The Truth About Omega-3: EPA/DHA, Purity, and Freshness Matter
with Oliver Amdrup-Chamby
Dr. Wendy Myers
Hello, I’m Dr. Wendy Myers. Welcome to the Myers Detox Podcast. On this show, we talk about everything related to heavy metal and chemical toxicity and the health issues caused by these toxins. We also talk about health in general, nutrition, biohacking and my favorite topic, bioenergetics. But today we’re gonna be talking about omega-3s and creatine. We’re gonna do a deep dive on why you need to supplement with Omega-3. Even if you’re eating a lot of fish, you may not be getting enough. We’ll talk about how much you need every day, why plant sources don’t quite cut it when it comes to meeting your needs for omega-3s, why being vegan and vegetarian and taking only vegan or vegetarian sources of Omega-3, and how you’re going to get maybe 10% of what you need in regards to Omega-3.
We’ll talk about different issues around that. We’ll also talk about the problem with fish oils, the oxidation, heavy metal contamination, cleansing processes, capping processes, and all the different things you wanna look for when it comes to buying the right fish oil. We’ll also talk about what kind of concentration you need, say of EPA/DHA and why that matters. We’ll talk about a new study that’s come out about how you can extend your life by five years by having adequate levels of Omega-3, which is really, really shocking. And then we’ll talk about creatine as well and all the different benefits of creatine, why it doesn’t matter that it’s synthetic. I know a lot of people can be concerned about that. We’ll talk about the toxins that can be in creatine and why testing for purity is important and why there’s a lot of products on the market that don’t have the creatine that they claim, especially the gummies. So lots of really good info on the show today.
Our guest today, Oliver Amdrup-Chamby, is the co-founder and CEO of the Danish-based health and food supplement brand Puori. With more than 15 years of experience, Puori is the front runner and third party batch testing based on testing all products and final consumer batches for the most known environmental toxins. In the last few years, Puori has pledged to be part of the transparency promise driven by the Clean Label Project, a project that gives consumers third party full transparency on what’s actually in their products. It’s a long-term goal of purity to be part of making environmental testing a regulated process for foods and food supplements considered in the risk group of toxification.
Oliver holds a bachelor’s in international business communication from SDU in Denmark and an executive program from Stanford. While studying, he started a personal training business called, The First CrossFit Gym in Denmark in 2006. In 2007, he launched a corporate fitness app, which was acquired nine months later. You can check out his website at puori.com/wendy if you wanna get a very special offer from puori.com. Oliver, our thanks so much for coming on the show.
Oliver Amdrup-Chamby
Thanks. It’s good to be here.
Dr. Wendy Myers
You have an amazing line of supplements called Puori supplements, and you rigorously test everything and test it for contaminants and toxins. That’s why I want to have you come on the show to talk about Omega-3 supplements. It’s something that a lot of people take, and there’s a lot of controversy around it. But before we get into that, why don’t you talk about why we need to supplement with Omega-3 supplements?
Oliver Amdrup-Chamby
To begin with, Omega-3 fatty acids are an essential fatty acid, meaning that our bodies need them. We can’t actually generate them ourselves. So we need these different forms of Omega-3 fatty acids to thrive and live healthily. The key part of our diet, when we look at the diet that we are generally consuming in the Western world, is low on Omega-3 fatty acids. It is probably higher in omega-6 fatty acids and low on Omega-3. So those are things you wanna balance out because together they actually balance out certain anti-inflammatory markers in the body. You definitely want both, but most people are getting way too much omega-6 compared to how they’re getting way too little Omega-3. So that’s the first step, I would say.
Dr. Wendy Myers
And then we’re eating so many seed oils that have omega-6 in them. I read it’s supposed to be about a one to one ratio, roughly, and in the US we get one molecule of Omega-3 to 25 molecules of omega-6. So that’s why we deal with so much inflammation and chronic diseases.
Oliver Amdrup-Chamby
Yeah, it’s a super diluted dosage you have there. I think in general, that’s what we are seeing in the Western world. One big part is consuming too little fatty fish and is definitely not something we do as much. And as you said, the other part is like consuming too much omega-6s from different sources. It can be oils, it can be different foods that are highly processed foods and so on.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Can you talk about for some of those listening that are proponents of getting your Omega-3 from fish or some people claim, oh, Omega-3 fats, you don’t want those from supplements ’cause they oxidize and we’ll get into all those points, but what do you say to those people that say, we should just get it from fish where it’s naturally occurring?
