Dr. Genevieve Newton and Dr. Abby Kramer explain the simple reason Fringe started making supplements: they couldn't find anything on the market they trusted enough to take themselves. This episode walks through the values that shaped the Fringe supplement line from day one — simple formulas, clean and food-based ingredients, effective doses, and complete transparency including published certificates of analysis and batch-level testing for heavy metals, pesticides, and mold.
The conversation focuses on Fringe's three core essentials: an unflavored electrolyte mineral blend with trace minerals, a magnesium support formula, and a vitamin D&K combination. Dr. Gen and Dr. Abby dig into what separates these from the crowded supplement market — including the widespread use of maltodextrin hidden in "natural flavors" and the real challenge of flavoring powders with actual fruit without compromising quality.
For anyone trying to cut through supplement marketing noise, this episode is a practical guide to what to look for on a label and why most products don't make the cut. The Fringe philosophy is straightforward: if they wouldn't take it themselves, they won't sell it.
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Transcript
Genevieve: Hello everybody, welcome to the Fringe. I'm Dr. Genevieve Newton, Scientific Director at Fringe, and I'm here today with Dr. Abby Kramer, our Medical Director. We love supplements and we have come up with what we call our essentials line — a select handful of supplements that for a variety of reasons we're going to discuss today are really essential for most people most of the time. Abby is really the brainchild behind the development of our supplement line. My job today is to ask her questions that will help you understand our rationale, our products, and what we do here at Fringe with respect to our essential supplements. To start off — why did we get into this supplement business? Why did we start making supplements?
Dr. Abby: At the core of it, it became really apparent to me and all of us — Alyson included — that the lid kind of blew off: what can we trust? I understood how important hydration was and electrolytes. That was the first thing we really started chipping away at. I'd seen such great patient outcomes in clinic with something as simple as putting patients on a daily electrolyte supplement. But I didn't feel awesome about myself or my daughter taking this stuff for 20 years every day. There were a few ingredients I didn't love. I didn't really know where they were being sourced, what testing was going on. So it was almost out of necessity that we were like: we need these things and we want cleaner products, so I guess we need to make them. Because they don't necessarily exist that are fully up to our standards. Not many companies will publish their testing results or let you know exactly what they're doing. So fundamentally it was like everything we make at Fringe, we're making for ourselves. We want more transparency or higher quality or to understand the process from the ground up. And we really wanted to start with the basics. There's a lot of noise in the world today — especially on social media — like you need this supplement, this protocol, this cleanse, this detox. And we thought long and hard: what do people actually need? What can we confidently say is essential? In our modern world, we are unable to get what we need no matter how clean you eat. It's incredibly hard to get enough magnesium from food. These three products are what we truly believe, through years of formulating and research, are really essential — must-supplement things. I love other supplements. You should see the shelves at my clinic. But that stuff isn't essential. These are things every human on earth basically should be taking most of the time.
Genevieve: Between you and me and Alyson, we have very different aptitudes for supplementation. You love working with supplements and are totally comfortable taking them. I have this kind of love-hate relationship where I buy a lot of supplements and then throw garbage bags of them away because I just can't bear to take anymore. And Alyson just hates taking everything. But I think that dynamic is actually good — we keep each other in check. At Fringe, we'll develop products for specific conditions, but we really wanted to start with this foundation. Coming at it from the clinical perspective — working with people for over a decade, working with a huge range of supplements, getting to know what actually moves the needle in terms of helping pretty much everyone feel better — that's your end of things. Then as we got into development, we quickly realized we needed to articulate our core values around supplements, because this determines everything we do. What are those core values?
