I Tried the World’s Most Researched Mental Health Supplement – Here’s How It Went
Intro
Annika: Hey there, and welcome to the Nutritional Mental Health Podcast. The podcast where we talk about the intersection of nutrition and psychological sciences. My name’s Annika, and I’m an ADHD nutrition research expert. To learn more about this research, join my Patreon, where you get a free ebook every single month, as well as group coaching and early access to this content. For other options, join my newsletter, subscribe to my YouTube channel, or join the Discord server where we actually get to communicate with each other. And I think that’s pretty fun. All of that is in the description below. Now I know this is what you are more excited about, so let’s get into the episode.
What Are DEN?
Let’s just start here. What even is the daily essential nutrients that we’re talking about with the research? What is it? How is it formulated? Why was it formulated that way? How do you make it more bioavailable? All of those questions.
Origin Story
Taron: All of those things. So our origin story, if we wanna go back to that beginning point — our story began with the suicide of a mother who had bipolar disorder. That was Debbie Steffen is her name. It turns out that her father had bipolar and had committed suicide prior to that, earlier than that. So this takes us back to the mid-’90s. Tony Steffen and Debbie Steffen had kids, and two of those kids had really severe bipolar disorder as well. Tony was really worried that they were gonna follow that same path.
He happened to meet up with David Hardy — I guess you could call it a coincidence, I don’t really believe in coincidences that way, but they met together at that time. David was in animal feed formulation, and they met together on a volunteer basis doing other things. Tony started talking about this, and David was like, “Bipolar disorder — I’m not really familiar with that, but in the animal kingdom, in the animal world, I formulate for cattle and for hogs and things like that.” And he said, “In the animal world, the pigs have this disorder called porcine vice, or ear and tail biting syndrome. And one of the things we do to settle that behavior down is increase the mineral content of their food, and that helps settle them down. So I wonder if that’s an equivalent thing.” Together they developed a human version of what is basically vitamins and minerals — all animal life needs them. They gave that to Tony’s two kids, and they started to respond. They started to get more stable — their bipolar symptoms lessened.
And so that’s kind of where the story begins. Once they realized that, they thought, “Hey, will this happen with anybody else?” They started giving this formula to other people, and sure enough, it was helping more people. Originally they went to the University of Lethbridge in Southern Alberta and said, “Here’s what we’re starting to find. Can you help us figure out a way to document this?” A couple of researchers there helped them do that, and then they came back with some data. The researcher there said, “This really isn’t my area, but I know a person at the University of Calgary who would be interested in this.” And that was Bonnie Kaplan.
They went to visit her, and she had studied vitamins a little bit on her own, but as single variables — just single nutrients — and the data really wasn’t very robust. But she said these guys had collected data, which made it intriguing. So she got a grant to do a pilot study, an initial study. That turned into the first publication in 2001 on this formula, in 11 individuals with bipolar disorder. And that’s where the ball began to roll, at least on the academic side.
Early Successes
Annika: Yeah, I think it’s really interesting because it was started mainly for bipolar, and it sounds like that is the condition that it seems to help the most right now.
Mood & ADHD Research
Taron: Yeah, mood dysregulation, mood issues are where that product seems to work really well. In the more recent studies that have been done in ADHD, the research has included a mood dysregulation component because that’s also a little more — it’s more life experience, more what people will have when they come to the doctor. It’s not just a pure, clean diagnosis of ADHD — there are other comorbidities that go along with that. So that’s where we see that mood improvement. The other thing we see very consistently is improvements on the Global Assessment of Function, or the Clinical Global Impression scales — that overall function. So sometimes we may not see the pure psychiatric diagnosis symptoms improve really well, but it’s that global functioning, plus the mood dysregulation, where we see that product work really well.
Real-Life Transformation
Annika: Yeah, and I think that is honestly almost more important, just for me. So some background — I tried the formula for honestly just 30 days, and within those 30 days, my emotional regulation was completely changed. I didn’t realize how much anxiety I was experiencing. I didn’t realize how much I was taking in from the world. And at the end of that, I was able to just exist. My brain wasn’t racing all the time. I wasn’t experiencing those increases in heart rate or just that general unsettled feeling. I could task-switch easier because I wasn’t overthinking different things. It was incredible for me. And I think that’s where it is — the quality of life. My ADHD symptoms technically didn’t improve, but I was able to focus better, be more present, able to just experience life better. My quality of life significantly improved.