Oliver Amdrup-Chamby
I think first off, that is a great way to go if you’re able to actually get like sardines, anchos, and macro salmon into your diet, those really fatty fish and get that regularly because what we are seeing in a lot of the studies is you need probably around 2000 milligrams of Omega-3 fatty acids on daily basis to get to what is measured as more optimal levels of Omega-3 in your blood or in your body, and you can measure that. It should be a good idea, you should do this. We are also very different as individuals. The way we absorb certain things, the way we actually convert the planned omega-3s that we’ll get into later on, versus the marine omega-3s is very different from people and so generally the best way to go around it would be to get like a red blood cell or make a three fatty acid index to see how much Omega-3 do I actually have in my body if I don’t have that data. And knowing all the, let’s say the macro data out there, as you said before, the vast majority, I would say probably 90% is getting too little omega-3s.
So if I don’t have access to that, I would still go probably with like, and I didn’t want to have enough food like seafood on a regular basis. That’s where a supplement can be a really powerful tool to that supplement in your diet, and that’s why we’re seeing a lot of people recommending it and because of all these different health benefits that they’re seeing if they don’t consume fatty fish.
Dr. Wendy Myers
I read that if you eat a little portion of salmon, for instance, you’re getting about two grams or 2000 milligrams when you eat a piece of salmon. Who is doing that? There’s very few people that are consuming a piece of salmon or a can of sardines on a daily basis. If you’re not doing that or you don’t wanna spend the money to do that, high quality seafood is very expensive. I don’t wanna be doing farm salmon that’s not gonna have the same Omega-3 profile, not even close, then you need to supplement.
Oliver Amdrup-Chamby
For sure, but at least it’s an affordable and efficient way of doing it if you’re looking at it that way. So, I agree. I love seafood and I live most of the time in Copenhagen, Denmark where we tend to consume more seafood. I still see a need for adding fish oil to my diet. And if when I’ve done my blood work, I would still see a need to do that. Now I most regularly take Omega-3 fatty acid, and we’ll come back to that in a second. Why that is important too, because I’ve been taking it for many, many years. And when we are looking at the ratios, and this is something I find very interesting, recently we’ve seen more studies focus also on the longevity of eating enough Omega-3 fatty acid in your diet.
One of the reasons I saw I think was pretty, very, very interesting was Dr. Rhonda Patrick, who was like showing the difference of a smoker versus a person that had a low Omega-3 index. The way they measured the Omega-3 index was, most Americans are below 4% of like the Omega-3 index in their body. And if they got to 8%, that difference would give them the same benefits as if you were a smoker versus a non-smoker. So it was pretty crazy to see those stats. On the graphs in the study, they were showing that if you had a smoker that had a high Omega-3, they were almost slightly better than the non-smoker that had a low Omega-3.
When you look at longevity curves and death of all cause mortality, not just like the known we have on heart health and so on, but really like all cause mortality. They were looking at that, bridging that gap of the Omega-3 index up to 8% , it would probably give you around five years on your longevity scale, which is insane when we think about how much impact that is and how little we talk about having optimal Omega-3 levels in our bodies. I think that’s a really interesting side component of, you know, Omega-3 is part of regulating inflammation. It’s part of so many different things. What it’s most known for is obviously brain health, heart health and eye health. Those are the key things that’s been studied the most.
Dr. Wendy Myers
When people have chronic illness, a lot of the research shows that they need 2000, 3000 milligrams a day of omega-3s to help with their inflammatory conditions, which are the underlying cause of so many chronic diseases today, like MS or heart disease or dementia. Whatever’s going on with, you need to reduce that inflammation.
Oliver Amdrup-Chamby
I think again, that’s where it is a convenient way of getting to adequate levels in your body by consuming a high quality Omega-3 supplement. And again, I would say it should be a marine-based one because breaking down what we talked about briefly before, you know there’s probably three main types of omega-3s. There’s definitely more, but when we are looking at it, there’s the short chain Omega-3 fatty acid called ALA, which is the one you get from plants, flax seeds, and walnuts.
Most people don’t get enough of that either. And then there are the marine-based ones called DHA and EPA, which you get from the fatty fish. Generally, I could even get it from other sources as well. But that will be probably the best source to get it from. And when we look at that getting it into your body, it’s actually way easier for the body to use the EPA and DHA compared to the ALA and it varies quite a lot how good people are converting because the ALA, like the short chain Omega-3 fatty acids, the body actually needs to convert. Whereas that’s also why we see more vegetarians or vegans or people who are not eating fish, they see a harder time reaching an optimal Omega-3 fatty acid level in the body where supplementation might make even more sense.
And again, if you’re really not into it, you could go the algae route. So you avoid, let’s say, fish. We’ll touch on that a little later on why it’s still harder and it’s way more expensive to get an adequate amount of Omega-3 out of algae. I think science will evolve a lot there in the future. But right now it’s still a very costly serving of Omega-3 per gram, basically.
