Supplements For Brain Nutrition. Dan Murray-Serter And Ali Abdaal

Heights Brain Health Supplement. Dan Murray-Serter Discusses With Ali Abdaal:

Every once in awhile working on a subject, you come across interesting parallels or collisions.

One of those I found pretty interesting was on Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal.

Strangely-enough, it plugs-in very nicely with the recent post on several different kinds of berries and their effect on brain health.

The interviewee, serial entrepreneur Dan Murray-Serter was having problems with insomnia and anxiety.

So in a strange turn of events, and after trying everything else, he went to a dietitian for help.

That person immediately prescribed him, of all things, supplements to cure his problem…

The Short Answer:

You often run into interesting coincidences when writing on a subject.
Just after the HT post on blueberries, I found a brain-health post on Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal.
Ali sits down & talks with serial-entrepreneur, Dan Murray-Serter.
Dan was afflicted with insomnia & anxiety out of nowhere.
Lucky for us and his customers, he went to a dietitian who prescribed high-quality supplements.
He tried them and they worked, so he made a product called Heights out of the most useful ones he could find.
If you don’t pay-up for quality, you might get less than you thought and conclude that supplements dont’ work.
Loopholes in laws make it easy for supplement companies to scam you out of your money and not give you much active-ingredients.
As visitors of Labdoor.com or Consumerlab.com might know, many brands do not have the study-supported amount of compounds in the supplements they sell.
The Expected Efficacy rating on Labdoor is a pretty good gauge of this.
What’s interesting is Dan says this “Three-Card Monty” happens all throughout the supplement world.
Fish Oil is just one example.
Heights also tries to do away with fillers, unnecessary bulk, etc.
And their DHA comes from algae, which is the actual source. Fish do not make their own Omega 3 oils and are not a necessary component.
All the ingredients are study-supported, present in the right quantities, and high-quality.
The main ingredients are DHA and Blueberry Extract.
Interestingly, according to Dan’s math, DHA makes up about 54% of your brain’s mass.
Fixing a deficiency in that could be a huge win.
That, along with the subscription nature of Heights gives people the best shot at experiencing actual results.
This avoids a lot of try & abandon loops people get caught in when buying cheap supplements.
So far, it looks like it’s working because the customer-retention and ratings numbers for Heights look very good.
According to their chief science officer the anthocyanins in blueberries actually help clean your brain.
Which is great, because if you aren’t on a good diet like Dan recommends, at least the supplement can help fill in the gaps.

Read on to find out the details…

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The Entrepreneur’s Solution – I Can Turn Your Problem Into A Company!:

So what Dan goes to talk about with Ali is very interesting.

His “Heights” product is targeted at optimizing brain-nutrition through a study-supported formulation.

According to him, brain-optimization or support through nutrition & supplementation is still pretty overlooked.

The entrepreneurial genesis of the product came from his own problems with insomnia and increased anxiety that came out of nowhere.

And because he’d tried everything from therapy to apps, he did take a friend’s advice as almost a last-resort.

What’s also fortunate for Heights users, is that despite his wariness over the quality and effectiveness of supplements,

He went ahead and took the dietitian’s advice on them.

You Have To Pay-Up For Supplement Quality. Or Else!:

In the process, he found out something many of us with even a toe in those waters have found out.

To a certain extent, you really -do- have to pay-up for quality.

No, not the boutique BS artists, but something at least as spendy as the Jarrow or Solgar brands.

For what it’s worth, I’ve also noticed a fairly -astounding- difference between a bargain brand (that sounds like the maker of TV-Dinners) versus another brand called Doctor’s Best.

The other thing Dan found out was the dietitian was right, as he started recovering in 2 days, and within 1 week was almost back to normal.

If You Don’t Pay-Up, You Can Get Stuck In The Loop Of Bulls**t Supplements:

Because although, you could be gambling at the biochemistry casino in one scenario,

In other ways as Dan points out, you could be getting scammed out of your money for very little to no results, because of the way at least some of the industry (potentially even large parts) has structured itself.

He goes on to outline how this creates a vicious-cycle where people try them based on lowest-price, don’t get any benefits, and then conclude that supplements are all worthless.

Part of the problem he points out, is that because of loopholes in the way things can be claimed on a product label,

And the difference between what the scientific research says actually works,

The Supplement Industry’s Game Of “Three-Card Monty”:

Supplement companies can get away with a type of sleight-of-hand equivalent to a fancy-powder “Three-Card Monty”.

They can -legally- name their supplement X, because of some bare-minimum amount Y.

They just forget to tell you the part where Y is only 10% of the science-supported quantity.

Now, there is no word in the interview on whether this happens in the U.S. with the mandatory-labeling on everything,

Or if this is something practiced more in the rest of the world.

But since DMS is based out of the UK, you’d think they’d have some fairly-precise E.U.-style regulations on how to label a product.

So You’re Saying There’s A Chance -In A Million. Confirmed By Labdoor And ConsumerLab:

The interesting thing this touches on in a different way is our old friends at Labdoor.com and Consumerlab.com.

