Welcome to the Let’s Talk Toxins show. Imagine feeling vibrant and energized every single day, no matter your age. In this episode, we’re uncovering the top 5 supplements that every woman should know about to maintain peak health for a lifetime. Curious about what these powerhouse supplements are and how they can revolutionize your well being? Well, stay tuned because this is as close as I get to suggesting that you pop a pill to suppress symptoms. Something as simple as the right supplement could be the game changer you’ve been looking for.
If you’re new here, I’m Dr. Gala Gorman, a licensed acupuncturist, naturopath, and author of “What’s Your Kryptonite?” I wrote the book to help women understand the effects of chronic stress that’s turned toxic. In the book, I share the MOLT Method™ I developed to make it easy to shed stress along with the accumulated toxicity, just like any other creature in nature that’s outgrown its trappings, so that you can cruise through midlife and beyond symptom-free, putting an end to health issues like chronic fatigue, insomnia, mood swings, and even weight gain.
M.O.L.T. in this case is an acronym. The T stands for toxins, and I can say with confidence that every symptom is caused by accumulated toxicity. I evaluate 12 categories of toxicity when I’m working with someone to unravel a health mystery. Our world is full of man-made substances that our bodies were not designed to deal with. Couple this toxicity with an overwhelming amount of toxic stressors the body was designed to manage, and it’s no wonder women find themselves playing whack-a-mole with symptoms.
Here’s a report that’s a great example of a toxin trend. This study determined that tampons were linked to arsenic and lead poisoning. This kind of information has been out there for decades now, but this is the first study I’ve seen that really showed that it isn’t just one certain brand, but that all these brands of tampons are finding these sorts of chemicals in. Even more concerning, it’s not just the most popular brands. It’s also the organic cotton tampons. So if you’re turning to an all-natural brand, even something organic, just know that that may not be solving the problem.
Your vaginal tissue, if you’re still cycling, most of the women that I work with are beyond that point in time, but if you have daughters or friends that are still having this issue and they’re open to hearing, just know that they need to understand how easy it is for their bodies to absorb these toxins through the thin delicate tissue in the vaginal area. It’s really important to do what we can to minimize our exposure to things that we know are introducing toxicity. There’s a lot of things that we come into contact with that we really have very little control over. But in a situation like this, we can use different methods for dealing with the natural bleeding of the menstrual cycle.
One thing I’d like to point out here is how important the menstrual cycle is in keeping us healthy. The blood exchange, essentially, the blood loss every month, if that blood loss is an abnormal amount, either more or less, or if it’s either really bright red or really dark red, those are all indications of a state of dis-ease in that reproductive system. As an oriental medicine practitioner, these are the kinds of questions that we ask to help us get to the bottom of what actually is disrupting those systems.
Just know when you get to the point where you aren’t cycling and you’re not essentially forcing your body to regenerate fresh blood every month, then it can be really helpful to just donate blood every three to six months. It just really helps your body to kind of use a hormetic stressor better. Like a controlled amount of blood loss to jump-start that blood production process. It also helps us to flush out toxicity. So if you think about it, just like we would consume water to flush out our kidneys and bladder, the urinary tract, a similar sort of thing happens when we donate blood and we force our body to generate new blood.
In my book, “What’s Your Kryptonite?“, Chapter 12 is dedicated to helping readers manage what I refer to as tricky toxins. Heavy metals are one of those tricky toxins. And our bodies are bombarded with toxicity, so we have to learn to manage it. Just comment “Tricky Toxins“ and we’ll send you a link where you can download the chapter for free. If commenting isn’t convenient, wherever you’re watching or listening to this episode, just go to drgala.com/links. Sign up for my wellness weekly newsletter, it comes out every Sunday and you can respond to any email you receive from me with “tricky toxins” and we’ll get you a link.
Every suggestion you’ll hear from me has been tested in the trenches. In this segment, which I refer to as “walking my talk”, this includes saying no to symptom suppression. Over the past four decades, I’ve developed processes that work sustainably. Typically, it requires a combination of approaches that I’ve synthesized to address some of the health issues that show up repeatedly for many women.