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Dr. Wendy Myers
There’s that conundrum of people that are vegan and vegetarian. They need their omega-3s and many of them are doing the E3 live, they’re doing the algae. But as you said, those have a far reduced capacity to convert to DHA. Plus, I’ve read that they have issues with that conversion. They have to have certain co-factors and enzymes, and those are reduced in the diet of people that are vegan and vegetarian. So even if they’re consuming these plant sources, they’re consuming their E3 live, et cetera, they have a dramatically reduced ability to convert that to DHA. Therein lies a big problem. That’s why their brains are smaller. Research shows they have smaller brains. Vegans especially have issues with their nervous system and the fatty coating, the myelin sheath ’cause they’re just not getting the fats that they need. I think that the biggest problem with the diet is just not getting the animal fats and the fat soluble vitamins and things that they need to be able to function optimally.
Oliver Amdrup-Chamby
Even though you can get some of them through algaes where they can actually concentrate it as well as you mentioned before, what we’ve seen is some of these algae still have to tend to really brand it. I think that’s another topic to dive into. If I start with the Omega-3 that is most commonly used is fish oil. It is coming from fish. It comes from a variety of fish, but what you really want is the smallest fatty fish in the food chain that you can get for environmental perspective as well both from a reproduction cycle, but also from environmental toxins as we know can creep into our food chain and especially fish in the ocean, pretty much everywhere, unfortunately.
So that’s a way to mitigate getting the cleanest starting point. The starting point is important, obviously the highest quality of fish and so on. From there on, there’s actually a lot of things that can go wrong. I normally say there’s three key things in a fish oil supplement. I wanna make omega-3 supplements. You wanna be aware of it. One is an active ingredient. So the active ingredient is the EPA DHA. When you look at a bottle of fish oil, it can say 30% concentration of omega-3s, or it can say 80%, or it can say anything in between. But it’s obvious that if you have a 30% concentration of omega-3s, you get way less of the active ingredients compared to a higher concentrated form.
That’s the main reason why you’re consuming this type of product. So active ingredients are key. Some brands will say you just need one capsule. If one capsule is, let’s say 800 milligram, even at 80%, you’re not getting close to the two grams of 2000 milligrams of EPA DHA that you want to maybe aim for. So, that’s the other side of it. The second leg is obviously purity. Where is this fish coming from? What has gone onto the environment that the fish has been living in? Are there any PCBs or dioxins in there? Are there heavy metals, mercury, or what we tend to find in fish, all these different things? We’ve seen pesticides and other residue that we test for through the Clean Label Project and IFA. We’ve seen different things sneak in, so you want to make sure that it’s something when you’re consuming on a daily basis from a food source that can be polluted. You wanna make sure it’s clean.
And then the last component and probably one of the hardest components for the brands and everyone out there, and even for consumers, is the oxidation side of it. How fresh is this oil when you are consuming it at home? How fresh is the product that you have on your hands? That’s also a data point, so you can measure that in to talk. There’s different values underneath that you’re measuring. But, basically if you can find a to talk product that is below 19, that’s Ios International Fish oil benchmark standards to receive their five star and below, you have a fairly fresh product on hand. In our end, we try to aim around six and I would say we find many products in the market that’s closer to 50, where I would say I’m not really sure if they even save for human consumption when you get such a rancid Omega-3 in there.
So the three points are really to look for, and those are data points, but most brands don’t share them and you don’t have access to them. So if you really wanna compare fish oils to fish oils, I would be a very happy man if I had a dollar every time someone said fish oil is fish oil, isn’t it? Isn’t fish all the same? It’s just a capsule. You’re not really tasting it, you’re just swallowing. I’ll tell you, there’s so much that goes into protecting it from oxidation, starting with that high quality of fish, and then obviously the purity side. So those are the three key licks that you want to aim for.
Dr. Wendy Myers
I stopped taking fish oil a really long time ago. I started talking again with your fish oil. ’cause I trust your brand and everything that you’re doing and how meticulous you are with your production and your testing, et cetera, et cetera. But in the past I used to take a lot of fish oil because you hear about it so much and all the benefits of Omega-3. But I did a test one time. I put a needle into the capsule and I smelled it and the smell was so horrifying. It was absolutely ranted. After that, I just never took fish oil again. I thought, I’m just gonna get it from the fish. I’m good here. And there was just something like I didn’t wanna take it. I just couldn’t put it in my mouth, and it was just my body screaming to me to please stop taking it. Can you talk about why the fistula goes rancid and why so many brands have this oxidation issue?
Oliver Amdrup-Chamby
I also wanna just make a connection because we call our fish oil the fish oil of sushi. You would never go into a sushi restaurant and eat something that was extremely smelly when you’re talking about fresh fish like that experience you had with a capsule and so many people are getting that experience or like horrible fish burbs or something like that, where it comes from these really super rancid fish oil. Unfortunately, the industry knows that as well. So some brands also do something to mask that. They’re adding a lot of tough, either coating to the capsule or flavor component into the oil, different ways of masking it. But where does oxidation come from? At first point, it comes from the production process.
