"Which supplements should I be taking?"

A QUESTION WE HEAR MOST WEEKS

"I've been listening to a lot of podcasts. What supplements should I actually be taking?"

It arrives in almost every intake conversation. Sometimes it's NMN. Sometimes it's a specific creatine dose someone heard about. Sometimes it's a full longevity stack from a Huberman episode or a Rhonda Patrick deep dive. The person asking has done real homework. They are not being naive.

And the honest answer is almost never the supplement itself.

Here is what we actually see in clinic. A person arrives convinced they need to optimize something, say NAD+ or testosterone or cortisol. We run a panel. Half the time, the thing they are worried about is fine. The thing that is actually off is something quieter, something they had no reason to suspect. A borderline ferritin. A blood glucose that spikes in a pattern they had never tracked. An inflammation marker that's been creeping for years. No podcast covered that combination, because no podcast knows their body.

Supplements are not inherently wrong. Some of them have real evidence behind them in the right context. But "the right context" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Taking NMN when your methylation pathways are not assessed, or adding creatine when your kidney function has never been checked, or stacking adaptogens on top of an HPA axis that is already dysregulated, those are not optimizations. They are guesses with a monthly cost attached. What we try to do at Expand Health is work backwards from data, not forwards from a product list.

The framework we use internally is simple enough to remember: test first, target second, optimize last. You do not need a complicated protocol. You need to know what is actually low, what is actually high, and what is just noise before you add anything at all.

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WHAT YOU CAN DO NEXT

• Before buying anything, get a baseline panel that includes at minimum: full blood count, metabolic panel, fasting insulin, CRP, ferritin, vitamin D, and HbA1c. These are not exotic. Most are covered by standard care. They tell you more than most supplement stacks ever will.
• For every supplement you are currently taking or considering, write down the specific outcome you are trying to affect. If you cannot name a measurable marker for it, that is a signal worth sitting with.
• Revisit your sleep and glucose data before adding a single new compound. In our experience, fixing either of those two consistently outperforms any supplement intervention we have seen at the same price point.

P.S. What is the one supplement you are currently taking that you are genuinely unsure about? Hit reply and tell me. I am curious what the podcast-to-clinic gap looks like from where you are sitting.

— Emilian