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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At least for people who carry the APOE4 genetic variant, a juicy steak could keep the brain healthy.
3 min
Must even steak be politicised? The American Heart Association recently recommended eating more “plant-based” protein in a move to counter the Health and Human Services Department’s new guidelines calling for more red meat.
Few would argue that eating a Big Mac a day is good for you.
On the other hand, growing evidence, including a study last month in the Journal of the American Medical Association, suggests that eating more meat—particularly unprocessed red meat—can reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s in the quarter or so of people with a particular genetic predisposition.
The APOE4 gene variant is one of the biggest risk factors for Alzheimer’s.
You inherit one copy of the APOE gene from each parent. The most common variant is APOE3; the least is APOE2.
The latter carries a lower risk of Alzheimer’s, while the former is neutral. A quarter of people carry one copy of the APOE4 variant, and about 2% carry two.
APOE4 is more common among people with Northern European and African ancestry. In Europe the variant increases with latitude, and is present in as many as 27% of people in northern countries versus 4% in southern ones. God smiled on the Italians and Greeks.
For unknown reasons, the APOE4 variant increases the risk of Alzheimer’s far more for women than men.
Women’s risk multiplies roughly fourfold if they have one copy and tenfold if they have two. Men with a single copy show little if any higher risk, while those with two face four times the risk.
What makes APOE4 so pernicious? Scientists don’t know exactly, but the variant is also associated with higher cholesterol levels—even among thin people who eat healthily.
Scientists have found that cholesterol builds up in brain cells of APOE4 carriers, which can disrupt communications between neurons and generate amyloid plaque, an Alzheimer’s hallmark.
The Heart Association’s recommendation to eat less red meat may be sound advice for people with high cholesterol caused by indulgent diets.
But a diet high in red meat may be better for the brains of APOE4 carriers.
In the JAMA study, researchers at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute examined how diet, particularly meat consumption, affects dementia risk among seniors with the different APOE variants.
Higher consumption of meat, especially unprocessed red meat, was associated with significantly lower dementia risk for APOE4 carriers.
APOE4 carriers who consumed the most meat—the equivalent of 4.5 ounces a day—were no more likely to develop dementia than noncarriers. (
The study controlled for other variables that are known to affect Alzheimer’s risk including sex, age, physical activity, smoking, alcohol consumption and education.)
APOE4 carriers who ate the most unprocessed meat were at significantly lower risk of dying over the study’s 15-year period and had lower cholesterol than carriers who ate less. Go figure. Noncarriers, however, didn’tenjoy similar benefits from eating more red meat.
The study’s findings are consistent with two large U.K. studies.
One found that each additional 50 grams of red meat (equivalent to half a hamburger patty) that an APOE4 carrier consumed each day was associated with a 36% reduced risk of dementia.
The other found that older women who carried the APOE4 variant and consumed at least one serving a day of unprocessed red meat had a cognitive advantage over carriers who ate less than half a serving, and that this advantage was of roughly equal magnitude to the cognitive disadvantage observed among APOE4 carriers in general.
In all three studies, eating more red meat appeared to negate the increased genetic risk of APOE4.
Perhaps one reason men with the variant are at lower Alzheimer’s risk than women is that men eat more red meat.
These findings might cause chagrin to women who rag their husbands about ordering the rib-eye instead of the heart-healthy salmon.
But remember, the cognitive benefits of eating more red meat appear isolated to APOE4 carriers.
Nutrition is complicated, and categorical recommendations—other than perhaps to avoid nutritionally devoid foods—would best be avoided by governments and health bodies.
Readers can order an at-home test from any number of companies to screen for the APOE4 variant.
The Swedish researchers hypothesize that APOE4 carriers may be evolutionarily adapted to carnivorous diets, since the variant is believed to have emerged between one million and six million years ago during a “hypercarnivorous” period in human history.
The other two APOE variants originated more recently, during eras when humans ate more plants.
APOE4 carriers may absorb more nutrients from meat than plants, the researchers surmise. Vitamin B12—low levels have been associated with cognitive decline—isn’t naturally present in plant-based foods but is abundant in red meat.
Foods high in phytates (such as grains and beans) can interfere with absorption of zinc and iron (also high in red meat), which naturally declines with age. So maybe don’t chuck your steak yet.
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