[00:10] Kacey K: Welcome to the Simply Healthy You podcast, your place for overcoming overwhelm with your health to reach your fullest potential. I'm your host, Casey Canaan. I am so pumped to have you here. I'm a recovering burnt out high achiever who is diagnosed with an autoimmune thy a condition by my early thirty s.
[00:27] Kacey K: I didn't realize that running myself ragged.
[00:29] Kacey K: In the name of being superwoman and determined to achieve all the things in life was killing my body. I created this podcast so that you don't have to continue the struggle like I did for over a decade. I sat down, studied the data, and simplified what it means to prioritize your own health needs so that you can be the best for all the things on your to do.
[00:50] Kacey K: List.
[00:50] Kacey K: Everything you hear on this podcast I have tested and implemented in my own super Pac life with my family to bring you the tips, tools and strategies that will keep your life simply healthy.
[01:06] Kacey K: Hey. Hey friend. Welcome to another episode of the simply healthy you. Podcast. I am so grateful to be infiltrating your brain with today's topic. My name is Casey Kane. I'm a certified Holistic nutritionist with a Master's in Psychology and I'm here to bring you science based conversations to help you live a healthier and happier life. As you probably know, if this is not your first episode of the Simply Healthy You. Podcast, I'm a huge fan of whole food, plant based nutrition because it can give us so much of what we need on a daily basis. However, the soil just ain't what it used to be from overproduction and mass farming practices and a whole host of other things. So we can't really get everything that we need. And this is where supplementation comes into play. This is probably one of the number one questions that I get in my DMs on a regular basis. Is there a supplement I can take for X, Y or Z? And the answer is probably yes. There is just about a supplement for everything out there. But the deeper question here is why do you want to use a supplement for that specific thing? Why do you want to use it? How should you be using it? How long should you be using it for? There's a big difference between short term and long term use. And so today, in this episode, I really want to unpack all of that for you and help you understand if supplements are necessary for optimal health and in what situations you might consider it, as I'm sure you have thought about it plenty of times before. There's so many people selling shit out there on the Internet these days. The supplement industry is another multibillion dollar industry that is completely unregulated. So you also really need to be careful. And I'm going to help you figure out how to look for certain things in different brands and companies. Since the 1950s, the soil depletion that we have been experiencing has created less protein in our plants, less calcium, less phosphorus, iron, riboflavin, vitamin C and magnesium to name a few. And many of the statistics that we see out there in current studies show increasing nutrient deficiencies because of this depletion in our soil. So, for example, the last magnesium stat that I saw recently was somewhere around 68% of Americans are magnesium deficient. That's pretty huge considering magnesium is a part of hundreds of functions within our body and is a giant reason why so many of us have some of the issues that we do have. Supplements are absolutely a way to enhance or complete what we are already getting from our diet. However, they are not meant to be a replacement for a nutrient poor diet. You have to be doing both or you will be taking hundreds of dollars worth of supplements every single month. And to be honest, it's not going to work if you don't work on the diet and lifestyle factors while using supplementation sometimes for a short term healing use, there are some that I will say I will be on forever, that I will take forever to complement my diet and make sure that I don't develop those deficiencies. But if you are not doing the diet and lifestyle along with taking supplements, the supplements are going to be pretty ineffective. You are never going to build up to maintenance level. You are going to have a hard time healing if you aren't properly absorbing a nutrient poor diet, depending on what it's comprised of, is going to lead to gut issues and hormonal imbalance and many of the things that I've talked about on this podcast already. So they are not a substitute. You have to do all of the things. Some supplements, like I said, will be short term use and others will be longer term use. In many cases, supplements are used for acute periods of healing and they are not going to be needed indefinitely. Others, like some of the ones that I recommend to my clients and some of the ones I use myself, will be ongoing because we just cannot get enough to meet our daily needs through food alone. There are a ton of misconceptions out there about supplements, so I'm hoping I can clear the air a bit for you in this episode. The media is bought and paid for as we have talked about many times here, and loves to sensationalize all the, quote, dangers of supplements when in actuality that's not the case when you know what you're looking for and when you are working with someone who is educated on how to use supplements properly. Media loves Big pharma. Big Pharma loves the media. They work together all the time, so