Rhonda Patrick, Ph.D. is a biomedical scientist and the founder of FoundMyFitness, a platform dedicated to delivering rigorous, evidence-based insights on improving healthspan and mitigating age-related diseases. cc: @FoundMyFitness @FoundMyFitnessClips
Sponsors:
Momentous high-quality creatine and other supplements: https://livemomentous.com/tim (code TIM for up to 35% off)
David Protein Bars 28g of protein, 150 calories, and 0g of sugar: https://davidprotein.com/tim (Buy 4 cartons, get the 5th free.)
Monarch Money track, budget, plan, and do more with your money: https://MonarchMoney.com/Tim (50% off your first year at monarchmoney.com with code TIM)
Helix Sleep premium mattresses: https://HelixSleep.com/Tim (27% off all mattress orders)
Sign up for “5-Bullet Friday” (Tim’s free weekly email newsletter): https://go.tim.blog/5-bullet-friday-yt/
Follow the Tim Ferriss Podcast: https://tim.blog/podcast/
Visit the Tim Ferriss Blog: https://tim.blog/
Follow Tim Ferriss on Twitter: https://twitter.com/tferriss/
Follow Tim Ferriss on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/timferriss/
Like Tim Ferriss on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TimFerriss/
I wanted to loop back around just so people aren’t like Ferris you forgot about vitamin D. I wanted to talk about vitamin D. So the vitamin D I’ve taken vitamin D forever. Tend to take 5,000 IU a day. I particularly in the summer get I would say at least an hour in the sun without skin protection. And I build up to that. I’m not an idiot about it. And yet I am barely in my labs. I’m always barely squeaking by on vitamin D. And for almost all of my adult friends who get labs, and this is also race agnostic, right? Everybody is deficient or just on the border of being deficient, even if they seem to be taking a lot of supplemental vitamin D and getting a lot of sunshine. And I have to ask myself, what the hell is going on here? In what set of circumstances is it possible that everyone would be so deficient if they seem to be getting a bunch of sunlight? They’re taking a bunch of supplemental vitamin D. Can you shed any light on this? I can. Or is there a problem with this measurement in the first place? Which is why I was talking about like proxies and confounders and stuff earlier with respect to some of the other studies. Yeah. So please please educate me the way vitamin D is measured. So vitamin D actually gets converted into a steroid hormone. And this steroid hormone essentially it’s going inside the nucleus of our cells where all of our DNA is and it’s activating 5% of the protein encoding human genome. Many of these genes it activates cloth. By the way you mentioned cloth. Vitamin D is important for activating cloth. Nice. Yeah. So very hugely important for dementia risk which we we can talk about. But to sort of answer your question, so your vitamin D levels are measured by epoxy and it’s called 25 hydroxy vitamin D which is the precursor to the steroid hormone. So essentially vitamin D3 which is made in your skin or if you supplement with it exogenously gets into your bloodstream and that vitamin D3 then goes to the liver and it’s converted into 25 hydroxy vitamin D. That’s the major circulating form of vitamin D. Mhm. after it’s, you know, 25 hydroxy vitamin D is made in the liver, it then goes to the kidneys and it’s made into the actual active steroid hormone which is called 125 hydroxy vitamin D. Well, it turns out the enzymes that are doing the conversion of vitamin D3 into that stable form that everyone gets, you know, when they’re getting a vitamin D blood test, that’s what they’re looking at requires magnesium to work. And there have been studies showing that in with low magnesium, it doesn’t happen readily at all. Interesting. 50% of the US population has insufficient levels of magnesium. So, you’re talking about a coin toss here, right? One out of two. One out of two, right? Mhm. 50-50 chance a person’s not going to be getting enough magnesium. That’s been shown to actually play a role in circulating levels of vitamin D. So, there have been NHEN studies and stuff showing that people that are that have low magnesium intake also have low circulating forms of 25 hydroxy vitamin D. So, that’s one thing. M another thing comes down to genetics. There’s actually a lot of people that have snips, very common ones that probably came from more southern latitude areas that don’t make as much vitamin D3 from the sun exposure because probably they’re getting so much sun, right? Yeah. So essentially, there’s the genetic component as well. And I’ve seen a lot of people’s, you know, different snip makeups and I know quite a few people that actually have to take a super high level of vitamin D3 to actually get enough vitamin D. And then the other thing is that you mentioned earlier the variation between supplements. So there have been studies on vitamin D supplements and it’s the same problem with melatonin. There are some vitamin D supplements with a fraction of what is stated in terms of concentration of vitamin D3 on the nutrition facts and then some of them have like 10 times as much vitamin D. So there’s just like this huge variation where you’re like it says it has 5,000 IUs but it only has 500. There’s a lot of different factors that could be contributing to that as well. So and then there’s also in terms of like people getting sun exposure. You said you don’t wear sunscreen. Some people do. People that have darker skin pigmentation have melanin. That’s a natural sk sun sun sunscreen. There have been studies showing that, for example, out of the University of Chicago, there was a study that was published a few years back showing African-Americans have to stay in the sun 6 to 10 times as long as a Caucasian to make the same amount of vitamin D3 from the same amount of sun exposure because they have a natural sunscreen. Yep. Melanin, which is that darker skin pigmentation. It’s a natural sunscreen. It’s also why their skin always looks great as they’re aging. You’re like, “Oh, you’re 75. your skin looks like you’re 30. I remember I won’t mention him by name, but meeting this this African-American fellow and I thought he was like 25 and he was 53 and had like f and the way