Taron: Well, that’s awesome. And I think that speaks to how a lot of those underlying issues seem to drive or worsen some of those other symptoms. When those settle down, then it’s a little easier.
Annika: I think that’s exactly it. It was really interesting — this is just a side note — what I noticed for myself going on it, it actually made me feel a little bit more… so I’m not diagnosed with autism yet, or ADHD — actually I’m in the middle of a psychiatric eval — but a lot more of the autistic qualities that have been noticed actually started being more present after going on it, like just more of my need for routine and stability. I just thought that was really interesting.
Autism & Anxiety
Taron: But there is some research on autism, yes. We have two published studies on the earlier version of the formula in autistic spectrum. In addition, in the Maddy study, which was the second double-blind kids study, 30% of those kids actually would’ve qualified for a diagnosis of autism, because they had symptoms on the spectrum. So that’s another symptom grouping where we see some benefit.
In the published study on autistic spectrum, what they found is that half of the parents wanted their kids to have traditional treatment, and the other half didn’t. So this particular researcher did a naturalistic comparison study to see — and what they found was that symptom improvement generally was very similar between traditional treatments, medication treatments, and the nutrients. But the differences were that there were far fewer side effects to get those gains in the nutrient group, and also less self-injurious behavior in the nutrient group compared to the medication group.
Annika: That’s huge. That was actually one thing, specifically self-injurious behavior — I do get those urges sometimes, just to like hit my head or really squeeze hard on something. And I did notice that those needs decreased significantly. It’s probably connected to that emotional regulation aspect of the brain just being like, “Oh, I have enough nutrients to create the things I need.”
Popper’s 4 Effects
Taron: Dr. Charles Popper, when giving a high-level view of what the nutrients do in this combination, said they have four basic effects. Typically people report improved cognition — clearer thinking, less brain fog — an improved sense of wellbeing, which kind of goes to that global assessment of function; improved mood, which is the most robust effect we see generally; and then reduced anxiety and stress. So people tend to be more resilient, they can handle stress better, that kind of thing.
Annika: Yeah, exactly. What I experienced — now that you just said “able to handle stress better,” that’s the word I was looking for — just especially all the stresses that people maybe don’t think are stresses, but to our brains, they are stresses.
Stress & Nutrients
That begs the question now: how do vitamins and minerals improve your stress response? That’s a big question. Do you have any thoughts on that?
Taron: Well, as far as an exact mechanism goes, we don’t know exactly why and how it works. But what we think is happening is that the nutrients are upregulating function. If we talk about enzyme kinetics as a general principle — how enzymes function and how efficient they are — aside from temperature and pH, there are only three things that affect how well an enzyme will function.
The first is the number of enzymes — the reaction rate is directly proportional to the number of enzymes, and in our bodies that’s not under our conscious control. The second: the reaction rate is directly proportional to the amount of substrate, or raw material, being fed into the process — if you saturate the enzymes with raw material, you’ll reach peak efficiency, but in our case that’s calories. The third is cofactor — the reaction rate is directly proportional to the amount of cofactor available to the enzymes. At least half of human enzymes require at least one cofactor, and cofactors are generally vitamins and minerals. So if you saturate the enzymes with cofactor, you can get peak or maximum efficiency that way.
That’s harder to do with diet alone, because the relative rate of cofactor to calories is low and stays relatively constant. Supplementing — especially with that broad-spectrum, full balance of nutrients — is perhaps the easiest way to increase that concentration of cofactor and improve the efficiency of those enzyme pathways. That’s the primary mechanism we think these nutrients are benefiting from. As a hobby, I go into the metabolic pathways and try to identify where those nutrients sit, to kind of illustrate that visually. We’ve got a couple of those maps in our clinical reference and in the online training we do for health practitioners.