we can't really trust anything they fucking say. Pharmaceuticals are usually somewhere around the number three or number four cause of death in the US per year, with nearly 130,000 deaths per year and this is not just from accidental overdoses. This is even when these products are used as prescribed. Adverse reactions to pharmaceuticals are 62,000 times more likely to kill you than food supplements and 7750 times more likely to kill you than herbal remedies. So everyone likes to talk about how herbs and supplements can be really dangerous, but nobody is talking about all the side effects that you see on the inserts for your pharmaceuticals and how likely they are actually to kill you. You still need to be smart. You still need to look up drug interactions if you are on other medications. And you definitely need to work with a practitioner that rightfully knows how and when to use supplements and herbal remedies. This is not a guessing game. This is not something that you should be guessing with. Just like you would get a prescription for a pharmaceutical, in many cases, you should be doing the same thing here. Even though we don't have to write a prescription for you for supplements and herbal remedies, you definitely don't want to just be going off of what's on the internet without having someone look at your entire health history and current situation in order to know what is right for you. You also have to know what you're looking for when you're researching brands. Not all companies are created equal, as we have seen with many other things, right? The whole food system. Not everything is created equal. Please do not ever buy supplements from grocery stores or Amazon. We have seen a ton of scams coming out and not just in those places, but so prevalent in those places because there are just too many hands touching those products. And even brands that you trust that might be on Amazon may be tampered with without that company knowing. You just cannot guarantee that what it says on that bottle is what you are getting when you are not getting it directly from the manufacturer. So, things that you can look out for when you are checking out supplement brands and looking to see if someone is legit and a company that you want to be buying things from. Are they GMP certified? GMP stands for Good Manufacturing practice. Are they GMP certified? That will tell you right there that there is a basic standard of care in creating the products. Now, this isn't a very high standard of care. Lots of people can meet this standard of care. But it is a place to start and something to look for. Are they third party tested? By who? Who is the lab? Do they share that information? Now, some companies will share this information and some won't. Some companies that do have a lot of different products available. It is very hard to keep up with the third party testing and updating a website and everything like that. They do have people who do this. However, I can understand when they are selling hundreds of different products that it would be hard to always have third party updated, third party testing available to customers. And so I don't think that 100% transparency is necessary here in order to be able to trust the company. But I think you should be able to see, are they third party tested and if possible, by who? There are companies that will say they're third party tested, but they own the lab that does it. So the lab technically has a different name, but if they're funding the lab, well, that's kind of counterproductive to the whole thing, right? Are the formulas based on clinically studied dosages? This is going to be harder for you to figure out, I understand that, but there are lots of times where you can at least look for a study to support the use of the specific supplement that you're looking for. Let's say you want to look at an adaptogen or something like that. You're looking at a maca powder or ashwagandha, right. Some popular ones that we see people talking about all the time these days. You need to be able to look and see, is there a study that they're citing when it comes to what they're basing their formulation off of? If they're not citing a study, can you go look for a PMID or something like that and see is there a study that talks about clinical dosages that make that formula worth it? Because if you're only taking whatever, if you're getting like a teaspoon of the powder and the clinically effective dose is actually a tablespoon, well, what's the point of buying that supplement? You're going to take just whatever dosage they made up on their container and it's not actually going to have any impact for you. It's not going to do anything like it's not going to be effective, so you're wasting your money. Right, so are the formulas based on clinically studied dosages? What's the expiration date? How long do they say that you can hang on to these supplements before they expire? Longer shelf life is not necessarily the best. I think anything that is about two years or less is a good standard to go by. Some of these things can absolutely be shelf stable, but longer than two years, you're going to start to lose potency on a lot of these things. So their expiration dates should be less than two years. If you want to get the freshest products available, if you want to make sure that they have not been sitting around for a long time or that they are so processed and or synthetic that they can