Last Updated on April 12, 2024 by Fasting Planet
Every day, you take a multivitamin to get your daily supply of vitamins and minerals. Before or after you exercise, you consume a sports nutrition supplement as well. When you decide to go on a fast, is it appropriate to continue taking your regular supplements, or should you quit these as well as food until the fast is over?
If you want to continue taking supplements on a fast, it’s important to know which ones will break your fast and which won’t. Prebiotics and probiotics, pure collagen, creatine, micronutrients, algae and fish oil, and multivitamins probably won’t break your fast. Protein powder, BCAAs, and gummy multivitamins more than likely would.
In this article, we’ll discuss more about supplements, including how they benefit your health and whether you should continue taking supplements on an intermittent or longer-term fast. Keep reading!
The Types of Supplements You May Take on a Fast
In a 2019 report from the American Osteopathic Association, a poll among United States residents found that most, 86 percent, used some sort of supplement or vitamin, which is about four in five people. You may even be one of them.
Supplements can be categorized into four broad types: weight management/sports nutrition, herbals and botanicals, specialty supplements, and vitamins and minerals. Let’s take a closer look at each of these four types of supplements now.
Weight Management and Sports Nutrition Supplements
In the 2017 CRN Consumer Survey on Dietary Supplements, it was revealed that over 170 million US residents take a dietary supplement, more than likely to lose weight. That’s roughly 76 percent of Americans in all.
These supplements may include hydration gels and beverages, garcinia cambogia, energy beverages, and weight loss pills or tablets. In case you’re not familiar, garcinia cambogia is a tropical fruit that’s rich in hydroxycitric acid or HCA, especially in the fruit’s rind. A common obesity treatment, HCA lessens adenosine triphosphate citrate lyase, reports a 2003 publication of Current Therapeutic Research, Clinical and Experimental.
Herbals and Botanicals
Next, herbal and botanical supplements are those that come from phytomedicines, botanical products, and/or herbal products. They may relieve aches and pains and even lessen some symptoms of illness. The most popular herbals and botanicals are ginseng, Echinacea, cranberry, garlic, and green tea.
Specialty Supplements
A 2017 chart from Statista cites omega-3 fatty acids and other fatty acids as the top specialty supplements, with 21 percent of the respondents having reported taking these supplements. That’s followed by probiotics at 16 percent, fiber at 14 percent, melatonin at 10 percent, and chondroitin and glucosamine at five percent each.
Vitamins and Minerals
Most supplements the average person consumes are probably a vitamin or mineral. From B complex vitamins to vitamin C, calcium, vitamin D, and multivitamin supplements, these can allow you to get your necessary nutrients even outside of food.
Supplements That May Break Your Fast
You probably don’t think about it any other time, but most of those supplements you ingest every day contain calories and sugar, two major deterrents when you’re in a fasted state. Some even have fats, which is again detrimental.
To recap, when you fast, you deprive your body of glucose, its main energy supply. Glucose, which gets converted to glycogen, is sugar. We provide our body with glucose through the foods we eat, and our system can produce glucose as well.
It’s only when your glycogen supplies run on empty that the body begins burning fat instead. That’s when you start to lose weight and look trimmer.
You don’t want to trigger an insulin response on a fast, as this causes the release of more glucose. If you must have calories when fasting, it’s important they don’t come from sugar, as that will almost always cause an insulin response.
That’s why you need to avoid these supplements, as they will break your fast.
Protein Powder
If you’re trying to repair tissue and build and maintain muscle, especially on a fast, then you’re likely mixing protein powder into a glass or two of water or black coffee each day. Muscle loss can be a risk on a fast, but taking protein powder will break your fasted state, which is just as risky.
The ingredients in your powdered supplement create an insulin response. According to Australian health store Happy Way, 30 grams of protein powder, the average serving, has 121 calories. If you’re on an intermittent fast like the 5:2 diet where you have to limit your calories to no more than 600 and you consume protein powder a few times daily, about half your calories are gone to the protein powder alone. That’s a lot!
Sugary Supplements
You may skip the supplements with straight sugar, but sugar can masquerade as many other ingredients. If you see a supplement with fruit juice concentrate, cane sugar, pectin, or maltodextrin listed on the ingredients label, skip it.
These supplements are especially sugary, which means they’ll cause an insulin response and bog you down with calories, bringing you out of your fasted state.
Branched-Chain Amino Acids
Another popular supplementary product, branched-chain amino acids or BCAAs have three types of amino acids: valine, isoleucine, and leucine. Valine and isoleucine can control your blood sugar and make you feel more energized, says a 2011 report in the Journal of Sports Medicine and Physical Fitness.
Leucine may benefit your body when developing muscle proteins according to the Journal of Nutrition in a 2006 study.
Yet as helpful as BCAAs can be when in a non-fasted state, continuing to take this supplement on an intermittent or longer-term fast is not a good idea.
This 2018 study in the Journal of Diabetes found that consuming large amounts of BCAAs could boost your insulin resistance. When your body is resistant to insulin, your blood sugar increases, which is not what you want on a fast.