Enzyme & Cofactor Role
Annika: I’m trying to think of a good metaphor here — using the gym as an example. You need energy to build muscle, you need to eat food, but that doesn’t mean you’re gonna gain muscle — or it could, but it also means you need to move your body. Then you could add on getting weights at home, just a few five-pound weights, and that could be more of that other aspect. But then if you wanna optimize it, you need a much larger range of different nutrients — which would be like all the different types of equipment in a gym — to really maximize your muscle growth. That’s really similar to how the multi-nutrients work in your body. Even though you can eat, which is more like getting some weights for home — if you’re eating an amazing diet, you’re gonna get some great muscle growth. But if you go to the gym, which would be like getting these multi-nutrients at very high dose, then you’re actually maximizing your ability.
I really love the pathway part, I feel like we could nerd into that — I don’t think we’re gonna do that right now — but just as an example, a lot of my listeners have ADHD, with dopamine. You absolutely have to have vitamin B6 or else you cannot create dopamine.
Dopamine Pathways
Taron: Yeah, and if we look at some of those pathway maps — I use the KEGG metabolic database, and you can look at all these different pathways. It’s fascinating. You can isolate right down to a single pathway — tyrosine to dopamine — and see the little enzyme steps. Then I use another database to find which cofactors are part of that, and you can see there are some cofactors connected there that you need. But then when you take a half step back, tyrosine is actually the center point for a larger network of enzyme reactions and pathways, and almost every single branch needs vitamins and minerals. Then you take a step back further and get to the cell, and all of the other interconnected pathways also need vitamins and minerals. It’s beautiful to start seeing that layering effect when you look at it.
Annika: Yeah — I don’t remember if we talked about this before, but just the energy aspect of our cells — for a lot of people with mental health conditions, whether that’s bipolar, ADHD, or depression, we tend to use ATP differently, our mitochondria aren’t functioning optimally.
Mitochondrial Dysfunction
Taron: That’s right. The research strongly suggests that there’s mitochondrial dysfunction in a lot of diagnoses — not just mental health diagnoses, but a lot of other diagnoses too, like diabetes and heart disease — the mitochondria are not functioning optimally.
When I looked at that, I wasn’t expecting to see the nutrient density in that reaction compared to the other pathways. With something like tryptophan or tyrosine, that’s at the center and everything branches out. But with energy production, you end with a single chemical compound — so it’s everything coming into a center point, as opposed to starting at a center and moving out.
If we start with glycolysis and the breaking down of glucose to pyruvate, there are quite a few nutrients involved in that process. Then pyruvate is shunted into the mitochondria, where it goes through the Krebs cycle, and there are quite a few nutrients involved there too. Then in the electron transport chain, there are quite a few nutrients involved in that process as well — way more than I imagined. The amazing thing for me is that when I got done identifying those and stepped back and looked at it, I realized that’s almost the entire label line item of the product. It blew my mind when I originally saw that — this is all to produce ATP. I think to date that’s the most nutrient-intense process I’ve mapped, just to produce one molecule. And then realizing that mitochondrial dysfunction plays a big role in a lot of other issues — I think that might be the most significant impact the nutrients are having in the human body: stabilizing the mitochondrial function.
Happy Spiral Effect
Annika: Yeah, and that just makes complete sense, because then you’re able to have the energy — which is where the brain fog disappears almost — and you’re actually able to move, and then you can make the food you’ve been not having the energy to make, and then you can go exercise ’cause you finally have the energy to do that. And yeah, then it’s like that wonderful — instead of the sad spiral, it’s the happy spiral.
You talked a little bit about bipolar — I was wondering if you had any other stories of people who’ve taken this and experienced benefit.
Bipolar Case Study
Taron: Yeah. For me personally, the most profound experience is one of our coworkers — she’s retired now, but her name is Cherry. She was diagnosed bipolar in her early teens, and for 20 years went through the system — revolving door, you name it. She tried practically every known prescription medication to find some release, some stabilization.
Go back to the late nineties, when Tony and David were sharing this story and asking people to try the product. Her friend heard about it and said, “Cherry, I dunno, is this worth trying? Do you want to try this?” She started taking it and noticed a difference — kind of like what you explained with your experience. She could tell something was changing, something was feeling better, she was more stable.