we got to that is I was like, “Oh, are you are you married?” And he’s like, “Yeah, five kids.” And I was like, “Wait, what? You have five kids? You don’t look Mormon. Like, wait, what’s going on here?” And lo and behold, let me dig into some of this real quick. So, recommended brands for vitamin D and how much should someone like me potentially be taking as a starting point? Because I’m also wary of taking too much vitamin D. I don’t want to overdose on vitamin D. It seems like there are some risks associated with that. I maybe I’m over overstating them, but how do you think about that? And then in terms of this rate limiting factor that you mentioned, magnesium, what type of magnesium, how much, how should I think about both of these? First of all, we need to talk about vitamin D levels and what the optimal levels are. And that’s really important for someone to figure out how much they should supplement with. I tend to think anywhere between 40 60 to 80. Like 40 to 80 nanogs per mill, you’re you’re in an optimal range. I like 40 to 60. I think that’s my sweet spot. And that’s because there’s lots of studies out there showing all cause mortality is lower within that range. So, you know, if you’re with like 50 nanogs per mill would be great. I mean, that’s a great place to be. If you’re below, you know, 30, if you’re about just 30, you might want to try to get up to 40. Let’s just say for argument sake that I’m at 30. I think I’m probably closer to 40, but let’s say let’s say it’s 30. For someone that’s at 30 Danograms per mill is supplementing with 5,000 IUs a day. Five. Yeah. 5,000 IUs a day and getting an hour of sun in the summer without sunscreen. You probably should be closer to 50 nanogs per mill. I would say if you’re taking that I’ll check my last labs. I just had them pulled two weeks ago, so I’ll double check. So for someone in that case, you might go up to 7,000 IUs and check and see where you’re at a month later. Mhm. And if you then are in the 40 to 50 range, then that’s your optimal dose to take. And this is an important conversation to have, Tim, because it really is there’s an individual component here. And people just want to at the end of the day, they want to what how much do I take? How much do I take? Well, you have to get a vitamin D blood test. This is one of those that you have to really measure because as you mentioned, there’s huge variation there in terms of, you know, absorption. And then the magnesium issue, right? There’s the RDA for magnesium, right? So for men it’s about 400 milligrams a day. For women it’s about 300 milligrams a day of magnesium intake from diet or supplemental sources. If you’re taking a supplement and also if you’re athletic and sweating a lot and using the sauna those requirements can go up between 10 to 20% depending on how physically active you are. If you’re like the endurance athlete you’re on the 20% higher you know range. If you’re more just like the average like I’m a committed exerciser, then you might have to go up 10% above that, right? So, typically the best forms of magnesium to take are the forms of magnesium that are the organic forms. So, that would mean it’s bound to a salt like magnesium citrate or magnesium malate or magnesium tarate. Those are more bioavailable than magnesium oxide for example. There’s also magnesium glycinate which is also a very bioavailable form. It’s the form that I take as well. And dose range, you know, you can take 300 milligrams a day and probably not have any GI distress. And so that gets you most of the way there and then you get the rest from your diet, right? You’re eating some leafy greens, you’re eating maybe some almonds or something which are really high in in magnesium. If you’re not getting any greens at all, then you’re going to have to go up a little bit more to the 400 450 milligram range, especially if you’re if you’re athletic. If you’re taking something like electrolytes, you’re getting some magnesium there. So, you can figure out how much magnesium is in your electrolyte, and that’s that can be counted towards it as well. There’s also magnesium 3enate which is the magnesium form that is allegedly able to cross the bloodb brain barrier better than other forms of magnesium that I mentioned. And I say allegedly because it’s animal studies that have shown that there have been a couple of human studies that were unfortunately there’s a conflict of interest. They were done by the makers of the magnesium 3 and8 supplement. So that’s always important to keep in mind. But they have shown that magnesium 3NA could improve some cognitive scores if you kind of pulled all the cognitive scores together. And so I think that there’s no reason why if you’re interested in cognition and stuff trying the magnesium 3NA. A lot of people like it as well. So that’s another form of magnesium. Although I do think you should probably take some magnesium glycinate along with that because you don’t want all the magnesium going into your brain. You want some of it going into your liver and activating the, you know, enzymes that are converting vitamin D3 into 25 hydroxy vitamin D, right? So, so that is something to keep in mind. If that form of magnesium indeed is going into the brain more, you want to make sure you’re getting some of the other forms to to cover the other bases of other organs as well. What brand of vitamin D supplementation and magnesium glycinate do you use? Is that also Thorn or are they other suppliers? I use Pure Encapsulations for the vitamin D. I have some friends, mutual friends of ours that like the Vesorb vitamin D3. So people that are not able to increase their vitamin D as well. Vesorb really increases the bioavailability of a lot of things including ubiquininal the CoQ10 I mentioned. I should have mentioned that I buy my dad that’s the form I get for him because it increases the bioavailability. Also some fish oil has been shown to increase the bioavailability. So Vesor vitamin D3 can be found at Pure Encapsulations. I don’t have an affiliation with them either. They also have a lot of clean third party tested products as well. And then I use their magnesium glycinate. For the magnesium 3NA, I use Zyogen. I like the Zyogen. Magnesium 3N8.
