Laura Schoenfeld: So with zinc, it kind of depends on the person’s diet and if she is getting a good variety of animal foods in her diet, so things such as meat, fish, shellfish, and poultry, that kind of stuff. That’s where a lot of dietary zinc is going to come from. If she has a pretty mixed diet with a lot of animal products in it, then I might start with like a 15 mg per day zinc supplement, which is basically the RDA for zinc.
Zinc is something that you don’t want to be overdosing on necessarily, so I tend to be a little bit conservative with the dosage amount. I do know some people who will do 50 mg zinc supplements per day with a client. Unless you have evidence that the person is zinc deficient, I wouldn’t necessarily go that high. So, I’ll start with 15 mg for someone on a mixed diet. If someone is either vegetarian, vegan, or maybe has been vegetarian or vegan in the past, or there is some kind of clinical evidence of someone being very zinc deficient, then I will do closer to 30 mg per day.
It is a chelated zinc form. I want to say it’s bisglycinate, but let me just double check. Let’s see. Yes, bisglycinate. So, it contains 30 mg of zinc bisglycinate chelate, and it also contains a little bit of riboflavin, B6, molybdenum, taurine, and maleic acid, so it is not just zinc, but I do like this product. B6 is definitely important to make sure somebody is getting enough of if she is also zinc deficient. I do like the zinc bisglycinate combo. As far as the 15 mg supplement, I believe it is a Pure Encapsulations product that I use for the 15 mg, and that one is—let me tell you once I get it open—let’s see. This one is a zinc picolinate product. I believe I use this one because it’s the only one I’ve found that is just 15 mg of zinc, but the thing about zinc is I really don’t think the form is hugely important. Zinc picolinate is pretty easy to absorb. The zinc bisglycinate seems to be pretty well absorbed. I don’t worry too much about it being some specific form, but like I said, the two products that I use are the Zinc Supreme by Designs for Health, which is the 30 mg supplement, or Zinc 15 by Pure Encapsulations, and that is a zinc picolinate.
As far as the frequency—I’m sorry, not frequency—the duration of giving that supplement, if it is a 15 mg per day supplement, that is something I feel comfortable giving indefinitely. As far as compliance is concerned, most people are not going to take something forever, so if they start taking it every couple of days during the week, then that is fine. We’ll just give a little boost. Something like a 30 mg zinc supplement I would only really give that for a couple months. You’d be looking for specific improvements in either their acne or if they have other things such as hair or nail growth issues, or they get colds really frequently. Seeing changes in that can indicate that their zinc status is getting restored.
The other functional lab value that I look for if I want to know if somebody is actually zinc deficient or not is alkaline phosphatase, which is a liver enzyme, but it is something that if it is below 50 can potentially indicate a zinc deficiency. So if somebody has an alkaline phosphatase of lower than 50, I may do a couple months worth of zinc supplementation, but if it is just based on clinical symptoms, that is going just be something that you watch for changes and see once they get to a certain level where they seem to be improved, then I would drop down to the 15 mg per day. So, 15 to 30 long term is pretty safe. I wouldn’t worry too much about that, or you can do like once a week 50 mg or something if you want to be even lower because I don’t really—I don’t think I’ve seen zinc supplements between 15 mg, but if you wanted to just kind of give them a little boost here and there, then 50 mg per week would spread that out. Let me actually tell you what that would be average. That would be an average of 7 mg per day, so that plus a mixed diet, you should be more than good enough with the amount of zinc the person is getting.