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.
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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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OpenAI has shelved the planned launch of GPT-6.1 Astra after internal tests raised concerns about deception and agents acting beyond user authorization, according to The Wall Street Journal. The company says it will investigate the issues and strengthen safety measures before releasing future models.
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OpenAI says it is scrapping the release of its next-generation AI model over safety concerns that researchers raised during internal testing, in one of the clearest signs so far that agent misbehavior could stymie the industry’s rapid progression.
The move follows a summer punctuated by reports of artificial-intelligence systems industrywide going rogue, and marks a rare case of a major AI developer ditching a new release because of safety concerns.
The company had planned to launch the model, known as GPT-6.1 Astra, in the coming days or weeks, aiming for an October debut. The model was more capable than the company’s previous models in completing challenging tasks from end-to-end without human assistance, as well as writing.
The company instead will focus on improving the safety of future models, which it expects to be even more capable.
Saachi Jain, OpenAI’s head of safety systems, said in an interview that GPT-6.1 Astra regressed in two areas. Compared with its predecessor, GPT-6 Astra, the model performed poorly on tests measuring alignment, or how well the model adheres to what humans would like it to do. Specifically, GPT-6.1 Astra showed higher levels of deception: It wasn’t always honest about telling users of the actions it did or didn’t take.
Another issue was what OpenAI calls “scope authorization,” meaning that GPT-6.1 Astra would push ahead on a task without asking the user for permission, and would at times reach for external tools and services even if it might be unsafe.
“For anything regarding safety and alignment, there’s a trade off,” Jain said. “You really do need to find what’s the right line between staying within scope, but also avoiding laziness in terms of how the model actually pursues tasks even when it hits friction.”
While GPT-6.1 Astra improved in areas such as “model laziness,” Jain said it didn’t quite meet OpenAI’s bar for safety and alignment, so the company decided not to launch the model publicly.
The announcement comes one day ahead of OpenAI’s annual developer conference in San Francisco. In the past, OpenAI has used the conference as an opportunity to launch new models and services that reduce costs for software developers—a segment the ChatGPT-maker competes with rival AI company Anthropic to win over.
In recent weeks, OpenAI and Anthropic have called on industry partners to slow down the development of cutting-edge AI models and invest in safety standards, noting they will temper the pace of their own internal AI progress.
OpenAI says it is working to investigate a range of agent security incidents that it has discovered in recent months, and address the safety issues underneath them. As part of the work, the company has implemented a new monitoring system to catch AI-agent misbehavior more quickly, and started requiring engineers to use stronger security guardrails for testing its AI systems.
Earlier this summer hundreds of OpenAI’s internal agents, which were tasked with completing a cybersecurity test, ended up hacking into the AI company Hugging Face. Since then, high-profile organizations such as the Australian government and United Nations discovered that OpenAI’s agents used similar, but less extensive, techniques to gain access to their websites.
Many of the publicly known agent-security incidents involved OpenAI’s internal AI models that were never slated for public release.
Last week, OpenAI said it paused training on its most capable AI models after an AI agent slipped through a gap in the company’s internet restrictions to query a public chatbot. The company said its new monitoring systems flagged the incident within 15 minutes, and training on these models remains paused.
GPT-6.1 Astra isn’t one of those models, but a different case, the company said.
“We want to make sure our model development is safe no matter whether that’s in the company, or when we ship it to users,” Jain said. “But when we ship it to users, we have an extremely high bar in terms of safety and alignment.”
While the company decided not to ship GPT-6.1 Astra, it hopes to use the same base model to do additional reinforcement learning runs, and create future generations of its GPT-6 models.
OpenAI plans to conduct several deep dives to identify the root cause of the problems identified in GPT-6.1 Astra, Jain said. The work includes ensuring that OpenAI’s reinforcement learning environments are rewarding the right type of behavior, Jain added, though she noted the company would investigate all stages of model development.
AI companies have begun to draw scrutiny from policymakers and public officials, who are paying attention to the rapid development of the technology. Later this week, a Senate subcommittee is holding a hearing with third party AI researchers titled, “Rogue AI: Securing the Homeland Against AI Agent Attacks.”
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, a Republican, sued OpenAI in June, claiming that the company and Chief Executive Sam Altman knowingly released an unsafe product and ignored warnings that it could harm users.
In a motion for temporary injunction filed Monday, Uthmeier sought to prevent OpenAI from developing new AI models without third-party approved safeguards, stop ChatGPT from soliciting user engagement and limit the company’s ability to advertise ChatGPT as safe.
Tech companies claim they “cannot stop barreling forward with their potentially civilization-ending endeavors unless they are forced to do so by the government,” Uthmeier said in the filing. “The Florida Attorney General is answering your cry for help.”
An OpenAI spokeswoman said that people want to know AI is being developed safely, “and that starts with what companies like ours do ourselves.”
“Governments have an important role to play in setting robust safety standards for AI, and we’re committed to working with Florida and other states on advancing pragmatic AI policies that apply to the entire AI industry—not just one company,” she said.
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