If you start with a semi fresh fish, you start with something that’s already on its way to rinse. So if you start high quality fish, obviously that’s a good starting point. Then when you go through, there’s a molecular distillation process involved in fish oil, which obviously have to be done under a super scrutinous environment in order to minimize oxygens coming into the barrels or where they’re touching other elements on their way to a capsule. Then there’s the capsulation process, and I think that’s probably one of the trickiest parts for them, really making sure that when they capsule that little gelatin capsule into it, that they do not get too much oxygen in that process. And then finally, there’s all the transportation from the manufacturer to the stall distributor to whatnot.
And then all the way back to the home that we live in, there’s so many touchpoints of heat, light, and oxygen that can touch the fish. And I think that’s where it goes wrong. But as you can see, there’s so many layers and it can go almost exponentially wrong if you do that down the path. That’s also why we think it’s so important that it’s not like the test results on oxidation. It’s not just coming from brands. When they publish them, they’re coming from third parties, like IFOS or Clean Label Project. But IFOS when it comes to oxidation, because they do an incredible job of testing the finished product. So the actual bottle that is standing on the shelf or that’s ordered on a web shop or on Amazon, that’s the product they test. And when they test that product, you have that real product capsule that you’ve been testing, you get the closest to what the consumer will face.
Obviously there’s things that even if we wanted to, and trust me, we want to sometimes control, let’s say the last delivery, like how did UBS handle it from our warehouse to you? And we put in everything we could in our end but that’s where, especially in summertime, there’s more to be aware of when you are let’s say, living in a very hot or warm climate where a UPS truck could be standing outside for a period of time where they don’t have air conditioner on or something like that. Those are things we can’t mitigate. But if we see anybody who is somewhat of an experience like that, in our end, we will refund you and send something new because most often it’s part of that ecosystem we can’t control and we’re not yet there hand deliver around you, unfortunately, depending on who you ask in our company, I’m sure.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Let’s talk about the toxins in fish oil as well, because mercury is obviously a big concern in fish, but in migratory fish there’s also problems with cadmium and nickel. It’s not just mercury though mercury is the big red flag. Can you talk about that and maybe some of the issues that the fish oil gets damaged in any way by the purification process or there are better purification processes than others?
Oliver Amdrup-Chamby
There’s definitely a better purification we’ve seen with working with different suppliers over time that some people are just better at keeping ration levels down when they’re purifying it. So I think there’s definitely something on that side. When we look at the fish again, coming back to the source, where are you actually catching that fish? What source is it? Many think that okay, a Nordic country like the Nordic, Scandinavia, something like that. It’s the best place to catch fish. But we are actually not actually always recommending people to eat a lot of fish from the local oceans around Scandinavia. What we’ve seen is that the coast of Chile has by far, purest fish and we can see, we can actually fish almost only anchos. We also sometimes use sardines and small fish like that.
But when we’ve used the ancho and we’ve used them from there, that’s where we see the best results. It’s a big school of fish. So you can shield fish. You have a fast reproductive society. So they can also be a friend of the C certified, which is an environmental certification to ensure that they don’t over catch. At the same time, we’ve seen the best stats that we’ve seen from fish oil, from out of the world coming from there.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Oh, fantastic. Let’s talk about capsules versus gelatin caps or liquid fish oil, and there’s a lot of different choices there. Can you talk about those and which are ideal?
Oliver Amdrup-Chamby
First off, there’s even gummies right now with fish oil in, and I would probably stay away from them for now because I have no idea how they would actually be able to again, keeping that environmental staple in a gummy over time for the oxidation side of it. And the amount of Omega-3 you actually squeeze into that, knowing how much you Omega-3 is actually inside a capsule. It’s pretty hot. So let’s say we focused on the liquid form and the capsule form. The capsule form has one big issue, if the capsulation process is done right, and it’s done in the right temperature, the right Christmas of the capsules, and so on, to protect the oil from oxidizing when you’re encapsulating it, then it has the effect that when you open the bottle, you know, the oil inside the capsules won’t get oxygen as the days go by, especially if you keep it in like a nice, climate controlled area, not in direct sunlight, maybe even in a fridge, if you’re living a very hot place and you don’t have air condition.
In a controlled environment, you would see a fairly stable product even after two years of shelf life. If you look at a liquid fish oil and we can actually sometimes make a fresher liquid fish oil because the capsulation process is hot. When I open the bottle, it’s almost impossible not to get oxygen ongoing into that bottle after each serving. So you take it out of the fridge, you use it, you maybe like leave there, go back in and so that opening, closing process, what we’ve seen in different environments of testing oxidation levels, we’ve seen that that rain city just goes pretty through the roof after 21 days, 30 days and so on.
