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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Artificial intelligence is making it easier than ever to build a business without building a team. As AI takes over coding, customer support, marketing, administration, and other day-to-day tasks, a growing number of solo founders are scaling startups to millions in revenue with few—or even no—employees. While the trend is lowering barriers to entrepreneurship, it is also reshaping hiring, raising questions about the future of work and how businesses will grow in the AI era.
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Ben Broca launched a company last December that offers AI tools to entrepreneurs. He’s already added 10,000 paying customers and is on track to bring in $10 million in revenue this year.
One thing he hasn’t added: any other employees.
The 40-year-old is part of a class of entrepreneurs who are launching, and then often running, new companies on their own. Artificial intelligence tools answer Broca’s emails, help write and debug code, field requests from customers, sign up new subscribers and grant refunds when issues arise.
Broca relishes his ability to make whatever decisions he wants on his own, often from his sun-drenched Sausalito, Calif., living room. “I think compromises make lukewarm results,” he said.
Once upon a time, running a business of a certain size required a team. AI is turning that assumption upside down, and more aspiring entrepreneurs are going it alone.
An analysis by the payments company Stripe shows there are thousands of solo operators on the company’s platform that are generating over $1 million in revenue, with their ranks doubling between 2023 and 2025. The number of solo operators crossing the $10 million threshold nearly tripled in that same span.
In the past, people without business contacts or particular savvy might not have known how to get their ideas off the ground, said Ernie Tedeschi, Stripe’s chief economist. “Now, AI can be a built-in business partner,” he said.
AI’s ability to handle various administrative tasks makes it potentially useful for launching solo businesses in many fields. But the technology’s ability to also handle key tasks in tech, like coding, make that field a particular hot spot.
Analyzing Census Bureau data, Bank of America Institute economist Taylor Bowley found that among all industries, new business applications in the information sector have seen the biggest percentage increase—nearly 45%—over the past year. At the same time, the rate of information-sector applicants saying they plan to hire workers has experienced the sharpest decline of any measured industry.
This Census dataset doesn’t track solo-operated businesses. But the numbers broadly show—in tech and beyond—that applications are flat among businesses likely to hire workers, but generally rising elsewhere. Economists say that’s a strong sign that solo operators are on the upswing.
“The bar for getting started has never been lower,” said Julian Weisser, who runs a San Francisco-based accelerator for solo founders working in tech. The accelerator—which offers founders seed money and mentorship in exchange for an equity stake—attracted 4,500 applicants for 10 slots made available in its most recent cycle, nearly five times the number it drew when it launched last May.
Going it alone with AI can still be surprisingly expensive. Broca said he was losing money on many customers’ accounts while paying to access Anthropic’s Claude to run his clients’ requests—that AI company, as well as others, charges based on usage. He has since switched to free open-source AI models from China.
Broca said he has raised $30 million from investors and, at the same time, has saved millions in salary since he hasn’t needed a team of software engineers.
Another risk: If it’s easy for one entrepreneur to launch an AI-assisted business, copying them can be easy, too. This creates anxiety for founders like Troy Johnston, who runs an AI-assisted business alone in Orlando, Fla.
“Everybody has the sword and we all have the ability to unsheathe Excalibur now,” said Johnston, 40, who used AI to code an app that helps people get the most out of credit card benefits. The company makes around $3,000 a month in profit, with no employees, and is continuing to grow.
What one-person businesses will mean for the labor market remains to be seen. Polling has shown Americans are worried that AI will replace jobs, and top economists are wrestling with that possibility, too. But AI is also creating lots of new jobs, and the go-it-alone entrepreneurs show how the technology can both open doors and limit employment opportunities.
“If everyone’s hiring less, but you get four times more firms, what does that do to head count?” said Rembrand Koning, an associate professor at Harvard Business School who studies entrepreneurship. He co-authored a recent study that found that among 50,000 startups the researchers examined, those focused on AI tended to operate with 25% fewer employees.
Koning also believes a soft hiring environment that’s left some people mired in long job searches has encouraged more to try their hand at launching businesses.
Some founders cite different motives. “It’s a perfect storm of post-pandemic burnout and a re-evaluation of one’s priorities, and also booming AI and a sense of what’s possible,” said Samir Ahmad, 39, who lives in Breinigsville, Pa.
Two years ago, Ahmad decided to leave the corporate job he had worked at Verizon for almost two decades to start a solo coaching and consulting business. He had been seeing social-media posts touting the ease and virtues of AI, which he used to chart a business plan and help with marketing. “It was like my chief of staff, a second in command,” he said.
The business ultimately petered out within months, though, and Ahmad is now back to a full-time corporate role with a utility company.
For Claire Vo, 41, AI helped her turn a passing impulse into a business. She was working full-time as a tech executive when she tapped AI in late 2023 to help code an app that would help her manage documentation and design for new products, with customers ranging from financial services to healthcare firms.
“I was copying and pasting from ChatGPT,” said Vo, who lives in San Francisco.
She put the app online for $1 a month, and within weeks people downloaded it thousands of times. Nearly three years later, Vo’s company—which she ran solo for nine months before hiring an engineer—now has 100,000 users and is on track to make seven figures in profit this year. AI handles the company’s marketing, sales and customer support.
While AI is a shortcut, Vo said her network and credibility in the industry were key. “I think people over-index on how easy AI is and under-index on how much I did to get to this point,” she said.
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