She describes an experience — being bipolar, in those manic cycles, she would often go spend the paycheck, spend their money. After a few weeks of taking the product — maybe a month or two — she went out and went grocery shopping and came back home, and her husband came home from work and said, “Oh, what’d you do today?” “Oh, I went grocery shopping.” And he was like, “Oh no, you went out shopping?” And no — she just bought the groceries, didn’t have any other impulses to buy or spend. And it was like, “Wow, this is different — something is beginning to change, things are beginning to function better.”
She had never been able to hold down a job before. When I started working with Tony and David — that was back in April 2001 — she had started working just about six to eight months before me, maybe a year before me, helping coordinate and help other people try the product. That was when I first met her. I never would’ve known that she was bipolar when I met her. But over time, she shared her story, and that was my first exposure to a significant mental health diagnosis and someone who had benefited from the product.
Annika: That’s incredible, ’cause yeah, the impulsivity aspect of mania is so hard. I’ve worked with people who have BPD, bipolar one, two — almost every single serious and persistent mental health illness — and it’s incredibly difficult. So just hearing that is… wow. You talked about bipolar — have you heard any stories from other people, say with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder? I mean, there’s so many other ones too, but…
Schizophrenia Case
Taron: Yeah, this is another one within our circle here. One of David’s sons, Landon, began to develop some unusual symptoms in his late-mid to late teens. It turns out he was having episodes of breaks with reality, and he was diagnosed with either schizoaffective disorder or schizophrenia at that stage. At that point, David had never really considered — it was like, “only use the product if you need it,” kind of thing. So they gave the product to Landon, and that really stabilized him, really helped him.
But then he moved out on his own, and as we tend to do, thought, “I’m good, I don’t need this, I’m doing all right.” He didn’t take the product regularly or consistently, and slowly those symptoms crept back in, to the point where he didn’t even recognize that he needed it anymore. He had a full-blown paranoid schizophrenic episode, and they brought him back home — for him it was really severe. They couldn’t manage him at home, they had to take him to the hospital. He was hospitalized for about three months, if I remember correctly. They had to medicate him. After about three months they were finally able to bring him home.
But that wasn’t the end of the story — he still had paranoid delusions, which made it really hard. They tried to get him to take the supplement, but he thought it was toxic — “were you trying to poison me?” — those delusions just kept being part of his experience. Over time, they were able to get him to take it regularly, and then finally it began to stabilize him again. He’s been taking it ever since, and now he runs the order department at Hardy Nutritionals. Again, you’d never know that he had that diagnosis. That was where David said, “You know what, maybe what we should do, instead of just taking it if we need it, is start taking this preventatively” — for his family, things like that.
So Landon was probably the most significant symptom case we had. But he had another daughter who also developed some of these types of behaviors, though there was a different cause for her — it turns out she had an H. pylori infection that produced some severe psychiatric symptoms. They were able to manage her using some probiotics and natural antifungal products, keeping that at bay for a long period, plus the nutrients. So sometimes it’s just metabolic; sometimes there are other factors that play a role.
Annika: That’s just amazing. I also wanna get a little bit into the newest research on pregnancy. As a person who could have a child at any point, who knows — I thought this research was incredible. So let’s hear it.
Prenatal Trial Results
Taron: Yeah, this is what the research calls the NUTRIUM trial. There are actually five publications now that have come out of that clinical trial. The primary one we call the Nutri-Mom study. In this study, researchers recruited 88 women who were pregnant and who also scored 13 or higher on the Edinburgh antenatal depression scale — so they’re coming into pregnancy with significant depressive symptoms. They randomized that into two groups — one taking the micronutrients, and the other taking an active placebo, which had riboflavin and iodine in it, because the study was done in New Zealand, where they recommend those two nutrients during pregnancy, so they had to include those in the placebo.
I believe it was around a 10-week trial — I can’t remember the exact details off the top of my head. Along with the recruiting, there were a lot of moms on antidepressants — this was a medication-free-group study, but a lot of moms came to the trial on antidepressants, so Julia Rutledge followed them separately; they weren’t part of the initial publication but were followed in an ancillary publication.