last for such a long time, because that's not really also going to be an effective dosage. It's not going to be an effective formulation, I should say, of that particular product. Like there are lots of different forms of calcium that you can take in a calcium supplement. If you go look, there's lots of different forms. It's a cheaper synthetic form of calcium. It's not highly bioavailable, it is not very well absorbed by most people and so you're not going to get a lot out of that supplement, but it could probably sit on the shelf for a long time. You're going to want to look for a different version of calcium in there. Same thing with magnesiums. These are popular ones where there's several different forms of these minerals that you can be looking for and so expiration date is something to pay attention to. How fresh are they and then are they gluten, dairy and generally allergen free? I think even if you don't know that you have an issue with any allergens or sensitivities right now, you don't really want those to be added to your products as much as possible. There are dairy free probiotics and everything else and I think that's important because you really want to make sure one, you're getting the purest form. Again, we're talking about effective dosages and things like that. The purest form of the supplement without other things that could possibly aggravate the situation. You don't want compounding factors to be in that formulation. Now sometimes things need to be formulated with other things in order to keep them stable or put them into a tablet or a capsule or whatever it is. But most of the time they should be pretty simple. You don't want to have these other potential allergens in there even if you aren't actually allergic to those things. Because if you start taking the supplement and do have a reaction, well was it from the magnesium in there or was it because they put in some kind of gluten containing filler in there or something like that? That's just an example. I don't know that necessarily there's anything gluten that usually goes into magnesium supplements, but I hope you get the point right. We don't want these other things that could be causing some kind of irritation in our system to be in our supplements. We want them to be pure. So companies that do try to keep all of those things out of their products as much as possible, that's a great standard of care to use to know that you are getting a pure form of the supplements. There are a lot of scams that we have seen in recent years. One of the big ones is the white powder swap. So putting something like baking powder into a supplement instead of what the product is supposed to be, again, magnesium is a great example of this, calcium is a great example of this. These are all white powder supplements that can easily be swapped out for something. Now you taking a baking powder supplement isn't really going to do anything, it's not necessarily harmful to you, but it's also not helpful and it's also not what you paid for, right? We see this a lot when it comes to Amazon supplements, when it comes to grocery store supplements, this is why I really do not recommend ever using those sources for your supplements. Some other things that we've seen a lot of is bogus claims, right? So many people claiming that their supplement does X, Y and Z and it's not scientifically backed up. The burden of proof is on them. If they are saying that their supplement does a certain thing, there should be evidence and proof of that on their website that you can track back to, again looking at third party studies, right? If they're doing their own lab testing and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, that's not enough. There should be clinical studies in some way. There should be studies for you to be able to look at that, support what they are claiming with that supplement. And if you can't find those, if they're not providing those, chances are they are probably lying about it or using and cherry picking data to support their product that doesn't even use the ingredient from the research, right? That happens a lot. You can find any research paper that basically has a line in it that you can completely misconstrue from what the original scientists were talking about in that study. So it's not hard to also make it look scientific without it actually being scientific. It's important that you look through the study and don't just look at the introduction or the conclusion, really try to look at the methods of what they were studying. Even if it sounds like gibberish, I guarantee you are smart enough to figure out like, yes, this sounds like it matches up with what these people are claiming for this supplement. Or no, this doesn't sound anything like what they were trying to look at in this study that this person says the supplement is for. And I'm always happy to talk science with you if you are trying to figure that out and look at research papers. I love this shit. So happy to look at research papers with you anytime. So bogus claims are a big one. Expired supplements are also a big scam that we have seen where people are taking them. Again, this happens a lot with grocery store and Amazon and places like that. I mean, even things like GNC, right? This is not regulated. They sell crappy supplements as well. It's mind boggling to me that they can get away with this and still stay open. Expired supplements, if you see that the