People need to be very quick on using the liquid fish oil to really ensure that by the time they have it in their fridge, that environment again is something we have hard time controlling, but at the time when they get to that, they will still have a good high quality product, even 30 days in or how long it will take them to go through a bottle. That will be my main reason for recommending the capsule because again, I feel like we can better control what you or the end user is getting at the day of consumption versus with the liquid fish oil. That being said, we still use liquid fish and we still see people buying liquid fish oil. We don’t have liquid fish oil in the US, we have in Europe, but in Europe we are still seeing maybe 10% of our customers that are leaning towards that because they’re using it in larger doses also. Maybe they’re adding it to food with their kids. They’re doing different things to really add Omega-3 to the diet.
I do say that you can cut up fairly easily, and that’s even what I’m doing at home, at Capsule. If you don’t want to, you can poke a small hole as you said, because even though it’s fresh, you’ll still get fishy fingers if you get that oil all over the place over time because it will start to oxidize on, no matter what.
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Dr. Wendy Myers
It smells like fish. Fish smells like fish. You can’t avoid that.
Oliver Amdrup-Chamby
No, it’s impossible.
Dr. Wendy Myers
What I really love about your brand and what sets you apart from so many other supplement companies out there is you have a QR code on all of your products that you can scan and you can see all the many different testing that you’ve done, the third party testing with the Clean Label Project. Can you talk about that in regards to your fish oil?
Oliver Amdrup-Chamby
I think our fish oil has been on the market since 2010. We’ve been around for some time and when we launched the brand, we had that consumer experience ourselves that we were standing in a store trying to buy a product. And everybody said to us like, when you buy fish oil, make sure that it’s clean and fresh and that it has higher Omega-3. And we were like, that’s a data point. The Omega-3 was the only thing you could see on the label if you trusted the label. So that’s the second story. We don’t wanna dive into that today, but the other parts like purity and oxidation, there was no way of figuring out, and we were calling the brands, we were like going in all different directions to trying to figure out the nerdy consumer we were at the time really wanted to understand which product to choose, which one was the best because it sure had to be a data point.
I think that laid the foundation when we saw that there were not really any brands doing that, and still many years later, there’s only a few brands doing it the way we are doing, and with the Clean Label promise that we’ll come back to in a second, there’s no people still. We are the only brand unfortunately who does the full QR code, which means every single batch of every single product will not be released to the public before there is either a clean label project that has tested and uploaded lab reports on the actual product or IAS certification on the product.
And again, for the fish, we are doing both actually. That’s the QR code that we put on the label and we believe that’s a data point that not all consumers will test and scan. They won’t use their phone and do that every single time, but it gives that foundation of trust and credibility that you can build on and as if you are like someone recommending to other people and people are talking about it, having that security on what’s actually in the product. It’s a no-brainer that that’s the future of supplementation with potentially natural ingredients or not natural ingredients that have a risk of either contamination, oxidation, or even not meeting label claim.
I’m almost smiling when I say it’s not fun. But, it’s incredible to see how many times we’ve been suggested, like, you don’t have to put 80% concentration in when you can actually do a little less because there’s a label claim gap. But that’s a different story.
Dr. Wendy Myers
And that’s what I love about your products. That’s why I recommend them. That’s why I wanna have you come on the show because you just go the extra mile, the extra expense to do all this testing and have this complete transparency, and you just don’t see that with a lot of companies these days. Let’s talk about creatine. So again, creatine is another one of those categories that is very popular. It’s growing in popularity. There’s a lot of great research out there about creatine. Can you tell us why people should be adding creatine to their supplement regimen and their smoothies, et cetera?
Oliver Amdrup-Chamby
I think for more and more reasons, it seems like every other month now that new studies are coming out in different directions. I think what we’ve seen for a very long time, for like almost generations, we’ve been looking at creatine, especially for muscle health. So we’ve seen its effect in adding that energy source for explosive training regimen, whether it’s like the sprinting or heavy lift thing and so on. We’ve seen a measurable effect in the body of adding creatinine to your diet from a supplement. So that’s where it’s been used the most. But that also makes so much sense when you’re not just looking at sport and bodybuilding communities. It makes so much sense when you look at healthy aging muscle over time.
Being able to work out more, actually do a little extra set, will increase your strength, will increase your body mass by adding that extra little piece of power basically to the puzzle. So we’ve seen a lot of promising health effects coming downstream of just having enough healthy skeletal muscle in your body, which is easier if you’re consuming creatine and working out. The other side is brain health, and I think that’s still fairly new, and it’s fairly limited what you can actually say, but I can say a lot of the different indications that people are seeing is very positive cognitive function in everything from post-trauma, getting hit to a head like a concussion to sleep deprivation.