What they found: first, with the moms, depression scores improved. They also found that if moms had previously trialed psychiatric medications, they did better — they responded better to the nutrients. So individuals who are poor responders to medications in the past might do better with the nutrients generally. The other thing they found is that a lot of the moms had personality difficulties, and those individuals also seemed to respond better to the nutrients. So at the mother’s level, those were some of the things they found.
It turns out there are risk factors to the infant if the mom has depression — things like preterm births, low birth weight, and a future risk of psychiatric symptoms, some of which can initially be measured in the child’s temperament. They did a 28-day evaluation and a one-year evaluation in those infants, and compared that group to babies born to moms who were taking antidepressants during pregnancy. What they found was that the babies whose moms were on the daily essential nutrients did far better — they clearly outperformed on the Brazelton Neonatal Scales, both the placebo group babies and the babies born to moms taking antidepressants.
Infant Development
Annika: That finding is just so incredible to me — as a person who has a history of needing antidepressants, who likely will probably have an increased risk of postpartum or antenatal depression, with all the hormone fun to handle — but just that, not only are you feeling better yourself, but you’re not passing a lot of this stress to your kid through those epigenetic factors — through all of it, I don’t know how it all works developmentally, but…
Taron: Maybe the nutrients mitigate those factors.
Annika: Yeah, it’s just really simple — I think that’s why I love it. As complex as the body is, this is such a simple principle, and it’s nutritional based. Bonnie Kaplan — one of the things she said that’s kind of stuck with me is that nutrition is not the only factor that plays a role in mental health, but it’s probably the most overlooked factor.
Taron: Definitely.
Annika: It’s so simple that we overlook it. It’s easy to overlook, right? And especially since we honestly haven’t had a lot of research on this, because both nutrition and psychology are super new, like within the last 100 to 200 years. So there’s just that aspect to it already. But then there’s a lot of mistrust, I think, in how nutrition can impact mental health.
Research & RDA Limits
Taron: Well, yeah — we’ve studied nutrients for 80-plus years, usually just single variables. So the impression is, “Well, nutrition really doesn’t work — you need it to live, but it doesn’t really do anything else.” Dr. Popper, along with Bonnie Kaplan and Julia Rutledge, wrote a chapter in an American Psychiatric Association textbook called Complementary and Integrative Treatments in Psychiatric Practice, published in 2017.
Annika: I think I’ve actually read that.
Taron: Yeah — and they go through the single-variable, single-nutrient evidence for mental health, and the only thing that stands out significantly as a single variable is folate as an adjunct to medication treatment. So if you’re taking psychiatric medications, a little folate can get you a better response to your psych meds. But when it comes to the broad-spectrum approach, at the time they published that, there was just one — the first double-blind study in kids was just being published when that came out, so there weren’t double-blind studies to evaluate yet. But there were other double-blinds done in behavior in kids, adolescents, and young adults — either in schools or in incarcerated populations — where they gave just RDA-level nutrients and saw statistically significant improvements in some antisocial behaviors. So they cited that evidence as proof of concept for the broad-spectrum approach. The difference between those studies is each used a completely different product, but that broad-spectrum concept is what works. Ours is a higher dose — they gave RDA levels for most of those studies; we’re giving a higher dose. So for mental health, that higher dose may be more relevant, though I don’t know for sure if those other studies were actually looking at mental health diagnoses rather than just antisocial behavior. There’s some difference there we could spend a lifetime studying yet.
Annika: Oh, we really could. I think that is actually part of why this works with ADHD — the differences in metabolism of almost every single nutrient we consume. Therefore it makes sense that we actually need more than the general population. And that’s where it works.
Taron: That’s where it works. And interesting — if we look at the definition of the RDA, going back to the Dietary Reference Intakes, the RDA is your daily target for intake. If we look at the definitions that go along with that: it’s expected to be adequate for 97 to 98% of apparently healthy individuals. So that leaves two to three percent of the population, who are apparently healthy, for whom even the RDA is not adequate. That already suggests a higher need for two to three percent of the population. Then it says it’s not expected to replete individuals previously undernourished — so if you’ve had a poor intake for a period of time, just consuming the RDA level isn’t enough; you need a higher level to top up the body. And the third part is that it’s not adequate for individuals with disease states marked by higher requirements.
