Would You Spend $1,000 a Month on Supplements?
Over-the-top regimens have become bragging rights—and revenue streams—for the health-conscious and wellness-obsessed.
4 min
Kristin Leite, 38, spends about an hour organising her “stack” for the week.
“In the morning, I take four powders and about five capsules,” said Leite, an esthetician who lives in Tampa, Fla. She pops around five more in the afternoon, and at night she swallows six or seven capsules.
“I’m talking probably like over 20 different supplements throughout the day,” she said, making adjustments based on how she feels.
That’s on top of the injections Leite gives herself regularly: NAD+, which she says makes her feel energised and alleviates her brain fog, and glutathione, which is marketed for antioxidant and immune support.
“It’s very painful, and it stings and it’s horrible,” Leite said of the latter. The Food and Drug Administration has warned that both can cause health problems in injectable form.
On TikTok, where she has more than 615,000 followers, Leite talks about the products she’s using. She links to them on ShopMy and Amazon, where she earns affiliate revenue from sales.
Over-the-top supplement regimens have become bragging rights for the health-conscious and wellness-obsessed.
From beauty lovers to masculinity influencers, everyone is boasting about their “stacks”—the numerous capsules, powders and injections they take regularly in the hopes of achieving a cumulative, self-optimizing effect.
They’re spending over $1,000 a month in some cases on products that purport to improve their sleep, mental health, fertility, appearance and longevity, but often aren’t approved for those purposes. Some are making money from their endorsements.
Influencers and other public figures are driving the frenzy. “I do 150 supplements a day, and I have for 20 years,” biohacker Dave Asprey said on a podcast last year .
Bryan Johnson, the tech entrepreneur and longevity enthusiast, said in a 2023 YouTube video that he took 111 supplements daily.
“A lot of people are pretty confused that I can take this many supplements in a given day,” he said in the video, posted the year before his company Blueprint commercialised multi-nutrient products. (He said in an email that he now takes fewer than 30.)
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has vowed to “end the war on vitamins,” has said in interviews that he takes “a ton” of them.
“Supplements aren’t a silver bullet, and they don’t override poor lifestyle choices,” Asprey said in a statement.
He said that the ones he takes aren’t necessarily for everyone. “That’s why I never share my exact supplement stack. Experiment, test, and find out what works for you personally.”
Supplements went from a means of treating diseases caused by nutritional deficiencies in the 1900s to lifestyle products that are now the backbone of a $70 billion industry.
Because they do not undergo approval by the FDA, they aren’t reviewed for safety or efficacy before coming to market.
Some have lots of scientific research backing their use, while others have very limited support.
Manufacturers are prohibited from making claims about treating or preventing disease, but influencers have sold the idea that buying the right products can fend off or cure almost any ailment.
Their videos draw on popular TikTok formats like shopping “hauls” and “get ready with me” routines, making supplements seem like a step toward pleasure or self-actualisation.
“Here are all the supplements I take as a 22-year-old, 125-pound girl in college who prioritises protein, slow movement and a healthy, active lifestyle,” one creator says in a video before filling a pale-pink mirrored pill case with a week’s worth of capsules.
“Rate my stack” is a common prompt in the Reddit forum r/Supplements, where posters share photos of the copious supplement bottles on their shelves.
Dylan Amble, a 28-year-old in North Carolina’s Outer Banks, recently filmed himself taking creatine and electrolytes, an NAC capsule, black seed oil, a saffron capsule and a supplement called Mojo that says it supports the production of testosterone.
“I don’t feel like I’m low-testosterone,” he said in an interview, “but I’ve seen a lot of podcasts where they talk about how it’s a gradual decline for males, so my mindset is, Why don’t I hedge myself as much as possible? ”
He’d been leading a self-described “degenerate lifestyle” that included drinking frequently and vaping before resolving to optimise his health and improve his appearance along the lines of so-called looksmaxxers—young men whose relentless pursuit of a physical ideal can include dangerous behaviours like injecting unknown substances and breaking their own facial bones.
(He considers himself a “softmaxxer,” meaning he doesn’t take things that far.)
To assemble his stack, which costs an average of $115 a month, he followed information shared by podcasters, including Andrew Huberman as well as models on social media.
“I always make sure to emphasise the importance of getting behaviours right first,” Huberman said in an email.
“While I personally have had great benefit from taking certain supplements, the topic of supplementation is a very small fraction of what I discuss on the podcast and social media.”
SuppCo, an app with 675,000 users, helps people track their stacks and assess the quality of certain supplement products.
CEO Steve Martocci, who previously co-founded messaging platform GroupMe and the Uber-for-helicopters company Blade, said he spends $1,114 a month on 28 supplements he takes daily to address nutrient deficiencies and, hopefully, increase his longevity.
The top 20% of SuppCo users spend $479 a month on supplements, according to the company, and the average SuppCo user spends $168 a month.
Nutritionists generally recommend filling nutrient gaps through food rather than supplements when possible. Some supplements can actually introduce or exacerbate health issues.