Recently, I had an opportunity to walk my talk and that really involved one of the seven ways that I use in my human energy system reboot. And that is to make sure that we’re consuming enough protein and the right protein. I was finding that I was really challenged. This is really a problem for those of us who like to eat one meal a day, OMAD. I was finding that I was doing pretty well eating generally one meal a day, but I would find myself kind of snacking just out of almost convenience in the evening. I was doing okay, not snacking too late, but I was finding that when I was snacking, the snacks were very low protein. They were fairly high-quality snacks, but very low protein.
I had to make sure that I have tuna salad, or chicken salad, or turkey salad. Something like that, that I can eat with a few crackers, that then at least I’m consuming close, if not all the way to my goal of at least 20 grams of protein in each meal. A meal generally consists of anything over 100 calories. So when you’re fasting, there’s kind of an unspoken rule that if something is under a hundred calories, it really doesn’t tend to spike our blood sugar enough to pull us out of fasting. But if it’s more than a hundred calories, it’s considered more of a meal.
Our goal is to get at least 50 grams of protein, at least 20 to 30 in at least two meals a day. Yes, there are a lot of people who would suggest that you consume one gram of protein for every pound of body weight. I don’t recommend that for a lot of reasons, which is more than we can go into. If you’re interested in hearing more about that, comment around this video so that I know you’re interested in that and I can do a whole episode on protein consumption because I do think it’s very interesting and there are some things that we need to understand for a mature woman that you’re not going to get from a bro YouTube creator that really doesn’t understand how a mature female woman’s body works.
This actually led me to try to figure out how I was going to make sure that I had appropriate snacks in the house and I actually ended up creating a whole menu with a flexible grocery list and daily or weekly variety of things that I wanted to keep in the house. I was then able to kind of be more proactive about how I was going to make sure that things that are healthy for me to eat are also handy and convenient. That’s just critical for us. We’re all busy. And if it’s healthy and otherwise meets the criteria, then we think this is good enough. And honestly, it’s not good. The nutrient density of what we’re consuming is extremely important, especially as we age, because we tend to need to eat fewer meals. We’re trying to be more mindful about what we’re eating and how much we’re eating. It’s really important to make sure that we’re getting the nutrient density in what we are eating.
Now let’s talk about the five supplements women must take to improve their health forever. And when I’m done, drop a comment and let me know which supplements you’re considering adding and most importantly, why. We always want to be supplementing thoughtfully and so if you feel like anything that I speak about here resonates with you, it should be fitting into your overall well-being supplement protocol for a reason.
First, I will say that you want to be taking some multivitamin. The only people who probably don’t need a multivitamin are people that really eat a super healthy nutrient-dense diet. Maybe they’re eating farm to table most of the time and those people probably are doing okay and don’t need a multivitamin. But most of us could use to supplement with a multivitamin. This is due to a poor diet even if we eat a really good diet, a lot of times the soil is depleted from the vitamins and minerals, or especially the minerals, and the minerals are what sort of provides the nutrients for the plant to make the nutrients that we are consuming.
The most important thing to understand about the multivitamin is that you want to vary the sources. Many people will kind of find a vitamin supplier that they really like, think is good and then they literally have been taking that same vitamin for years and years and this weakens your microbiome and your digestive system and really is not doing you any favors. The way I approach using a multivitamin is we rotate the multivitamin that we use and if you’re working with me, I use a process basically to evaluate what your body needs at the time. But if you’re trying to do this yourself, just come up with three or four brands and just switch that up every month or two. If you have four brands that you take regularly, then take one, one month, the next one, the next month, the next one, the next month, the next one, the next month. And then you’re basically going to take four different multivitamins three times a year, and then you’ll get a nice variation of the combination, essentially.
If you look at the breakdown of these vitamins, you’ll find that they really do vary more than you think they would. The most important thing to realize is that every manufacturer sources their ingredients from a different place, but they tend to find a place that they source their ingredients that they turn to repeatedly. And so the soil that those ingredients were grown in, the environment that they were harvested out of, that’s the same and it’s got the same sort of chemical structure, if you will. Mixing up the sources kind of mixes up what’s coming into your body. Not that different from eating a variety of nutrient-dense foods, essentially.
