool of choice. From cutting edge biohacks to grounded lifestyle practices, you’ll walk away with actionable insights to look, feel and perform at your best across all of life’s domains. Here’s something that took me years and an absurd amount of time, energy and money to learn. Your body is not a broken machine waiting for the next right pill, whether natural or synthetic. Instead, it’s the most sophisticated regulatory system on the planet.

Nick Urban [00:01:12]:
And when a number on a test looks off, that number is usually pointing at something deeper. And most of the time, your body is already aware of it and working on it. By the end of this episode, you’ll know why A blood test can read perfectly normal while you’re actually running on empty. The handful of things on a supplement label that tell you within seconds whether a product is worth your money, and the one phrase that changes how you buy everything. That phrase is supply. Don’t override. Let’s get into it. All of this starts somewhere no one looks not on the front of the bottle, not on the side of the bottle, not even on the back label of the bottle where all a supplement manufacturer’s dirty details usually lie.

Nick Urban [00:02:01]:
It starts on the opposite, with what your body already has and what it’s doing with the nutrients it has. Once you see how smart the system that is your body is, the the entire way that you shop changes. See if this scenario sounds familiar. You see on your calendar that you have your annual physical coming up. Or maybe you use one of the modern platforms to get your blood work done, perhaps even from the comfort of your own home. Leading up to that day, you do all of the right things. You stop supplementing. You don’t train too hard.

Nick Urban [00:02:36]:
Right around the time of the test, you probably go in fasted all of this so that you get the best, most accurate results. If you go into the office, you’ll hear back from the doctor that everything looks normal. If you cowboy this and you used a third party service, you get your biomarker reports and you see most things in balance. A couple things off here and there, but overall things look good. So you should be all set. And then here’s the uncomfortable truth. Normal can mean that your body is succeeding brilliantly at keeping your blood topped up while the reserves behind it, the tissue levels of nutrients, drain. That’s because for most things, blood is the last place deficiency shows up because your body defends it first.

Nick Urban [00:03:22]:
And when a number does come back that’s off, it’s usually a signal pointing at something deeper. The biomarker itself isn’t the problem. Sometimes your body is handling it. Sometimes toxicity, an infection or a real deficiency overwhelms it. And that’s when it needs your help. To make this more tangible, let’s take one of the Internet’s favorite supplements over the last handful of years. Magnesium. I first got into it after I read Dr.

Nick Urban [00:03:52]:
Carolyn Dean’s book the Magnesium Miracle. And within about a minute of applying topical magnesium, I felt my muscles noticeably relax. But that’s only the surface. The reasons I use magnesium are too many to list right now. And that would be. It has been entire episodes in themselves. The reason we’re looking at magnesium right now, today, is because of the way it. The reason we’re discussing magnesium.

Nick Urban [00:04:19]:
1% of your body’s magnesium sits outside your cells, and only a third of 1%, 0.33%, is inside your blood serum. That’s the part that your standard test reads. So when magnesium comes back normal, you measured a puddle and you’re calling the reservoir of magnesium full. What’s going on is that your kidneys clamp down and defend that blood level the moment your intake drops, while the tissues quietly run down. The test looks fine because your body is winning the battle it cares about and losing the one behind it. So what do you do? There are a lot of different approaches here. If you want to get a more accurate gauge of your magnesium status, you can look into red blood cell magnesium or intracellular markers. You could use an inorganic.

Nick Urban [00:05:13]:
You could use an organic acid test or metabolomics test, HTMA and oligoscan, or even a panel like True Diagnostics, True Health. These can each give you data. You can also try introducing a little bit of magnesium and noticing how you react, mainly because most people, almost the entire US population, is either deficient or insufficient in magnesium. At least what you ingest is only one part of the equation, though. Something that I think is pretty cool that not a lot of people talk about. Your body controls the dose of what actually reaches cells, not simply blindly taking in, not simply blindly transporting everything you ingest. Iron is on your gut cells wide open. When you’re low slammed shut when you’re full, one single dose blunts the next one roughly by 40%, which is why iron absorbs about twice as well every other day as it does daily.

Nick Urban [00:06:11]:
And this holds true throughout everything. When you’re low on a nutrient, you absorb it more efficiently. So people on a low calcium so people on a low calcium intake pulled in about 43%. Mega dosing is usually backwards, and a lot of compounds are biphasic anyway, one effect at a low dose and the opposite at a high dose. So doubling a dose that worked can backfire. Many of us want to believe in a linear dosing model where one dose had a certain effect. Double that dose should have double the effect. And that’s quite often not the case.

