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Tension: A man took the same three supplements for a decade, only to learn from his neurologist that two of them had been blocking each other’s absorption the entire time.
Noise: The wellness internet gives us the vocabulary of health literacy — bioavailability, absorption, protocols — without the clinical judgment to know whether our specific stack actually works in our specific body.
Direct Message: The ritual of taking supplements can feel so much like responsibility that we never question whether it’s working — and the hardest truth is that being wrong can feel exactly like being right, every single morning, for years.
To learn more about our editorial approach, explore The Direct Message methodology.
Derek, a 47-year-old civil engineer in Portland, lined up the same three amber bottles on his kitchen counter every morning for eleven years: magnesium glycinate, vitamin D3, and a high-dose calcium supplement. He’d assembled the stack in 2013 after a deep dive into wellness forums and a particularly convincing YouTube video from a naturopath with 800,000 subscribers. The routine felt like armor. It felt like taking control. It felt like the one thing he was doing right in a life where everything else — his diet, his sleep, his slowly worsening migraines — remained stubbornly out of his grip.
Then his neurologist, during a routine follow-up for those migraines, asked him what supplements he was taking. Derek listed them proudly. The neurologist paused — the kind of pause that carries weight — and said, “Your calcium is almost certainly blocking your magnesium absorption. They’ve been competing for the same receptors for a decade.”
Eleven years. Every single morning. Two of the three pills he’d been taking were essentially canceling each other out.
I’ve been thinking about Derek’s story because it captures something I keep seeing — a pattern I’d call performative health literacy. It’s the deeply modern phenomenon of feeling medically informed while being medically unsupervised. We read the studies. We bookmark the threads. We build protocols from podcast timestamps. And the ritual itself — the daily act of swallowing the capsules, measuring the drops — becomes so psychologically reassuring that we never question whether the chemistry actually works.
This isn’t ignorance. That’s what makes it so uncomfortable. Derek is smart. He reads widely. He can explain the difference between magnesium glycinate and magnesium citrate. But intelligence without clinical context is like having a map with no legend — you can trace every road and still not know where you are.
The calcium-magnesium interaction Derek stumbled into is well-documented. A study published in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition found that high calcium intake can significantly impair magnesium absorption when taken simultaneously, because both minerals compete for shared transport pathways in the intestine. Separate them by a few hours and the issue largely resolves. But no wellness influencer mentions timing. Timing doesn’t fit in a Reel.
Nadia, a 38-year-old marketing director in Chicago, told me she’d been taking zinc and iron together every morning for six years — another classic antagonistic pair — because a wellness blog had listed both under “essential daily minerals for women.” She only learned they were competing for absorption after developing an iron deficiency severe enough to cause hair loss. Her doctor’s first question wasn’t about her diet. It was about her supplement stack. “He looked at me like I’d been poisoning myself with good intentions,” she said.
There’s a psychological concept that maps onto this perfectly — the illusion of explanatory depth. It’s our tendency to believe we understand something far more thoroughly than we actually do, simply because we’ve been exposed to the language around it. We know the word “bioavailability.” We’ve seen the absorption charts. But knowing vocabulary is not the same as understanding pharmacokinetics, and the gap between those two things is where real harm lives.
The supplement industry — worth over $177 billion globally — has a vested interest in keeping that gap invisible. The marketing doesn’t just sell products. It sells the identity of someone who takes their health seriously. And once that identity is established, questioning the stack feels like questioning yourself. As we explored in a recent piece on how people who can’t do anything in moderation aren’t lacking discipline but responding to something deeper, the compulsive optimization of health routines can itself be a trauma response wearing the mask of wellness.
Marcus, a 52-year-old retired operations manager in Scottsdale, stacked five supplements daily after leaving his career — vitamin D, fish oil, ashwagandha, a B-complex, and melatonin. He’d built the protocol during the disorienting first months of retirement, a period he described as “needing something to organize my mornings around.” The stack wasn’t really about health. It was about structure. About feeling like he still had a system to manage. We’ve written before about what happens when people leave careers and suddenly have nowhere to be — the supplement ritual, for Marcus, was filling an identity vacuum as much as a nutritional one.
Photo by Taryn Elliott on Pexels
When his primary care physician finally reviewed his bloodwork, his vitamin D levels were actually too high — he’d been supplementing on top of a diet already rich in fortified foods. His ashwagandha, meanwhile, was potentially interacting with the thyroid medication he’d started the year prior. Nobody had connected the dots because nobody had been asked to. Marcus was his own pharmacist, his own researcher, his own clinician. And he was doing it wrong in ways that felt exactly like doing it right.
This is the quiet danger of what I’d call wellness autonomy without clinical accountability. It’s not anti-science. It’s science-adjacent — close enough to feel rigorous, far enough to miss the interactions, the contraindications, the dosing nuances that require someone who went to school for this. We’ve seen similar patterns in how conditions like sleep apnea in women go unscreened — people self-diagnosing with the wrong framework because the right one was never offered to them.
And I want to be careful here, because the instinct to manage your own health isn’t foolish. It’s often born from real failures — the seven-minute appointment, the doctor who dismissed your symptoms, the system that treats you like a billing code. Nadia told me she started her supplement routine precisely because her previous doctor had waved away her fatigue with “you’re probably just stressed.” She wasn’t wrong to seek answers. She was wrong to stop seeking once she’d found ones that felt satisfying.
That’s the distinction that keeps nagging at me. Satisfaction is not the same as accuracy. The feeling of taking control is not the same as having it. And a morning ritual that makes you feel responsible for your health can — paradoxically — become the very thing that keeps you from actually being responsible for it.
Derek eventually separated his calcium and magnesium by six hours. Within three weeks, his migraines — the ones he’d been chasing with the supplements in the first place — reduced by nearly half. Eleven years of a problem that had a simple fix, hidden in plain sight by the comforting fiction that he already knew what he was doing.
Tessa, a 29-year-old graphic designer in Austin, summed it up in a way that stuck with me. She’d been taking a curcumin supplement for joint pain without knowing that without piperine — a black pepper extract — her body was absorbing almost none of it. “I wasn’t taking a supplement,” she said. “I was taking an expensive placebo and calling it self-care.”
The internet gave us access to an extraordinary amount of health information. What it didn’t give us — what it structurally cannot give us — is the clinical judgment to know which pieces of that information apply to our specific body, our specific medications, our specific biochemistry. That judgment isn’t a product you can buy in capsule form. It lives in the conversation between a patient and a practitioner who has the full picture. And most of us haven’t had that conversation. We’ve had the search bar instead.
We know that structural changes happen when people lose their identity frameworks — and health rituals often become identity frameworks, especially for people in transition, in crisis, in the ordinary drift of aging without a map. The stack isn’t just supplements. It’s a story we tell ourselves about who we are: someone responsible, someone proactive, someone who doesn’t just wait for things to go wrong.
But responsibility without verification is just theater. And the hardest thing about Derek’s story — the part that made me sit with it for days — isn’t that he was wrong. It’s that being wrong felt exactly like being right. Every single morning. For eleven years.
That’s the part none of us want to examine. Not whether our supplements work. But whether we’ve confused the ritual of taking them with the evidence that they do.
Feature image by Jonathan Borba on Pexels