expiration date has either been scratched out or replaced or there's a sticker over it red flag, there's an expiration date printed on that bottle for a reason and there is no reason why that expiration date should be changing, it should be getting repackaged or something like that. There's no reason why the expiration date should be changing on that bottle from when it was originally manufactured and ineffective dosages. What I talked about before, another scam that we're seeing a lot of where there's just a little bit of the ingredient in the product itself so that they can say that it's in there, but it's not actually an amount that has been clinically studied to make a difference. So you're getting it technically right, they're not completely lying to you, but it's not actually an effective dosage. This is why it is so important you buy directly from companies or from well known dispensaries. One of the ones that I just recently got approved for, I got my credentials approved for, I'm super excited about is full script. And so that's going to be a service that I will be able to provide to my clients with professional grade supplements at clinically effective dosages from reputable companies. Those kinds of dispensaries are a great place to be buying your supplements from and or directly from the companies because they can guarantee that their products are what they say is supposed to be in the bottle or the powder or whatever it is. As I said, supplements can be used for short term. There's a couple of different uses that we could use here. Short term cases like removing different toxicities so things that have built up in the body like heavy metals or parasites or mold or bacteria or other pathogens, right. We know that there are short term uses for things like that where you might do if you have a candida overgrowth, for example, bacterial overgrowth, you would do a candida protocol for a short period of time, and then when the Candida is in control, you would wean off of the supplements and no longer need them anymore. As long as everything stayed balanced. Right. So it's a short term use of supplements that can be very effective even in the case of nutrient deficiencies. So short term supplements can also be effective when the body is particularly depleted and your immune function is low, it kind of helps. Supplements can be used to help boost things back up to a maintenance level. And again, as long as you have done the work with your diet and lifestyle, you can then maintain from there. And you don't need to take the supplements forever once you're back at that maintenance level for long term use, we're really talking about the foundational nutrients that we need. And this is still going to be specific and unique to each person because it depends on your dietary pattern, your dietary choices, your lifestyle, your health history, your current situation. I mentioned before, if you're not absorbing things properly, this can have a big role in the kind of supplements that you take and whether or not you should be taking certain supplements. For example, most people will need something like vitamin D three if they live somewhere in the northern latitudes where you cannot synthesize D from the sun all year, or if you are someone who is not out in the sun almost every single day, even when you can synthesize it. Or if you do live in southern latitudes. Like if you're not out in the sun on a fairly regular basis, if you're not getting a tan, you're not getting vitamin D. That's basically a good measure of whether or not you are getting vitamin D. If you can't get a tan. If you're not getting a tan, you're not getting enough vitamin D. And so supplementation is going to be something that you would want to do all the time. Not high dosages, it's a very low dose that would be necessary for maintenance dosages. And vitamin D is something that you would want to test at least like twice a year to see what your status is. And if you do need to do a short term higher dosage, many times when we become depleted from illness or things like that, or high levels of stress, we might need to increase it a little bit. But this is just an example of one vitamin in particular where I tell all of my clients to take it in the winter months and if they are not getting out in the sun regularly and getting that tan, if you are lacking other things in your diet and you know you will never eat adequate amounts of those things, whether it is by your dietary choices, whether it is because of allergies things like that, just things that you don't necessarily like, that's valid. Right? I know I am never going to eat enough of X, right? In our house, we choose not to eat animal products, right? So there are certain things that are less abundant in plant foods. And we know that we need to be making sure that we have some supplements as an insurance policy. We don't necessarily need the supplements every single day to sustain us in our house. We have worked very hard to make sure that we are eating a balanced diet and getting most of what we need. But it's that insurance policy that we know we're filling. If there is a gap in any given day, if we don't eat our usual foods, we have that because we know that we don't eat animal products in our house. And so you might have dietary choices that you have made that you're just not going to eat adequate amounts of certain things that might have certain nutrients in it, then