You’ve seen groups that have been sleep deprived and then have added like a higher dose of creatine. We are talking 20 grams and where the most recommended doses are probably around five, even three in Europe, three to five-ish has been most of the tests on the sports side, but for the brain health that those tests has been slightly higher, any production for the brain staying sharp, being alert, all of those things. We are starting to see more and more often they’re even starting to do smaller studies onto Alzheimer’s and the various cognitive decline diseases that we are seeing as well in the population.
So I think it’s a very promising ingredient for those who’ve tried and played with it themself. Now, I know we go into something that’s totally anecdotal, but when you’ve played with it yourself, you feel the difference in your strength training or your explosive burst, even the recovery. And even if you play it with a higher dose, you might sometimes even feel the difference in your late afternoon cognitive function or post jet lag or something like that when you’re playing with it. I’ve been playing with it quite a lot for myself as well, which was recommended to me by a brain scientist when I had a concussion several years ago. I was starting to play with larger doses. I think there’s a lot of promise on this fairly inexpensive compound.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Well, I’m happy for these athletes that are trying to improve their performance, but I think for a lot of women, especially menopausal women really need that assistance and that boost in their muscle formation in brain functioning ’cause after five years of being in menopause, women can lose 30% of the electrical flow to their brain. And that’s why they see the reduction in cognitive functioning and numbers start going downhill. So creatine can be especially helpful for them. Can you talk about that?
Oliver Amdrup-Chamby
When we talked about that muscle component, we know that when you’re aging, you’re losing muscle over time. So if you have a compound, I think you might actually feel even more benefit when you’re, let’s say an aging population that is starting to work out adding creatine versus let’s say the bodybuilder or the super athlete that’s already dialed in on a lot of different regimens and so on. I would say, I think it’s one of the things that, again, when we recommend it, when we’ve seen it in, perimenopause, menopause, and post menopause. When we’ve seen all these different stages, that’s one of the products we get most positive feedback on afterwards, that they feel their muscles are getting stronger. They feel extra energy levels during the day and so on. Again, whether it’s because of creatine by itself, it’s not like it’s a protein that will create an anabolic effect in the body and give you something.
Creatine will give you that extra, let’s say 10% increase in your workload capacity in strength training, and that 10% increase will push you. So if you’re doing, let’s say, a squat exercise as a middle aged or even older women that you’re doing those, 10% will give you several more reps off weight on the tension, and that extra rep will give you much more like hypertrophy, all the different things that you’re looking for on the muscle side of it. I think it’s the downstream of you being able to actually do more. That has probably the biggest effect on hormonal status. The ability to actually work out.
Dr. Wendy Myers
I also read that if you say you have a bad night of sleep, taking creatine can improve your brain function, like 30%, something absolutely huge. You can regain your cognitive function, even if you’ve had a bad night of sleep. I have those nights and so I definitely take creatine on the days that I haven’t slept very well.
Oliver Amdrup-Chamby
For sure. You’re playing around with it. Are you on a podcast? You need to be more on alert. There’s different time zones. That’s where you can play with it. I think there’s a lot to play around with. And again, it’s fairly inexpensive and if you choose a high quality pretty rusted source, it’s a pretty decent supplement to play around with.
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Dr. Wendy Myers
Can you talk about the fact that it’s synthetic’cause this is obviously concerning to some people out there? Can you talk about the nature of that and why it needs to be synthetic and maybe why you don’t really need to be so concerned about that?
Oliver Amdrup-Chamby
I think when we look at creatine monohydrate, which is the key form of creatine that is used in all the different studies, basically that’s the one I would go with. When you look at creatine, it’s something that your body actually creates in your liver and a few other places in your body, but it’s probably not more than one to two grams a day. You can get creatine from your diet, like you can get it from red meat and shellfish and a lot of different areas, but it’s hard to get like five, 10 grams or whatever people are trying to hit.
So, in that regard, when you then look at creatine in the lab, it’s different from, let’s say, a protein powder where you’re concentrating a natural source so you can actually control the environment even more when you’re doing it synthetically like that. How would you describe that process? The easiest way? Even if you think of a fermentation process, something that you control in an environment where you can actually create the crates and monohydrate, it doesn’t come from a concentrated beef liver or something like that. So when you have that product and you add it into your body, it will react exactly like if you’re eating it from a food source. It wouldn’t be any different because it’s the exact same form that the body is working with.
So you can add it that way. That also means that you can control the environment if you have a good clean environment to begin with, a quality water facility, which I would say is very important. Also, now we are seeing creatine is really taking off, which means there’s a lot of different things coming on the market when you’re seeing a supplement like that taking off in many different directions. So I would definitely look for a product that has like GMP certification, it’s under these GMP certified, which is good manufacturing practice. It is basically pharma standards of how to run the facility that is producing it.