The next thing would be minerals. Just like vitamins, we tend to find that we are deficient in minerals and this is primarily due to the fact that, again, our soil is depleted. Also, a lot of the chemicals that we are encountering every day tend to bind to these minerals and sort of pull them out of our body even if they shouldn’t be doing that. Some minerals are just really critical for cellular functioning and we may need to supplement, but we’ve got to supplement mindfully with all of these vitamins and minerals, anything I suggest here, because there’s a balance in our body that our body manages pretty easily if we’re getting all these vitamins, minerals, nutrients in diet and it’s going through our digestive system and our system is filtering what it needs, what it doesn’t need.
When we’re supplementing in, essentially a stronger dose, it’s an artificial way of getting that into our body that can be a little confusing for our digestive system. So now we’re trying to essentially take over a process that our body’s designed to do naturally and it can backfire on you if you’re not careful. Vitamins, minerals, nutrients, everything requires digestion, requires your stomach, your spleen, your liver, your gallbladder, all your digestive tract, everything. Every system in your body essentially has to deal with anything that you consume. Just don’t fall into the trap of thinking like your body will just get rid of it and there’s no implications if you’re taking way more than you need.
The first one I want to talk about here is zinc and copper. The ideal ratio of zinc to copper in the body is eight to one, but an acceptable range is 1 to 12 to 1. Maintaining this ratio is important for good health. Zinc reduces the amount of copper the body absorbs and high doses of zinc can lead to copper deficiency. This is one of the reasons why you may have a suggestion to take zinc and copper together again to kind of manage that ratio, but just know that you can never manage the ratio because your body is getting some of these nutrients, some of these minerals just in the foods that you’re consuming. We’re trying to bridge the gap as mindfully as possible and just want to make sure that you’re watching for any signs of an imbalance that you’re creating. An imbalanced ratio can be linked to inflammation, poor brain health, disturbed sleep, and cardiovascular issues.
The next mineral is Magnesium and Calcium. As you can see these are combinations. Calcium and magnesium are both essential minerals that work together to support good health. The optimal ratio of calcium to magnesium is around 2 to 1, and if you stray too far from that ratio, it can be unhealthy. For example, if you take a thousand milligrams of calcium, you should also take 500 milligrams of magnesium. But, the interesting thing with calcium and magnesium is you don’t want to take them together. They’re best taken separately because they kind of compete with each other. I tend to recommend that you take vitamins and minerals with food and then we take herbs and homeopathics and that sort of thing away from food.
If you’re taking calcium and magnesium, I would suggest taking your calcium and magnesium with your meal and then you might want to just use the magnesium in the evening. It can really help promote relaxation, can help if you’re prone to getting muscle spasms at night, then taking magnesium in the evening can really help. And so that could be a good way for you to like, you’re getting this calcium and magnesium to keep that in check.
The other minerals essentially are a combination, sodium, potassium, that sort of thing, essentially your electrolytes. If you’re leaning into fasting, intermittent fasting, just like I typically recommend for mature women, 18-6, which means you’ve got a 6-hour eating window, that works really well to eat 2 meals in a 6-hour eating window, and you get plenty of nutrients if you’re eating a high-quality diet. Plenty of nutrients in those two meals and it’s not too challenging. But if you find that you’re wanting to fast a little longer, maybe try one meal a day, maybe even try a 40-hour fast, then you’re going to need to make sure that you don’t let your electrolytes get out of balance. There are supplements like LMNT that can help to keep your electrolytes in balance, honestly, I don’t like using all that extra salty stuff if I don’t have to. But when I do an extended fast, I definitely have to make sure that I keep nourished, replenished.
The next thing we’re going to talk about is essential fatty acids. So EFAs they’re referred to sometimes. And so 1 gram of omega-3 to 4 grams of omega-6 is the ideal ratio. The important thing to know here is that bad fats are higher in omega-6. They can be up to 5 grams, 15 to 1. What we find is eliminating the bad fats is extremely difficult, especially if you eat out a lot. A restaurant just simply is not going to spend the money to use really high-quality oils. So we find that it’s best to supplement with things that are higher in omega-3 to help offset that, and that includes cod liver oil. You might turn to vitamin A and D to help increase your omega-3. From my perspective, I use cod liver oil in capsules. It just makes it a lot easier to consume. Especially if you take these kinds of things with a meal and it goes into your digestive system. You won’t have any sort of reaction that’s an unpleasant feedback on consuming this cod liver oil if you just take it in a capsule and you take it on an empty stomach. A lot of times your body will let you know that was kind of something that needed to be diluted. But if you take it with a meal, you won’t have a problem.
