Why Every Day Looks A Little Different

Every supplement on the market is built around the same basic assumption.

If you are deficient or below optimal in a nutrient, then you should probably take some sort of daily supplement for it.

Seems reasonable enough. If you're low in magnesium, take magnesium every day. If you're low in vitamin D, take vitamin D every day. If you're low in iron, take iron every day. The entire supplement industry is basically built on that idea.

But here's what started bothering us. The human body doesn't actually treat every nutrient the same way.

Some nutrients are absorbed almost immediately and then excreted a few hours later while others can stick around in tissues for weeks or months.

Some compete with each other for absorption, some become less effective when taken continuously, and some actually work better when you take them less often.

So if all of these nutrients behave differently, why is every supplement protocol designed the exact same way?

To explain what we mean, let's imagine a world where there are only three nutrients in existence.

Vitamin B2, calcium, and iron.

Now let's say you somehow figure out that you're deficient in all three so you decide to supplement them. Very logical.

The obvious solution you would likely take would be to buy a B2 supplement, a calcium supplement, and an iron supplement and just take all three every morning with breakfast and honestly, that's not a terrible strategy. You would almost certainly improve your deficiencies over time.

But if your goal isn't just “better than before” and instead your goal is to create the most optimized protocol possible, then that's where things start getting interesting.

The first thing you do is start looking at what actually happens after each nutrient enters your body. You'd look at things like how long it sticks around, how it's absorbed, where it goes, and how it's eventually removed.

For example, Vitamin B2 is pretty straightforward. It lasts for a pretty short amount of time (around 2 hours) in your body before the excess is removed through natural processes. Your body is also very good at absorbing it and getting rid of excess amounts. There isn't even an established upper limit because toxicity hasn't really been shown to be a meaningful concern. Easy. Take your B2 every day and move on.

With calcium, suddenly things become a lot more complicated.

Calcium is stored in your bones for years, but calcium circulating in your blood only hangs around for about a day.

That means your body is constantly trying to maintain a certain concentration in your bloodstream. If blood levels fall too low, your body starts pulling calcium out of your bones and teeth. If levels climb too high, you can start running into problems on the other end like chronic fatigue, muscle weakness, and lethargy.

A useful way to think about it is that your bones are basically a giant calcium savings account that when your body needs calcium, it makes withdrawals from. When you have excess calcium available, it makes deposits.

So now the goal isn't simply “get enough calcium.” The goal becomes finding the dosing strategy that keeps you in the sweet spot as consistently as possible.

Then you get to iron. Most people assume taking something more often should lead to better results but iron is one of the best examples of why that isn't always true.

In fact, many doctors recommend taking supplemental iron every other day because absorption is often higher and side effects like nausea and constipation are often lower.

So now you've got your first supplement schedule.

But then you keep digging and you realize this is where things start to get really annoying. You discover that calcium and iron actually compete for absorption. In the gut, they both use the same DMT1 transporter. In simple terms, they're trying to use the same doorway to get into your bloodstream so if calcium shows up and iron shows up at exactly the same time, less of both nutrients get absorbed.

You paid for both, you swallowed both, but your body didn't actually get the full benefit of either.

Now you're stuck with a puzzle. You need calcium every day. You want iron every other day. But you don't want them competing with each other.

So eventually you end up with a schedule that looks something like this.

Now iron gets priority every other day, but calcium still remains present daily (with the added benefit of having controlled dosage to keep you in the Goldilocks zone of calcium intake). B2 keeps doing its thing in the background.

You've just created a system that is more optimized over a 48 hour period than simply taking everything together every morning.

Your body absorbs more, you waste less, and you aren't creating unnecessary competition between nutrients.

Now, try doing this with all the nutrients you may be getting a suboptimal dose of combined with all of the beneficial nutrients that supplement a complete diet. The three nutrient example only contains a handful of possible interactions. Bump it up to 30 and you now have hundreds of interactions to consider.

Then on top of the interactions, you have to consider synergies, tolerance, adaptation, receptor downregulation, optimal forms, dosing windows, and long term optimization over years rather than days.

At some point the problem becomes so complicated that no normal person could realistically manage it on their own.

That's the entire reason M3 exists. We solved the scheduling problem so that you don't have to.

Your job is to open today's packet and take it once a day.

The complexity stays behind the scenes, the benefits don't.