Nick Urban [00:06:53]:
So the simple principle here is to supply what your body asks for instead of trying to force override it. One crucial thing I learned back in my interview with Dr. Z in episode number 220 is something known as the Goodhart’s Law. If you take away nothing else, this could be the one concept that changes the way you approach health optimization forever. Here’s what it says. When a measure becomes a target, it stops becoming. Here’s what it says. Take triglycerides, for example.

Nick Urban [00:07:27]:
We’d all agree lower is better for the most part, but how you get there decides everything. If you clean up your diet and insulin and they drop and you’re healthier underneath, great. If you block a pathway or you carry a heavy metal or a hidden toxin that also lowers them and that number drops just the same while you’re harming your health, I don’t think I need to spell it out that that’s probably not going to be a good thing overall. So what this means is instead of optimizing the marker, you want to fix the system the marker is reporting on. So if we’re not deciding what to take based on disordered biomarkers, we’re going to employ Goodhart’s law and choose the things that will fix the systems that need optimizing. How do you decide what to take at all? There are two questions that I like to think of before anything earns a spot in my supplement stack. First of all, what does my body need this for? And what job would it do in my stack? Now, there are a lot of different ways you can categorize supplements. I like these because they’re clean and simple to understand.

Nick Urban [00:08:36]:
The first one is, what do you need? You can sort everything into three tiers. First, we have the essentials. These are things that your body cannot make and you must either get from diet or supplementation period. Going without essential nutrients eventually breaks something and inside your essentials a subcategory within that. I like to work on minerals first, because they are the cofactors that your vitamins and enzymes and a lot of other things cannot fire without. That’s why they’ve been nicknamed the spark plugs of life. Then after the essential, you have conditionally essential. Conditionally essential means that your body can produce them and usually does produce them.

Nick Urban [00:09:24]:
But when you’re under a stressed state, from normal living, from illness, hard training, aging, perhaps genetics, you don’t produce enough or the optimal amount you need for that situation. You won’t die, but you will also not be fully optimized. As an example, you could fit the popular creatine into this category. And then after that you have all of the non essential supportive substances. These are still valuable and worth taking. They’re just a lower priority than the essential and conditionally essential nutrients. Once you handle the first two, then you can. Once you handle the first two, you have your foundation laid and you can.

Nick Urban [00:10:07]:
Non essentials would include most other things that people supplement. The next lens to consider is what job does it do? Every supplement is hired for one of four jobs. You have two that are primary and two that are supportive. Under those four, the first one is foundational. These are your nutritional insurance that you take for life, albeit in varying doses depending on your context. The next one is targeted for a goal or an event for a specific finite amount of time. Then you stop those ones. Third up, you have terrain, which is the support that keeps your gut, brain, body detox.

Nick Urban [00:10:48]:
Third up, we pain your gut, your detoxification pathways, cardiovascular function, especially any areas that need special attention based on your overall lifestyle and profile. Then we have the amplifiers. These are the things that make everything else work better. Starting with cofactor. Cofactors are the partner a nutrient needs to work. Lastly, we have the amplifiers, the things that make everything else work better. Starting with cofactors, which are the partners a nutrient cannot work without. Let’s take vitamin D for example.

Nick Urban [00:11:25]:
Vitamin D works best when it’s co administered with cofactors like magnesium, vitamin K2, calcium, zinc, boron and vitamin A. At the very least, though vitamin D3 plus magnesium plus vitamin K2, you’ll notice some overlap between the foundational nutrients and the amplifiers. That’s because a lot of them are the same, specifically the minerals. There are also other amplifiers and cofactors and coenzymes outside of those as well. Such as choline, coenzyme Q10, alpha lipoic acid, carnitine, taurine, inositol, essential fatty acids and amino acids. The other branch of the amplifiers are things like shilajit, which contains fulvic and humic acids, which enhance the absorption of tons of other things that are co administered with them, as well as phospholipids, which when they’re administered alongside other things, help that other thing get into the brain more effectively. There’s also blood flow enhancers. The better your overall blood flow, the better you are able to transport nutrients to where they belong.

Nick Urban [00:12:38]:
So all this to say, if you don’t know the job of a nutrient of a supplement, you might want to figure out where it belongs before adding it. Here’s the one part that makes it so very few people actually build a strategic stack. And that is that your context what’s going on in your world rewrites the protocol even when the ingredients stay the same. The rule under that is that anything that’s pushing your body hard carries a cost that you supplement to help overcome faster and more effectively. If you get sick or you feel it coming, your your ability to tolerate vitamin C can skyrocket. You can go from barely tolerating just 3 grams at once to easily 10, 20, 30 grams at a single time. If you’re curious how that works, I suggest you look into the several different books that I’ve read of Dr. Linus Pauling.