supplements are really helpful here. And to be clear, I do think that no matter what your dietary choices are, and I've said this on previous episodes, you will have to supplement something. I mean, even people who eat animal products, one of the biggest arguments against a vegan diet or saying that a vegan diet can be healthy, of course any dietary pattern can be unhealthy. And I do think that many dietary patterns can be healthy, but it's all about how you implement that dietary pattern and whether or not you are being really intentional about what you're eating. So even people who do eat animal products, if you are someone who eats animal products, there will still be things that you will have to supplement. And it also depends on how much whole food plants are you eating in addition to those animal products, because there are lots of things that you can only get from plants that you cannot get from animal products and you would have to make that up in supplementation as well. So I just want to be clear about that. There's no magic diet that gives you everything there's absolutely not. I mean, all of us at this point have to be taking some kind of supplements in some way if we are trying to make sure that we have that insurance policy and are not developing deficiencies. If you have a higher stress life or a higher stress job or any of those kinds of things, or you just want to have a higher output. Like if you're just in a phase of your life where you are really going after your goals and you know you're not sleeping 8 hours a night, maybe you're sleeping like six or seven and you're functioning well, but you want to make sure that you don't burn out and you don't deplete yourself. Supplements are a great insurance policy here to help avoid depletion. Like right now in my life, there are some supplements that I am definitely using more regularly. That if it was a slower time of my life and I didn't have two small kids and I wasn't running my own business and doing a podcast and all the things, I probably wouldn't need to be taking them every day because I'm pretty intentional about my diet. But I just know that right now is one of those really intense periods of my life and I want to make sure that I'm protecting myself from depletion. Genetic factors can also play a role here with supplementation because there are some things that determine your ability to break down and absorb certain nutrients. You don't necessarily need to get genetic testing for this. But this is a big reason why I'm so excited to be able to do lab testing, functional lab testing, with my clients in the coming months as I am working on my new integrative health practitioner certifications. Because I want to be able to see your deficiencies at the start of working with you. And then after starting there will be some of my clients who have some of these genetic factors and if we supplement for three to six months and don't see a change in some of those nutrients, then there's a good chance that there's a genetic factor playing in there. Because I always work on gut health with my clients, I always work on hormone health with my clients. That is the foundation of Simply Healthy Academy and my group coaching program. So I know that I'm addressing those issues there and it might be a genetic factor at that point, in which case we might have to look at a different formulation of certain things. Usually the products that I recommend are good for people, even with these genetic mutations that we know about that can affect this. I look for methylated versions of B vitamins, I look for chelated versions of minerals and things, so I know that it is the most bioavailable form regardless of your genetic status. So it's not something that you necessarily need to know, but it's a good thing for us to be able to track. And I'm really excited about being able to offer this in the next couple of months. You definitely want to be able to monitor your use at least every six months, depending on what you're using for supplements or less. If you are using acute protocols, like if you have a specific issue, like I was talking about with any sort of toxin buildups, you want to be looking at your status in less time than that, probably like twelve to 16 weeks, you want to be checking your status again. After implementing a protocol, it's important to note that deficiencies do not go or stay away unless you support them daily. You can't just build up your body, not work on adding things to your diet, and expect to maintain adequate nutrient levels without supplementation. As I mentioned earlier, that's not how it works. You can get up to maintenance level with supplements. But if you haven't adequately planned for that in your diet and know that it is possible to get 100% of what you need from your dietary pattern that you are choosing, then you are just going to get depleted again and you're just going to have to start using a supplement again. So being on supplements all the time is not a bad thing. I know some of us, there are some out there who say being on medications forever are not great, and I think there's a different reason for that. I agree with that to a certain extent, depending on your health situation. Like, I don't want to be on my thyroid medication for the rest of my life, but I also will have to see at the end of my healing when I can balance my numbers with a really low dose of my medication and try to wean off