Commusings: A Healthy Dose of Supplement Skepticism by Dr. Mary Pardee

Dear Commune Community, 

sup·ple·ment (noun): something that completes or enhances something else when added to it.

With this definition in mind, here’s my morning “enhancement” routine:

A heaping tablespoon of green powder dumped in lukewarm water. I vigorously stir the pulverized nettle, barley grass, parsley and basil leaf until my pint glass looks like a swamp sample. Don’t forget the spirulina and chlorella or the kelp and nori. If the taste wasn’t ghastly enough, I top it off with some black pepper activated turmeric extract. A drop of D3/K2 for good measure. Down the hatch. Wretch for a moment.

Grab the vitamin pill box. It’s Sunday so I depress the lever underneath the big “S.” It pops open like an over-stuff locker. What’s inside? Omega-3 fish oil, B Complex, Berberine, Resveratrol / NMN, Magnesium glycinate. Spill them into my palm and toss them into my gullet. Gulp.

A spoonful of yogurt to abet my fat-soluble buddies. And … liposomal Vitamin C slurped from a packet. A 5g scoop of creatine and urolithin A mixed in water. And an hour or two later, a smoothie with whey or pea protein. Add some bee pollen.

I could prattle on about the bio-chemistry involved at great length. And, I have.

But … are all of these supplements really “enhancing” my life or are they simply providing the sewer system of Los Angeles with insanely expensive urine?

Further, if a supplement is meant to “complete” something else, the way a nice broach “completes” an outfit, then what is the outfit? In other words, if supplements are 2% of my overall health, then what should the 98% of my life look like?

Thankfully, I have Dr. Mary Pardee in my life to navigate the information wilderness. I recently interviewed Mary on the podcast on Supplement Facts vs. Fiction and she’s been kind enough to pen this week’s essay.

Planting seeds of ideas on IG @jeffkrasno.

In love, include me,  
Jeff

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A Healthy Dose of Supplement Skepticism
by Dr. Mary Pardee

When Commune approached me to write a course about supplements, I was torn.

The global nutraceuticals market is projected to be valued at 650 billion dollars (USD), and growing. This number is so large, it’s hard to make it tangible. To put this into perspective, only 21 countries had a GDP higher than that in 2022, according to the World Bank. Argentina (at #22) came in at $632 billion. If supplement sales were considered a country’s economy, it would be in the top 10% of GDP.

One of the reasons I was interested in taking on this challenge was because I personally have had a varying relationship with nutritional supplements. I’ve gone from taking 10-20 different supplements a day when I was in my early twenties to just four regular supplements these days.

The difference between these two periods of my life is a vastly different level of discernment and skepticism for this industry.

In my twenties, if someone who I respected told me something, I believed them. It was cute.

It was also really expensive and confusing.

Everybody seemed to have a different opinion about which supplements were helpful and which weren’t. I was seeing multiple healthcare practitioners with the goal of getting healthier and they were telling me I should be on all of these supplements.

But when I was taking 10-20 pills a day, I didn’t feel healthy. I felt sick.

After graduating from naturopathic medical school, I returned to my passion for research and started re-questioning everything.

My only interest here is getting to the truth – as best as I can know it – of what works and what doesn’t. As I have grown as a doctor, this has been quite a humbling process. I have said many things, which upon further research, ended up being false.

For instance, I listened to lectures from doctors who convinced me that dairy and gluten were bad, and I believed them. I was gluten-free for almost 11 years in my teens and early twenties.

Then I dived into the research myself, and I realized I was wrong.

Being wrong sucks.

And what is worse than being wrong is having to tell people that you were wrong.

In my first Commune course on Gut Health I said something along the lines of, “No one should eat dairy.” I used an evolutionary rationale to back it along the lines of “we are the only species to consume dairy post infancy.” But since then I have reexamined the science behind dairy and it turns out that dairy can be a great source of protein and a lot of people tolerate dairy just fine. Including me.

I sent the Commune team an email, asking them to amend my course to reflect the science. I don’t believe that everyone needs to avoid dairy and gluten anymore. Obviously, there are some people who do, but I know longer believe these food groups are “bad.”

Admitting you are wrong isn’t fun, but I would rather be wrong, and acknowledge it, than double down and still be wrong but sound like I’m right. Because, if I step into a place of honest detachment, I care more about the truth than my ego (except when I’m arguing with my boyfriend, at which time I like to play a game called “Mary’s always right”). But when it comes to science and what I tell my patients, I play as fair as I can.

I try to bring this discernment to all areas of my life: More discerning in the relationships I put time into, more discerning in the continuing education I commit to, more discerning in the business decisions I make, and more discerning in the information I decide to take in and, most importantly, the information I decide to accept as truth… for now.

And I have become more skeptical. The integrative medicine space is unfortunately filled with a lot of practices that are not truly evidence based. I don’t think people are intentionally spreading misinformation, but instead I think it is due to the fact that they have chosen a side and feel like they must defend it.

So, when Jake asked me to write a course on supplements I gave him five other course ideas instead, and told him, “I don’t believe in most supplements, so I don’t think you want me to do a course on them. Skepticism is what made me stop taking supplements not that long ago.”

He replied, “That’s why we want you to write the course”.

So I spent months digging into the research around some of the most common nutritional supplements.

And I was shocked at what I found.

Some of the most common supplements in the market have very little, if any research backing their efficacy. These are supplements we spend billions of dollars on every year.

Part of me wanted to cry when I realized how much money I likely wasted as very expensive pee, but the optimist also thinks about the money I will save moving forward, with discernment.

The creation of this course was such an important reminder that just because information is really, really common, does not make it any truer.

For example, Vitamin C was a shocking supplement to research, because the research supporting it is remarkably weak. It made me want to dig deeper and keep questioning.

The creation of this course has changed how I practice. There are several supplements I used to recommend for certain conditions that I have told my patients to stop taking and save their money.

And on the flip side, this course prompted me to start taking and recommending several supplements I had stopped reordering, because I now think the potential health benefit outweighs the cost.

And I fully acknowledge there may be a day that I get to email the Commune team and ask them to amend this course. Because the research will progress and we will learn more, and some things that we thought were true today, may turn out not to be. And that’s OK, as long as we stay committed to the truth, and our health, and not to our egos.

I hope this course is informative, I hope it saves you money and I hope it helps you slim down your supplement regime.

 

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Dr. Mary Pardee is a licensed Naturopathic Medical Doctor and a certified Functional Medicine doctor who specializes in integrative approaches to chronic gastrointestinal conditions and longevity/preventative medicine in Los Angeles, California. She is the founder of modrn med, a medical practice that provides medical and health services to patients via in-person consults as well as telemedicine.

Dr. Mary Pardee holds a Doctorate in Naturopathic Medicine from Bastyr University, San Diego, and a Bachelor of Science in Human Nutrition from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.