Nick Urban [00:13:32]:
And vitamin C is also just one of many nutrients in which the body has a fluctuating need, depending on the other life circumstances. For example, if you’re slammed with stress, your body dumps magnesium and electrolytes so you can replace them and perhaps add theanine or ashwagandha or something to pull the stress response down lower. I’m prepping for a dry fast right now. So for a few days going in, I’m taking liver support binders and minerals that I’d never normally touch. I’m doing it to help my detox pathways handle what the fast will mobilize. And when I take nootropics that overclock me, I increase my consumption of antioxidants to mop up the reactive oxygen species, AKA the exhaust. The results. Once you settle on the ingredient to add to your stack, the next step is to choose the right product.

Nick Urban [00:14:25]:
Unfortunately, the industry is built around you not knowing how to read what’s in your hand. Here’s how the people who make these things read a label for a handful of nutrients. The form they come in Is everything magnesium oxide, for example. The example that we keep using over and over again is about 4% absorbed, barely a supplement and mostly a laxative. So you want any of the other forms. Essentially glycinate, malate, ionic, taurate, citrate is okay. There are some other new fancier forms that are also okay. Vitamin B9, folate.

Nick Urban [00:15:05]:
You want either methylfolate or the non methylated form, not synthetic folic acid because a big slice of the population does not properly convert folic acid. If you decide to supplement vitamin D, in addition to getting ample natural sunlight, you want vitamin D3, not D2, because D2 can actually lower the D3 you already have. Keep in mind that to reap the full benefits of vitamin D, you’ll still need a little bit of exposure to UV light in order to sulfate the vitamin D and convert it from inactive form to active form. I used to be against any and all synthetic nutrients. Yet there are exceptions. For example, synthetic vitamin C ascorbic acid made in a lab is the same molecule that saved countless lives. Now it’s not exactly the same as a whole foods derived natural vitamin C complex. So there are certainly pros and cons to each.

Nick Urban [00:16:06]:
You often won’t get some of the things that come along with the natural molecule when you take an isolated synthetic. So I like to make sure that the diet is constructed in a way that allows for adequate amounts of the other constituents that are found within the natural based products. I’m also not blanketly in favor of synthetics. There is a study I saw that showed gamma. There’s a study I saw that showed that an isolated synthetic vitamin E by 30 to 50%. So when it comes to natural versus synthetic, my answer is that it depends. After you’ve made sure that the label contains the right form of the nutrient, the next thing to consider is how much of that active are you getting? Not simply how much powder is in the capsule or in the scooper. For herbs and extracts, is the active constituent standardized to a percentage or does it just print the plant name and hope that you don’t care about the details? Do they use a patented, branded, often clinically studied ingredient which signals they cared about the material instead of just using the cheapest form? And for minerals, read the elemental amount.

Nick Urban [00:17:19]:
500 milligrams of magnesium citrate is about 16% magnesium, so you’re only getting 80 milligrams of that actual mineral. One other consideration here, does the dose on the label match what the studies used or is it a sprinkle? So that they can list the ingredient that is called pixie dusting or fairy dusting and is a fairly common industry practice. Unfortunately, two other secrets that will help you first, by federal law, ingredients are listed heaviest, first, most prominent first. So inside any proprietary blend, the top ingredient printed last is the smallest amount in the tub. Conversely, the first ingredient in the proprietary blend is the one that they have the most of in that section. Proprietary blends are something that you want to avoid if at all possible, because a lot of the top brands openly disclose that they’re using the clinically validated dosages of everything. There are exceptions, good companies using proprietary blends, but that’s the exception rather than the rule. The second one, and this one’s burned me several times, is to check the serving size before you trust the dose because that big number you see is sometimes per three or four or even six capsules.

Nick Urban [00:18:46]:
And then, while you’re at it, glance at the other ingredients line a long one. A long list of other ingredients often means that the manufacturer cut costs because having few ingredients can make the product harder to manufacture, slower and thus more expensive. Usually the things you see in the other ingredients section are not going to help your health in any way. So the fewer the better. Next, and related to what we were discussing previously, does the product contain the cofactors the main star ingredient needs? So if you’re taking a vitamin D supplement, does it contain vitamin K2? Does it contain magnesium? Does it contain any of the other things that I mentioned? If you’re taking a zinc supplement, does it contain copper? Because a zinc with no copper taken over months can quietly strip your copper and cause real, sometimes permanent nerve damage. A thoughtful formulator and formula either includes the CO factors or assumes that you know how to pair them. Okay, here’s something else no one in the industry will tell you. Most brands do not make their own products.