That’s one side of it to be aware of. Again, with the Transparency project where we test every single batch in consumer batch In the end, what are the things I could be worried of finding in a product from the contamination? Could there be any cross contamination in the processing? Could there be heavy metal residue from the machinery or anything else? Could it be residual solvents? Through that process, those are the things we are looking the most for or microbial. Is there anything like that that is touched? So again, high quality facilities and a third party testing in the end, that will give you the trust and credibility to be able to consume that on a daily basis. That’s at least what this study just showed.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Then there’s a problem with there not being the creatine that’s claimed on the bottle. I think you have to be very careful about buying by a price on Amazon. There’s a lot of Chinese manufacturers. What are your thoughts on that?
Oliver Amdrup-Chamby
What are my thoughts on that? I think I saw recently somebody who’s running a creatine test, they were taking several different creatine gummies through a lab to see what are actually in these gummies, like how much creatine is actually in there. I kid you not, but some of the brands that they found had less than a percent of what they were claiming in the gum. So you’re eating gummies, basically. That’s what you’re getting. I think it’s a little like with the real crates and monohydrate powder. I would be more worried about the impurities of a poor manufacturing facility, the cross-contamination that could happen in that process.
I would really pick something that is GMP certified. The brand works on a GMP certification because that normally sets a standard that the facility where this has been produced, they live up to like pharmaceutical cleaning standards, all the standards around the machinery and so on. That’s something they can’t move around with. And then again, if I had the opportunity to work with a brand or buy a brand where there’s a QR code on the back where I can scan and see active ingredients by a third party, I can see if there’s residual solvents. I can see if there’s any traces of heavy metals in there. For something I’m consuming on a daily basis, which it sounds like based on all the studies that are coming out, this is something people are consuming day in and day out. That’s where I would really care about the purity and the quality of the brand that I’m consuming.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Can you talk about dosing? What would be a good beginning loading dose and a maintenance dose?
Oliver Amdrup-Chamby
There’s a lot of talk on dosing as well. Without knowing the person that is starting on creatine I would recommend like the three to five grams dosage or in a serving, probably in water or something like that. Some are fairly simple. You can mix it into pretty much anything. It’s a fairly stable matter, but I would probably take it in water and in the morning if I could, or around my workout. That would probably be it. Another thing we tend to hear is I get GI issues, it distresses my gut a little bit when I consume this. If you’re going up to a larger dose for any reason that you’re like decided on or what your health practitioner you’re working with, I would again suggest maybe going in smaller intervals.
Back in the days of bodybuilding, it was more common to say you load yourself up, you take like 20 or 30 grams a day in the beginning, and then you kind of saturate the cells faster. And it looks like there’s evidence that that might be the case. But if you look after three months, you are getting there by keeping a maintenance stone. So that’s why most of the studies are showing these three to five gram doses. And I think that five grams is the maximum we can recommend as a brand on packaging as well. So that’s what we would do.
Dr. Wendy Myers
That makes more sense to me. I’m not a fan of high dosing supplements, especially in the beginning when you don’t know how you’re gonna react. I’m much more a fan of just going low and slow and that’s hydrating up.
Oliver Amdrup-Chamby
That’s what I would do. And then, since it might give you some gut or GI distress, I think it’s a very low number of people if you’re getting a high quality product. I think some of that distress can come from the flavor component, the weird things that tend to be in a lot of these and powders as well. That’s a different story obviously, but if you’re building and just working with a clean, simple ingredient like Puori, I would just mix it in water and then I would go and I would see how I feel, but I wouldn’t take it around, let’s say, coffee in the morning because then you might have an extra strain to it. You could mix it in if there’s a little bit more of a food feel to it. But I feel like at least that’s something that I feel for myself if I have an empty stomach cup of coffee and a lot of creatine, I’m doing multiple things that might play a little bit with my stomach.
I would definitely just say, check it on a sip of water and I can do now like larger doses without feeling any GI distress at all. Go slow as you said, that’s how you wanna start out in supplements. Take that dose that is recommended on the label and then like go from there. And if you like, start to play with different benefits like post jet lag and so on, you can always split up. You do like half an hour and you do three servings instead of doing it all at once if you want to see how you feel.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Okay, great. I also saw one video where it was saying the best way to take creatine is to dissolve it in warm water or a hotter water so that it dissolves really, really nicely, and then you can put that into your smoothie or just drink it like that, and it just absorbs better. I don’t know if that’s true
Oliver Amdrup-Chamby
I haven’t seen any particularly in that, but that could be something out there. Again, there’s a lot of stuff going on in this field right now. I think the key here is consistency, and to find a routine that you can keep. We talk about meal timing or magnesium timing or all these different things that can make a few percentage improvement for sure, for some. But if you miss one or two days a week, you’re already like 20 percent out the gate instead of if you keep a consistent routine of taking it in the morning, which I would recommend, especially if it also has these cognitive effects for you. You take in the morning with your glass of water as a shot in your smoothie, however you prefer doing that in the morning, consistency would build on that.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Okay, great. Well, Oliver, why don’t you tell us where we can get your products, the name of the Omega-3 and the creatine product that you talked about today, and anything else you wanna share with us?