Because they both have rankings of Potency, Purity, and Expected Efficacy of all kinds of supplement products.

-Including Fish Oil.

The reporting summary by Labdoor may not imply the level of marketing-horrors that Dan talks about.

But they do state that the variance from stated-contents of fish oils to their lab tests were substantial.

Those numbers for potency ran as low as 25.3% less on the skinflint end of the scale to somehow miraculously 32.7% more at the underreporting end where customers actually got more than they paid for.

The top 3-4 brands on Labdoor’s list include UniCardio, Viva, and OmegaVia.

Astoundingly, companies that allegedly put out NSF-tested supplements like NatureMade rank near the bottom.

This was true especially for the “Expected Efficacy” score, however that is computed outside the simple numbers for actual vs. claimed EPA & DHA.

The Outsider’s Solution To Industry BS. Build It Better And Wrench Every Day:

Heights is trying to address this as well as other issues, like unnecessary use of fillers, charging the right amount for a product that actually works, etc.

And strangely-enough, through their research they might even be making healthier and more considerate products.

As Dan points-out that the cold-water fatty-fish don’t actually make their own Omega 3 oils.

-It’s the algae they or the fish lower on the food chain eat.

So if Heights can just use oil straight from the algae, it’s going to be much cleaner, with probably a lower-risk of PCBs and mercury, as well as putting a smaller load on the environment.

Any fans of the fish vs. fish oil during pregnancy post can attest, that little of the high-food-chain carnivorous fish is very safe.

So maybe Dan is really onto something and it is much wiser to get your Omega 3s from Algae or Organic plant sources instead, as that article also discussed.

Dan Made Heights With DHA From The Source & Study-Supported Ingredients. A Man After Our Own Hearts!:

To counter the BS put out by marketing companies disguised as supplement companies, Dan also points out the scientifically-supported minimum DHA amount that actually helps your brain.

He’s a man after our own hearts, as that type of thing is what HealthTrekker is all about.

And so the first part of the talk about their brain-health supplement ends at around the 16 minute mark.

The rest of the talk in the middle, and just at the end is more about entrepreneurship and Dan’s life so far.

For those who want to pick up on just the brain-health part, it starts back up around the 1:36 mark.

Here:

The Other Guys. Blueberry Brain-Cleaners & Energy Vitamins:

In the rest of the talk, he goes on to share some of the other main ingredients in Heights.

This should make our blueberry-post fans very happy.

And what I didn’t realize about their pills is that you could freeze-dry & powder blueberries down to such a state that you really could pack the equivalent of 25 into one Heights capsule.

As for the other main component, which is DHA, Dan says that most users start experiencing an increase in energy and focus in about 3 months.

The B-vitamin complex may also be responsible for some of that effect, too.

But interestingly, vegans might see an even quicker improvement that’s closer to the 2-week mark.

DHA-Deficient And Burnin’ Down The House!:

Because they are more likely to be deficient in DHA.

And amazingly-enough, Dan points out that compound is a huge part of the building-blocks of our brains,

On the order of about 54% of the total mass!

So fixing that nutritional-deficiency might turn out to be a huge plus.

The other nice features of the product are that they only do subscriptions.

So that if you sign up, you are much more likely to experience the actual improvemenst by avoiding both the BS Supplement Loop and the other fault of dropping-out too soon.

As a result, his numbers look good. Because Dan says it’s the #1 reviewed supplement on TrustPilot, and they have a very high customer retention rate,

Supplements With High Ratings Are Great, But Remember Your Diet:

-Which is a real achievement, because in the supplement world he says, the drop-off rate can be very high and very fast.

So they must be doing something right.

I did like the fact that he still encourages people to get the best possible diet they can, and cites the Mediterranean and MIND diets as the ones with the best stats behind them.

He even mentions that despite taking his own supplements, he still does eat several blueberries each day while trying to get the best diet he can.

The other great thing Dan points out, along with a few studies about student test-scores etc, is that according to the chief scientific officer of his company,

The anthocyanins in blueberries (which hold the championship title as highest for any food) serve to stimulate the brain’s cleaning-system or “glymphatic” system.

As far as I know, he’s the first person I’ve heard to have stated that directly in anything I’ve heard or read; although it makes perfect sense.

Clean & Build Your Brain When Your Diet Is Lacking In Dr. Neal’s Superfoods:

And if that’s true, it just lends even more credence to our old pal Dr. Neal Barnard’s list of superfoods for your brain.

Because those U. Cincinnati experiments led to a reverse in mild cognitive impairment (early-stage Dementia) at a dosage of 2 pints of blueberry juice per day.

So Heights is in some pretty good company!

Since Dan also mentions that few people get everything they need from their diet, a quality supplement that helps your brain and does what it says could be a really important thing to have around.

Anyway, there you go. Great talk with 2 great entrepreneurs. And one of them making a surprisingly-legit seeming product!

[note: Just for the sake of formality. No. HealthTrekker is not getting any type of consideration, discount, affiliate income etc. from any of the parties mentioned here. They just all sounded really cool.]