Also, the insulin response triggered by BCAAs can interrupt autophagy. If you’re new to this blog, autophagy is an internal process that’s kickstarted by fasting. Through autophagy, your healthy, new cells eat the damaged parts of old cells, and sometimes even the whole cell itself.
This recycling, so to speak, ensures that your body has only strong cells to keep your immune system healthy, your digestive system on track, and other processes running as they should.
Gummy Multivitamins
Taking a one-a-day gummy is an easy way to get your supply of vitamins and minerals, but the convenience comes at a price if you’re fasting. These multivitamins are often high in protein and sugar, both of which will break your fast. The fats in some gummy multivitamins aren’t ideal either.
Supplements Less Likely to Break Your Fast
Now, not every supplement will necessarily impact your fasted state. The following supplements may not break your fast, but since there are no guarantees, be a little cautious when you take them.
Prebiotics and Probiotics
Prebiotics trigger the growth of helpful microorganisms while probiotics include live microorganisms within. If you’re getting prebiotics and probiotics from a supplement and not from food, then they’re without digestible carbs and calories. That should make them safe to take on your fast.
Pure Collagen
A structural protein in our body’s connective tissue, collagen can make your skin healthier. By taking pure collagen on a fast, you can still enter and maintain ketosis and proceed with your fat burning. A 2019 report in Oxidative Medicine and Cellular Longevity notes that autophagic processes may be temporarily impacted by pure collagen though.
Creatine
Creatine is a type of organic compound that may boost post-exercise muscle recovery, help you build more lean muscle mass, and enhance your strength. The good news for fasters is that if you already take creatine regularly, continuing it on your fast shouldn’t create an insulin response in the body.
Micronutrients
When you ingest micronutrients individually instead of in a multivitamin, you also likely won’t disrupt your fast. These micronutrients include vitamins A through K, molybdenum, manganese, potassium, and iron.
That said, you may want to rethink whether you want to take some fat-soluble vitamins when fasting. Vitamins K, A, D, and E are all considered fat-soluble, which means the best way to absorb these vitamins is to consume them with a meal. On an intermittent fast where you can eat, such as a 16:8 fast, save your micronutrients for mealtime. If you can’t consume any food on your fast, your body may have a harder time processing these nutrients.
Algae and Fish Oil
Fish oil is rich in omega-3s and carries with it a multitude of benefits. These include possible boosts to bone health, skin health, eye health, and heart health. If you have depression or other mental disorders, fish oil may lessen symptoms, and it’s even believed you can lose weight through fish oil if you follow a nutritious diet and exercise regimen, says the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition in this 2007 report.
Algae oil, which is comprised of marine oil, also carries with it many benefits since it has omega-3s and omega-9 fatty acids. You may increase your brain function, boost some blood fats, and successfully combat inflammation through algae oil.
If you stick to one or two tablets or spoonfuls of the oil a day, the lack of digestible carbs and calories should make algae and fish oils safe to take on a fast.
Multivitamins
Above, we said that gummy multivitamins aren’t the safest choice when on a fast, but that doesn’t necessarily mean all multivitamins are bad. You’ll have to do some comparison shopping at your grocery store to find a multivitamin without added fillers or sugar that’s safe for a fast.
Should You Supplement While Fasting?
You know now that some supplements should be fine to consume even when fasting, and others, not so much.
Just because you know you can, does that mean you should take supplements when on a fast?
To answer that question, let’s address the main reasons people consume supplements. For many, it’s to boost their health and get the nutrients, minerals, and vitamins they may lack dietarily. Others want to lose weight or build muscle, as we talked about earlier.
If you already don’t get all your vitamins and minerals through your diet when you’re not fasting, then you might assume that fasting will put you at risk of a deficiency. While it is true that nutrient deficiencies can affect fasters, you’d have to either fast for very long periods or almost all the time for these deficiencies to occur.
What if you’re more worried about losing muscle mass on a fast? After all, when your body begins burning fat instead of glycogen for energy, it may torch muscle proteins as well.
Again though, the results of this muscle mass loss are most pronounced during longer-term fasts. If you’re on an intermittent fast a couple of days a week, you shouldn’t have to worry too much about your muscles shrinking.
Even if you are still feeling a little uncertain, you have a reliable way to maintain muscle mass on a fast that doesn’t involve taking supplements, and that’s exercise. If you hop on the elliptical or exercise bike thrice weekly and ride for at least 25 minutes while alternate-day fasting, you can retain your lean muscle mass according to 2013 data from Obesity (Silver Spring).
Lifting weights, again about three times every week, can also keep your muscles large and strong. That means you can skip the sports and nutritional supplements.
If you decide you want to continue your supplement regimen on a fast anyway, then make sure you do so with water. When consuming water-soluble vitamins, C vitamins should be okay to ingest without food, but not vitamin B. It could cause nausea, so save it for when you can eat again.
Conclusion
Millions of adults take supplements every day, yet when fasting, you may have to rethink whether it’s a good idea to keep ingesting that gummy or pill. Some supplements contain carbs, fats, sugar, and calories that cause an insulin response, prevent autophagy, and otherwise break your fast.
The next time you go to take a supplement on a fast, look at the ingredients on the bottle first. You’ll be glad you did.