Oliver Amdrup-Chamby
I think the key for you, and you know that as well, Wendy, we worked together for some time, but Puori means, pure origin. We are trying to source everything from the cleanest, pure origin we can, whether it’s a raw ingredient from fish or a protein powder or all the creatine. And then we provide that lab data, like certainty for consumers, that they can always find lab reports on the actual end product, the finished goods that’s out there. That’s what Puor is all about.
We try to do the common supplements uncommonly well, so you won’t see the newest ingredient coming out of the gate from us. But you’ll see the ingredients that have a lot of evidence behind them, the heavy evidence based and there’s a risk of contamination and our consumers are asking for it. That’s the product that you’ll see from us. That’s where we come from. Puori probably sounds harder to say or spell, but it’s puori.com. So, it comes from Pure Origin. That’s where you’ll find us. I know you have a site as well that you can go through slash Wendy, I think, right?
Dr. Wendy Myers
You can go to puori.com/wendy. You can get 20% off using coupon code Wendy also.
Oliver Amdrup-Chamby
Exactly, and it will say there on your landing page. So, that’s where you can find more. Again, coming back to what do we wanna see in the future of supplementation, we wanna see the products where there’s a high risk of contamination, whether it’s the protein powder category we’ve seen with alarming stats on heavy metals in protein powders, or every new product that’s popping up now and then what we wanna see is that eventually these high risk products, they have a third party tested and eventually it’s not from Clean Label Project.
It’s something we are running as a brand. It’s something that is mandatory by a third party like we’ve seen in baby food with the a 899 outta California and Maryland, where it’s actually now mandatory for baby food brands to have heavy metal testing available on the batch level if you wanna sell in those days. I think if baby food can get there, and we know that let’s say in protein powders, half of America’s best selling protein powders, it has levels of heavy metals above Proposition 65. When we know those facts, we need to do more for the people who are trying to buy a quality protein powder to stay healthy or creatine, they’re not buying it as their guilty pleasure.
It is supposedly something they’re doing for their health and I think that’s where we can help hopefully show the way and show others that it could be done to have this type of transparency and consumers can trust the brands that they do and then create really good relationships over time. That’s the dream. That’s the push that we are doing. That’s why we’ve been around for quite some time and we expect to be around for quite some time. We always joke about, hey, in three years, this will be mandatory and everybody’s gonna do it, but it is a slow machine to get moving and you know that having spent a lot of time in detoxification, just understanding how we get these things out of our bodies and where it come from and so on.
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Dr. Wendy Myers
I think the labeling on supplements is gonna be a very slow moving train. You’re well ahead of your time in that regard. I think it’s very expensive to do that. You test the ingredients before they even get put into the final product. You test the final product, you throw out ingredients if they don’t meet your standards and it’s just not an expense that a lot of companies are gonna go to. It just isn’t.
Oliver Amdrup-Chamby
Still, I think at least we shouldn’t do it all over the place because that’s gonna be too much and we shouldn’t be greenwashing this either, but we should take those high risks where we know like with protein powder, there’s some things we need to just do. I believe we’ll get there. So, we’ll keep pushing and we can see there’s more people and brands following in that direction. It’s exciting to see.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Well, Oliver, thanks so much for coming on the Myers Detox podcast. It’s always a pleasure talking to you and everyone thanks for tuning in to the Myers Detox Podcast. I’m Dr. Wendy Myers, and I love bringing experts from around the world to help you make those discernments, make those distinctions, help you to uplevel your health, answer all your questions about health, just getting there, one step at a time. Rome wasn’t built in a day. There’s a lot to learn on all these various topics. I’m here to help you make those upgrades. Thanks for tuning in.
Disclaimer
The Myers Detox Podcast is created and hosted by Wendy Myers. This podcast is for information purposes only. Statements and views expressed on this podcast are not medical advice. This podcast, including Wendy Myers and the producers, disclaims responsibility for any possible adverse effects from the use of information contained herein. The opinions of guests are their own, and this podcast does not endorse or accept responsibility for statements made by guests. This podcast does not make any representations or warranties about guest qualifications or credibility. Individuals on this podcast may have a direct or indirect financial interest in products or services referred to herein. If you think you have a medical problem, consult a licensed physician.