Nick Urban [00:20:00]:
They pick the formula out of a contract manufacturer’s catalog and then put their name on top of it and their logo and a shiny label. That same formula often gets sold to a dozen competitors. One factory makes thousands of formulas for hundreds of brands, so the founder’s story on the front doesn’t always mean much. My filter when I’m looking at brands is three particular things. First of all, are they using some kind of third party testing that you can verify with a certificate of analysis on the finished product? I’m looking for transparent sourcing and honest, effective dosing. Now, that doesn’t sound like it should be difficult, but the thing is, fewer than one in five Brands can claim all three USP and NSF certifications. These are independent third parties that verify the label claim matches the bottle, or more importantly, what’s in the bottle. Informed Sport goes a step further and tests every batch, if possible.

Nick Urban [00:21:06]:
You’ll always want to buy direct from the manufacturer or the brand, because on big marketplaces and even the real brands listing, because of the way the supply chains work, you still might not get the real product. Shocking, I know. In 2026, Amazon and other platforms are working to improve that, but it has been a massive historical problem. How big of a problem? Well, there’s a Consumer Reports article. I’ll put in the show notes for this episode. And the FDA tested 46 supplements off Amazon and ebay. Here’s what they found. All 46 had undeclared pharmaceuticals, several wearing the best seller badges on their plat.

Nick Urban [00:21:53]:
So, yeah, it’s a real issue. And that was just in 2022, I think it was, too. So now you know what to look for. You know the factors that matter. And here’s the thing, you can pass every read and buy an excellent product and it can still do nothing for you. And that’s because the missing label and that’s because the missing variable was not getting the right product in your hand. What do I mean? Context decides the outcome far more than the bottle does. Same supplement, same dose.

Nick Urban [00:22:25]:
Two people, two opposite results. I run everything through a lens. I call context. Seven questions. Who you are, what you’re fixing, the timing, your terrain, whether you’ll do it, what it trades away and how you’ll track it. And before your experiment. Your genetics can also help cut some of the guesswork. They won’t hand you the perfect answer, but they can show you whether you’ll do well on certain things.

Nick Urban [00:22:57]:
Maybe a precursor like N acetylcysteine NAC for short. How your baseline, how your baseline needs compare to the average. For example, I run genetically low on magnesium, so I have a higher need to supplement magnesium and get dietary magnesium. So I could tell from my genetic analysis alone that I would likely do well on magnesium. And I do remember that the rda, the Recommended Dietary Allowance, the percentage that you see on the back of the nutrition labels, products that was largely formed on very old science and just marginally updated. Those are the levels that are required to keep you from dying to prevent major outright disease, not what’s necessary to thrive. It’s also an average across the population. And you could be either higher than average or lower than average across every single nutrient.

Nick Urban [00:24:00]:
So getting A one time genetic analysis done to understand how throughout your lifetime you’re likely to respond to supplements, longevity compounds, peptides, other interventions in my opinion is well worth it. And that rationale expands beyond just the rda. Published research is an average across hopefully thousands or perhaps even more people. You are one person though, so you become the experiment one variable at a time, the right duration, two kinds of tracking, your biomarkers and your felt experience, and a keep or drop line you set before you start. The best way to figure out what is going to work best for you is actually to try it and then iterate from there. Now you can try to do that all by hand using tools like a smart wearable, perhaps the Oura Ring, Ultra Human, RingCon, Whoop, Apple Watch, Fitbit, you name it. You can use those devices and try and figure out what was the impact, was it positive or negative. Or you can use the platform that I’ve built for you and it’s free.

Nick Urban [00:25:10]:
It’s called Outlier and it helps you understand what works for you and what does not work for you. It works best with a wearable, but it still can help give you insight even if you don’t have a wearable device that you use. If that sounds interesting and you want to check it out, you can go to outlier.com app and find what works for you. Well, we will wrap this one up. You don’t need to memorize any of what I’ve mentioned. Just remember the one meta idea underneath everything. Your body is not a broken machine that you’re simply patching up with substances. It’s the smartest system in the universe and the whole skill is learning how to supply it, not override it.

Nick Urban [00:25:53]:
To find the cause before you chase the number. When it comes to supplements, sort them into tiers and name their jobs before you buy them. Read the label like the people who make supplements and then run experiments on yourself to determine whether or not they earn their keep up. Next time in the next solo sode, we will cover peptides, my favorite class of biological messengers. Although the chemically modified forms that are popular blur the line between supplement and drug, I’ll give you the filter that I use to decide when they are worth touching and when they’re not. Thanks for sharing your time, your energy and your attention with me. And until next time, be an outlier. Thanks for tuning in to high performance longevity.

Nick Urban [00:26:49]:
If you got value today, the best way to support the show is to leave a review or share it with someone who’s ready to upgrade their healthspan you can find all the episodes, show notes and resources mentioned@outlier.com until next time, stay out energized, stay bioharmonized, and be an outlier.