Just remember again, you can get a copy of my Tricky Toxins chapter from my book, “What’s Your Kryptonite?“, for free. Just comment “Tricky Toxins” and we’ll send you a link where you can download the chapter. If commenting is inconvenient, go to DrGala.com/Links and sign up for my Wellness Weekly Newsletter. You can respond to any email you receive from me with “Tricky Toxins” and we’ll send you a link.
We’ve covered three now, multivitamins, magnesium and calcium, and essential fatty acids. Let’s continue with a couple more supplements women must take to improve their health forever. And don’t forget when I’m done, drop a comment and let me know which supplements you’re considering adding and why.
I apologize for the inconsistency in formatting between the first and second parts of the transcript. You’re correct that I added subtitles in the second part but not in the first. To maintain consistency and adhere to the original instructions, I’ll revise the second part without adding subtitles. Here’s the revised version of the second part, formatted similarly to the first part:
B complex vitamins are the fourth essential supplement for women’s health. Many wonder if they need to take a B complex if their multivitamin already contains B vitamins. Generally, you probably get enough B vitamins from a multivitamin, especially if it’s designed specifically for women, who tend to be more prone to B vitamin deficiencies.
However, if you’re not eating much meat, which shouldn’t be an issue if you’re consuming enough protein, you might want to add a B complex on top of your multivitamin. Another recommendation for women is to use bovine liver supplements, as it’s much easier to consume liver in supplement form.
These supplements are considered diet enhancements. While I generally don’t recommend taking supplements long-term, this doesn’t apply to diet enhancements like cod liver oil and liver supplementation. These are necessary because our diet is often deficient in these nutrients.
B vitamins are water-soluble, which means it’s easier for your body to process and eliminate excess amounts. This makes it less concerning to take B vitamins in higher doses.
The fifth essential supplement is antioxidants, with vitamin C being a prime example. Vitamin C is also water-soluble and can be taken to “bowel tolerance”. If you feel a cold coming on, start mega-dosing vitamin C. Take about 1000 milligrams every two or three hours. This helps your body clean up the debris your immune system creates while fighting off the illness.
It’s important to use high-quality vitamin C. I typically recommend Ester-C. For quick assimilation, use it in powder form diluted in water, though this can be unpleasant. Taking it in capsule form with a meal is usually sufficient if your digestion is working well.
Now, let’s address some common questions about these supplements:
A daily multivitamin is necessary because most diets are deficient in essential nutrients. Your body needs these “raw building blocks” to create energy. Nutrient deficiencies accumulate over time, draining your energy as your body struggles to produce what it needs.
Essential fatty acids (EFAs) help offset the ratio of bad fats in your diet. Good fats include high-quality olive oil, avocado oil, and grass-fed butter. When eating out, you’re likely to consume a disproportionate amount of bad fats, so supplementing with omega-3 fatty acids (like cod liver oil) can help balance this ratio.
Regarding B complex vs. multivitamin, this isn’t an either/or situation. A multivitamin is necessary, and you may need additional B vitamin supplementation, especially if you’re not getting enough protein. B vitamins can also help with anxiety and stress management.
When combining supplements, be aware of any medications you’re taking, including hormone replacement therapy and thyroid medication. Supplements can interact with medications, potentially creating imbalances. Be cautious with fat-soluble vitamins (A, D, E, and K), as they’re harder for your body to digest and eliminate. It’s better to get vitamin D from sunlight when possible.
These supplements are best taken with food as a diet enhancement. While a nutrient-dense diet is ideal, it’s often challenging to achieve. Supplementation can help improve the nutrient density of your diet.
If you’re not seeing improvements after several weeks of supplementation, your digestion might be compromised. In this case, consider reducing toxicity and rebooting your digestive system, possibly through fasting.
Remember to subscribe to the channel for regular updates on the Let’s Talk Toxins Show. Until next time, be well!