“It’s a new addiction that people have,” said Mona Sharma, a celebrity nutritionist in Los Angeles. She said many of her clients take upward of 15 supplements a day.
One female client, she said, was taking 70 of them, following guidance she’d seen online, without feeling any positive effect on her well-being.
“We hear that [Andrew] Huberman is taking something, and we all jump on the bandwagon thinking it’s good for us,” Sharma said, “when that’s not the case.”
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As AI productivity trackers reshape workplace evaluations, employees are learning how to manage calendars, activity levels and AI usage to ensure their contributions are recognized.
4 min
What’s more important than being a good employee right now? Looking like a good employee in the eyes of AI productivity trackers that more managers are using to evaluate their teams.
Employee-monitoring systems are especially popular at tech companies and are also used by other white-collar firms that want to probe how people spend company time. The scary thing: You might not even know you’re being watched because many states don’t require disclosure.
Metrics can include performance data that is undoubtedly relevant, such as sales results. But it also can employ dubious proxies like keyboard strokes and how often your computer screen goes into sleep mode.
We generally accepted, or at least understood, heightened surveillance during the work-from-home era. Back then it seemed reasonable for bosses to keep tabs on employees they couldn’t see.
Yet the oversight has only escalated, and tensions are rising, too.
A group of former Meta Platforms employees alleges in a lawsuit that the company used a “constellation of internal artificial-intelligence systems” when it began laying off about 10% of its workforce in May. Meta says humans make termination calls.
However that case shakes out, a couple of things are clear. Companies eager to gauge which employees are locked in now have sophisticated AI monitoring systems at their disposal. And they believe they have leverage in a tepid labor market.
So while we may chafe at having our worth reduced to numbers on the boss’s productivity dashboard, we have to play the game as it’s being played. Here are some tips, based on conversations with people who make employee monitoring systems—and others who game the systems.
Be meticulous about your calendar
Calendar integration is one way that productivity trackers have gotten more advanced and, ostensibly, fairer.
Let’s say you make an old-fashioned phone call or attend an in-person meeting. Your Outlook or Slack status may switch to “away,” making you appear as inactive as if you were taking an extended coffee break.
Employee monitors like one made by a company called Insightful cross-check your online status with your calendar to see whether there is a valid reason for your apparent inactivity. If that call or meeting is on your schedule, then the system will recognize that you are busy offline. If nothing is on the books, it could look like you’re slacking off.
Hit the activity sweet spot, around 80%
Let’s not go any further without addressing the underlying question: How much downtime is permissible during the workday? After all, people have been scared to let managers see anything non-work-related on their screens since personal computers first arrived in offices.
No one knows this better than Roger Wagner, who is widely credited with creating the first “boss button” in the early 1980s. He designed a keyboard shortcut to instantly display a spreadsheet if the boss walked by your cubicle while you were playing a computer game. Boss buttons have been features of countless diversions since. (I confess to using one built into a March Madness streaming app.)
Wagner, the founder of computer-education company 1010 Technologies, says his original design was a joke—more of a commentary on overbearing managers than a cover for lazy employees. Good bosses understand workers need mental breaks throughout the day, he says.
This matches what I heard from Insightful Chief Executive Ivan Petrovic. He says customers that use his company’s workforce-management platform don’t expect employees to stay on task 100% of the time.
“On average companies are aiming for 60% to 80% of your time being utilized for work during the day,” he says.
Go ahead and exhale. It’s probably OK to watch an occasional YouTube video at your desk.
And if you’re going to artificially inflate your activity level, be careful. Hitting 90% could look suspicious.
Get physical
So don’t leave your mouse jiggler on all day. Choose the right one if you must resort to shenanigans.
There are lots of software applications that mimic the movements of a computer mouse, so you can appear to be working while away from your desk. There are also devices that plug into computer ports and do the same thing.
Corporate cybersecurity systems increasingly block these apps and devices, and productivity trackers claim to be able to detect them. But some workers swear by mouse docks, like one made by Tech8 USA, that keep cursors moving. The company originally made mouse-moving software but now focuses on physical jigglers.
“People are drawn to mechanical solutions because they’re so simple and don’t require software,” says Tech8 Marketing Director Sam Matthews. “As monitoring technology becomes more sophisticated, that distinction has become even more relevant.”
Use AI, but not too much
Another popular metric for employee-monitoring systems is AI usage. Companies want to know who is embracing new tools, and it can be tempting to think more is better.
“There’s a performative aspect where employees overblow their usage of AI so that they appear relevant in the organization,” says Andrea Derler, principal researcher at Visier, which helps companies track and analyze employee work habits.
In a recent Visier survey of 1,000 U.S. workers, 48% admitted to exaggerating their AI usage.
This is already an outdated strategy. Using AI for everything used to score points for experimentation. Now it can seem wasteful because many companies are watching AI token spending more carefully.
Look, productivity theater has always been part of work. Most of us aren’t trying to cheat the system, but expectations are changing so quickly that we need to be savvy about what the latest employee trackers are looking for.
Sometimes it takes a little gamesmanship to get full credit for our contributions.
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