Own the Day, Own Your Life: Optimised practices for waking, working, learning, eating, training, playing, sleeping and sex. Aubrey Marcus

      ACTIVE B VITAMINS

      When Kobe Bryant or LeBron James—or a young Aubrey Marcus, starting shooting guard for Westlake High School—needed to play a basketball game with the flu, there was one vitamin to reach for: B₁₂. B vitamins are involved in everything, from the conversion of nutrients into neurotransmitters like serotonin to proper mitochondrial function. You can feel it when you take a good B vitamin: there aren’t any questions. You will have more energy, more resilience, more bounce in your step. Think of it like this: “I’ve got your back, B.”

      Not everyone handles the absorption of B vitamins well, however. A good portion of people, for instance, struggle to uptake the essential B vitamin folate, or folic acid, and supplementation with a methylated version, like 5-methyltetrahydrofolate, can make a huge difference. One study showed that people suffering from major psychiatric conditions like schizophrenia or depression were deficient in folate, and benefited from methylfolate supplementation. Generally speaking, the methylated form of vitamin B, methylcobalamin, is more easily absorbed by the body, so pay attention to your body and make sure you supplement with B vitamins that are packaged the best for your system.

       Pro Tip: IV Vitamin Therapy

      IV vitamins have been used in emergency-room care for years. Ask any medical student or young ER doctor how they deal with a bad hangover, and they will give you two words: banana bag. They are referring to a standard IV solution bag that contains many of the vitamins and minerals you need. The advantage of the IV is that it bypasses the gut, ensuring that the vitamins are delivered into the blood. A lot of places have popped up extending this service, not just to the sick but to the healthy (or the hungover). One of the best is a program developed by functional medicine wizard Dr. Craig Koniver called Fast Vitamin IV. It offers not only the usual suspects, but a whole host of amino acids to further assist with recovery.

      Whether it is a dose of vitamin B₁₂ to give you additional energy and pep, or glutathione to help restore your liver, or just a plain old banana bag to cover your bases, IV therapy is only going to get more popular. And as the price goes down, the only question you really need to answer for yourself is: Is the juice worth the squeeze?

      The Emptor-iest of All Caveats

      If you’re not taking supplements, you’re missing an opportunity, plain and simple. But taking the wrong supplements is just as bad, and sometimes it’s worse than taking no supplements at all, because not all supplements work. We have all tried some that didn’t do shit. Some are not strong enough; some have herbs that don’t do what they say, or vitamins that won’t absorb. You can spend hundreds of dollars on things that basically create more expensive pee, with no performance gains to show for it. The key is to find a good company that makes quality products.

      I personally take products from several other places besides Onnit, including Sunwarrior, Healthforce Superfoods, NuMedica, and LivOn. Unfortunately, our industry is full of brands peddling a ton of garbage, so it is extra critical for you to choose wisely when it comes to supplements and the companies that sell them. Believe me, I understand the potential for elephantine bias in those words, as a supplement maker myself, but it doesn’t make them any less true or the need for me to say them any less urgent. This isn’t Supplement Supermarket Sweep, after all. We can’t have you just running down the aisles of your local GNC with your arms out, scooping bottles into your basket without reading the labels and figuring out who made what’s inside.

      Here’s what you need to know and look for when you’re shopping around for each of the supplements we’ve just recommended:

      Avoid supplements that make medical claims. Supplements are technically categorized as a food, not a drug, by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Foods can benefit your health, but drugs treat medical conditions. Therefore, a supplement company cannot advertise that its product is able to fix a medical condition or a disease of any sort without the bitch slap of justice eventually finding its mark upside their head. Remember that product Airborne, which was supposed to keep you from getting sick while flying or teaching elementary school? Well, those exaggerated promises cost its makers to the tune of $23 million.

      If a supplement is claiming a miracle cure for a real medical condition, you know at least one of two things. The company making it is either about to get sued, or run by amateurs too small to get noticed by the FDA and too insignificant to be penalized by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Both of those are red flags, especially the latter. Amateurs can produce supplements and get them on the shelf without actually following the rules. It’s kind of like those unlabeled cookies wrapped in cling film at the counter of the gas station. Who makes those things? While this informality occasionally results in delicious cookies, it’s not what you want for supplements. Supplements must be controlled by a variety of FDA checkpoints during the development and production process.

      First of all, every ingredient needs to have something called GRAS (generally recognized as safe) status. If it’s not on the GRAS list, it shouldn’t be in the formula. Second, there are strict laws concerning how the food/supplement is produced. This is called good manufacturing practice (GMP). Every supplement needs to be produced in a GMP-compliant facility until it is fully packaged and sealed, preventing contamination. These facilities are regularly audited by the FDA and additionally audited by the manufacturing brands. Finally, every supplement is tested for microbial and metal contamination twice before it is released to the public: each ingredient is tested individually, then the finished batch is tested. You can be fairly confident that supplements making medical claims have not cleared these rigorous regulatory hurdles on their way from some dude’s basement to your kitchen counter.

      Avoid companies that don’t perform randomized clinical trials on their own products. If a company hasn’t performed any clinical trials, it is a sign that either they are cheap or they don’t believe their stuff works. As a point of reference, we spent over $400,000 to get our nootropic formula tested twice by the Boston Center for Memory against placebo. There was plenty of research on the ingredients already published, and in chapter 6 you’ll read about one in particular. But we wanted to do more than just suggest that our product would work. We wanted to test it in the most rigorous method possible—randomized clinical trials, run by someone who had no stake in whether Alpha Brain worked or not. That’s important: it’s so easy for great marketers to convince you that a product will help your memory or help you lose weight; it’s a lot harder to show—with evidence, data, and testing—that it actually does so. While it usually isn’t feasible to run tests on every single product, if a company hasn’t run independent clinical trials on any products, they are not for you.

      Watch out for supplements filled with caffeine. One of the big ways those great marketers make you think that what you’re swallowing is doing what they say it will is by juicing it with caffeine. The caffeine gives you an instant hit when you take it, and you end up saying to yourself, “Well, it’s definitely doing something!” And it is: it’s sinking its little hormonal claws into your adrenal system and memorizing your credit card number. There are plenty of good ways to take caffeine. They usually don’t involve supplements. So avoid most supplements that contain heavy caffeine; it’s there to cover up the weaknesses of the core product.

      Prescription

      Since all supplements are different, and you are different, I’m not going to give you specific amounts to take here. The first step is to supplement your lifestyle in the most natural way possible. Get more sunshine, spinach, and fish, and eat all the weird foods you can. We’ll talk about more of that in chapter 8. Then when it comes to dietary supplements, the best practice is to talk to a health-care practitioner, dietitian, or functional medicine specialist.

      It’s also important not to expect miracles or dramatic overnight changes. Your problems weren’t built in a day; the solutions may not come so quickly either. Since I am acutely aware of how my body functions and feels (hey, it’s my job!), I can usually feel a difference the same day I take a supplement, but I have also learned that sometimes it takes weeks before you accrue the whole-body benefits. Track how you feel over time. Do that however you like: use an app, keep a journal, send yourself an email at the end