So the deep read is important to understand that the RDA level might work for a high percentage of people, but how many of us have higher needs, or have had poor diet and need higher amounts, or have bodies with higher requirements? Dr. Bruce Ames published a series of papers on what he called binding affinity, the KM factor — where a single point mutation or single polymorphism changes the affinity of that enzyme for its cofactor. If you have a higher concentration of cofactor, it overcomes that little deficit and the enzyme works properly. How many of us have those?
Annika: Yeah, which is exactly — I’m sure a lot of people listening are gonna be like, “What about the MTHFR mutation?”
Taron: It’s not a mutation, it’s a polymorphism.
Annika: That’s, I guess, just semantics. But yeah, that is exactly why we see people with those differences needing more folate or folic acid.
Taron: Exactly.
Annika: You cannot process folic acid — and it’s incorrect, that’s just a lot of online messaging for people to sell their stuff. Some people would benefit from a methylated folate; it depends specifically on your specific polymorphisms. Very complicated stuff.
Taron: Right, right. And for some people, methylated folate can actually make their symptoms worse if they have that polymorphism.
Annika: Yeah, but that’s where it is — you just need more. It’s fascinating.
Taron: If you look at the product Deplin, which is methylfolate, it’s 15 milligrams — that’s a hundred or more times the RDA, maybe even higher. But that works for a lot of people. Again, it’s concentration — it goes back to those three factors that affect enzyme kinetics.
Annika: That’s it, exactly. And I also wanna talk a little bit about how you make the different nutrients more available for people — like, that is why I think your product seems to work better, but it’s also why it has a lot of capsules a day.
Why 12 Capsules Daily?
Taron: Yes. The calcium, magnesium, phosphorus — I’ll call them the macro elements — they’re bulky. Our clinical dose, the dose that’s been studied in clinical trials, is 12 capsules a day — or at least, there’s a bit of a range, but 12 a day is what’s been studied. If we look at that relative to the ingredients, it takes about eight of those capsules just to hold the calcium, magnesium, and phosphorus. Then you can fit all the other minerals, trace minerals, and vitamins into about four capsules a day. So it’s bulky to begin with. Very few products actually deliver the full — we deliver just over the full RDA of calcium in that product, along with everything else, and very few other products do that.
One of the things we do is chelate the minerals. Chelation is actually a chemical term meaning the ligand has two binding points for the minerals — think of it like a horseshoe magnet, with two ends, and it binds to the mineral in two places to hold or carry it. That chelation process binds with the minerals in a way that helps it not dissociate too quickly — it gets absorbed a bit better, or at least becomes more water-soluble, and we think more water-soluble means a little more bioavailable. There are other products out there that seem to work or absorb too, but we figured it’s those factors — the completeness, the high dose, and the chelation together — that contribute to the outcomes we see. Each of those is one leg of a three-legged stool, if I can put it that way.
Annika: Yeah, I mean, that’s exactly why — it’s all the things working together to really allow your body to use it in the way that a person who has more mental health things going on in their life needs. It makes it so the body doesn’t work as hard, and our bodies are already working really hard.
Taron: Yeah, that’s right. Life is challenging enough.
Annika: It is. So, 12 capsules — that is a lot for a lot of people. For me, I promised myself I was gonna do it. I made it work, and once I started seeing the results, it was a no-brainer, and it started becoming part of my routine.
Taron: I think that’s a significant thing — a lot of people, once they recognize they’re getting a benefit, then it’s like, “Okay, I wanna make this part of my routine.” I went through that experience myself. When I first started taking the product years ago, I didn’t take 12 a day — interestingly, the formula changed over time. The original formula was 32 capsules a day. It was incredibly bulky back then — eight capsules, four times a day, to get the level in that very first publication; the first 10 publications used that very bulky formula.
Annika: That’s so impressive that they stuck to that.