of it. I have to see if there's damage to my thyroid that's been done. I have an autoimmune condition, and the reality is your body starts attacking whatever organ it is for you when you have an autoimmune condition, and if there's damage and it cannot fully function properly, you may not be able to ever produce enough. My thyroid may never be able to produce enough of thyroid hormone. In order for me to be healthy, I may need a medication forever, which sucks. It should not be the case, but that does happen in the case of autoimmune conditions, for example. So there are supplements I will use for the. Rest of my life based on our dietary choices, like I was talking about, and lifestyle choices, but I'm also constantly experimenting with other ones as I learn, and that I think may be beneficial for me or might serve my clients well. I don't recommend things to my clients that I haven't used myself. I take all of these supplements. I've never used something that has been contraindicated in situations where it would be dangerous. There are very specific situations where you might need to use some things that are a little bit more rare, but I haven't run into it yet. And so those are ones that I might not have tested out. But I test everything out first, I try things out and as I'm going through these new certifications, I'm definitely looking at some supplements that I'm going to try for myself. There's a new brand that I'm being exposed to as well. And I want to test out the quality, I want to make sure that they do what they say they are supposed to do. And I've looked at their credentials and all that kind of stuff. So I'm excited about this. Again, I think supplements can be a great complement and should be used. We should not think at this point we can't rely on our dietary pattern in and of itself. And with many of us having a fair amount of stress in our lives and wanting to implement things like exercise routines because it is healthy for our body, which also does put more stress on us. It's a healthy version of stress. But so many of us already have an unhealthy level of stress in other areas. That some points of life. It's just a part of it. And supplementation can really help you in making sure that you don't get to a point of disease, that you don't get to a point of illness, that you don't get to a point of having to come back from things. And if you are in one of those depleted states, they are a really great way to more quickly heal and sometimes the only way to help you quickly heal because you just cannot. I mean, you would have to eat so much food in a day in order to make up for some of these nutrient deficiencies. And or. They're a great alternative in the case of parasites and bacteria and things like that. What a conventional doctor might recommend, where it's like antibiotics is the remedy, and it's just fucking knocking everything out in your system, and you have to start rebuilding things from scratch. Those things can be very harsh treatments and in some situations may be necessary, but really I feel like that is the last approach when we know that there are so many supplements and herbal remedies that can work instead. So I hope this helps address the supplement question for you. As I get asked this regularly about my thoughts and whether or not you should be taking something or what supplement you would take for X, Y or Z. I will not make recommendations to you in the DMs, just so you know. I love to help you. Believe me, I want to give out as much free information as I can. However, I do not know your health history. I do not know your current health situation. I don't know what medications you might be on. I don't know your dietary pattern. I don't know your lifestyle. I cannot adequately make a recommendation to you in the DMs without knowing the full picture. So the best way to do that, if you are looking for my input, is to become a client. Pretty soon we are going to be opening the doors to Simply Healthy Academy. That's coming up. Open enrollment is coming up in April, and we start the next round on May 1. That is a fantastic way to build a foundation of health, to work on gut health, to work on hormone health, and to get to the root causes of your health issues. And I will absolutely create a customized supplement protocol for you like I do for every single one of my clients inside of that program. Even though it's a group coaching program, we do so many things on the individual level, and that is why I have 100% retention rate coming from this round to the next round. All of my clients are returning because they invested the dollars, they saw the value, and re enrolling was not even a question for them. They all snagged those first spots as fast as they possibly could, and I'm so excited for that. So that's the best way to become a client right now. I hope that this was helpful for you. Thanks for listening and I will catch you next time.
[29:54] Kacey K: Thank you so much for listening to the Simply Healthy You podcast. If these episodes are resonating with you, go ahead and click that subscribe button and leave a review with all the great nuggets that you're taking away from today's episode. I promise you I read every single one of them, as your feedback is really valuable to me in creating future episodes. As your host, I look forward to having you join me for the next episode. But in the meantime, remember, keep it simple and eat more plants. You.