Taron: Oh yeah — but once they realized, “Hey, this works for me,” it’s like, “I’m not gonna let go of that. I don’t want to go back to where I was.” So over time, we’ve been able to reduce that dose down to 12 from 32 — some progress, though there’s still some capsule fatigue. I remember the morning I was pouring out capsules in my hand thinking, “Look at all those pills, that’s ridiculous.” And then, “No, I understand what this is doing for me.” I made the decision right there — this’ll be part of my food, I haven’t eaten until I’ve taken this with my food. And that became part of my routine.
Annika: That is exactly what I did — I almost have to force myself to eat three meals a day, it’s more of just my altered hunger cues, it’s really hard. But pairing it together — if whoever’s listening has ADHD, y’all know pairing tasks together is the best thing to do, best thing for us. And so, yeah, it works.
I also really love that you have a program that’s free, where you can talk to practitioners to help you through this process.
Free Practitioner Help
Taron: Yes. We have a team of wellness advisors here. The way we’ve designed our company to work is that we first and foremost want to speak with health practitioners — we teach them everything we’ve learned, in a nutshell, help them understand where the studies are, give them access to the studies, and give them the benefit of the experience we’ve had over the last 20 years. As part of that process, individuals who come to us who aren’t health practitioners — we give them a softer, pared-down version of the training we give doctors. We do the same thing for them, too. And sometimes they’ll have those moments of “this is too many capsules,” and we can have that conversation with them — where are you at, where were you at, have you noticed any changes, do you want to continue that way or go back — we can help ask them questions maybe they’re not quite ready to ask themselves.
Annika: Like helping them through what are some of these supportive things happening in my body — I talked to Dr. Z, she’s fabulous, love her so much. I was telling her about how, as I’ve been taking it, I started to feel a little bit more tingling, and she said, “Okay, well, that’s a sign that you can reduce some of the medication you’re taking.” I restarted my sertraline probably back in June — no, January, or maybe February — and then two months ago started with the Hardy product, and that’s when I noticed some of that, and I was able to get off my sertraline again.
Medication Interactions
Taron: Yeah, we help people do what we call side-effect audits. It’s an interesting phenomenon. One of the things Dr. Popper said is that this product works on a broad range of psychiatric symptoms — it has a diverse effect on brain function, and it also upregulates or potentiates response to psychiatric drugs. That’s one of the phenomena we’ve noticed. All drugs have side effects, and it’s hypothesized that people under-respond to psychiatric medications because their system isn’t optimized. Once the system starts to be optimized, we start seeing over-response, if you will, to psychiatric medications. So we can help people understand how to figure out whether what they’re experiencing is a medication side effect or not, and guide them through that — and this is where the doctor comes in, because we teach the doctor how to do that too, so the doctor can then help the patient with that process. But we can at least help people identify what’s going on so they can make a decision — “Oh, I want to start working on reducing this,” or whatever. That’s part of what we offer, and it’s built into the price of the product itself.
Annika: I just love this, all of it. I mention it to a lot of people, but this is, I think, one of the most ethical supplement companies I’ve ever talked to — because you all care so much about the person, and not just about — obviously money’s important — but you first care about the person, making sure they’re getting the care they need.
Ethical Supplement Co.
Taron: Yeah, as much as we possibly can. That was one of David Hardy’s — “we’re gonna stand on this hill.” Part of our mission statement is that we want to contribute to a world where mental health issues are not a big factor in quality of life.
Annika: Which is exactly what you’re doing — that can be done if we focus on the person.
Taron: Right.
Annika: I really encourage anyone who’s listening to just go into the description, take a look at it, see if it’s ready for you. I honestly think almost every single person with any sort of mental health condition should at least give it a two-month trial. It is incredible the way it affects, at least, my stress, my ability to manage my life, my emotional regulation. It has completely changed myself, and I think everybody needs to have that chance.
Taron: Yeah, that’s well said.
Final Thoughts
Annika: All right, well, thank you so much for taking the time to talk through a lot of this. I appreciate that. And if anyone needs to connect with you or another person from Hardy, y’all have lots of options on the site.
Taron: That’s right — we’ve got phone numbers all over the site, emails, a lot of different ways to connect with us.
Annika: That’s another thing I like — very easy to communicate. All right, well, thank you so much again.
Taron: Well, you’re very welcome. Thanks for inviting me to come and join with you today and have a little chat about this. Appreciate that.
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