Dr. Abby: This took time — you kind of have to be in the trenches in that process. First and foremost, we really like to make simple products. There are so many products where you flip them over and there are 50 ingredients. Less is more. You shouldn't need that many things in a product to move the needle. Our products are very minimal. Clean ingredients — we take a very long time to source the cleanest possible ingredients we can find. Organic whenever possible, non-GMO whenever possible, food or earth-based whenever possible. We don't like to chase trends like special nano sizes. A lot of the supplement world is going more pharmaceutical — more is better, making everything 10 times more absorbable. Our ethos at Fringe is really to get back to nature, to get nutrients in the form we're designed to get them from — from our food and water. As natural-based as possible, as non-synthetic as possible. And effectiveness is big. I know clinically what I've seen be effective. Then Genevieve goes and does her deep dives, reads the research, and — thank goodness — almost always comes back and says the data really backs this up. A lot of products in the supplement industry, especially more synthetic, more generic products, are also really low dose. A perfect example is vitamin D. If you go to CVS and buy a vitamin D supplement, it might not be in the most absorbable form, and it usually is a really low dosage that just won't be effective. Patients are like: I've taken vitamin D every single day for years, how are my levels still at 30? I see the product they're taking and it's 1,000 IU — just not enough to move the needle. So we make stuff in really targeted, therapeutic ranges so they'll actually work. And then the biggest thing that blew the lid off reality for all of us: the transparency in testing. We test everything before and after production. We test for everything possible to test for. And we take it a step further and publish those testing results on our website, which almost nobody does. It's a risky move, but we really believe our customers should have informed choice — they should be able to see the testing results and make informed decisions. I'm hopeful this trend continues and consumers start demanding more transparency.
Genevieve: The things that you've seen in practice with respect to the way people are sensitive to things that are generally recognized as safe — there's very little strong research on some of these. Citric acid is in absolutely everything. Maltodextrin is in absolutely everything. The market is so saturated that there's this baseline acceptance across the industry that these are fine. And you came into it with practical experience of seeing that some people don't respond well to these things. There's emerging evidence about maltodextrin in particular.
Dr. Abby: And if it's not in your product in high enough amounts, you don't have to put it on the label. That to me is the worst thing we uncovered — can you even trust someone's label? So when people ask me how to know if a product is clean, can you look at this label and tell me? I really can't tell you. I just hope we're on the forefront of this changing. Whole social media accounts are now dedicated to buying a product and sending it for third-party testing. It's only a matter of time before most companies have to come on board. If you include maltodextrin in your product, just put it on the label.
Genevieve: Maltodextrin is often included in the "natural flavors" umbrella — that's how it typically sneaks into many of the products you're consuming. If you're only consuming a very small amount occasionally, it's typically not going to have much effect on your gut microbiome. But if you're consuming it from all these different places day after day after day, that's when we start to see things not being quite as optimal. In the most high-level terms — how do you think our supplements are different from what's on the market?
Dr. Abby: From the formulation level, we have a very different approach to making products. I think most companies just go to a supplement manufacturer and basically white label someone else's product. They want to make a sleep support supplement and the factory shows them five versions that have done really well and they're like: great, just put our label on it. You can see this across different supplement brands — they all basically sell the same thing. We really take the time from the ground up. Where does each individual ingredient come from? Where is it sourced? Let's see the testing. Building it from scratch is what we do. Our average product takes us two years. Incredibly long time. And if it's not perfect, we won't put it out. We're going through this right now working on another electrolyte flavor. If it's not right, we're not going to launch it. The sourcing, the cleanliness, our extensive list of things we will not use — that makes it a thousand times harder to make products because we are that picky. And the testing we do: there are different tiers and we go to the top tier, testing for everything possible. Our personal standards for heavy metals, for example, are the most stringent strict limits. The main thing is our standard for quality.
Genevieve: I finally wrapped my head around why we can honestly say we make some of the best products on the market in terms of quality. The ingredients that got in at the ground level of supplement manufacturing with the designation of being generally recognized as safe have had very little research done on cumulative effects, additive effects, long-term effects. Most of them are probably neutral in terms of their health effects — some of them will have some level of harm, but we're not talking about things that are highly toxic, more like neutral to slightly harmful. But what we've chosen to do is not use those things and instead use things that actually have health benefits. So that filler that goes into our supplement will be a prebiotic fiber that feeds the gut bacteria. We've changed the focus: these are our less active ingredients that also have a biological function. That's something I just don't see anybody else doing.
Dr. Abby: I think about the electrolyte market. For many years it was: a handful of key players came in that made electrolytes far better than traditional Gatorade or Powerade. There was this whole movement of let's make things more keto friendly without sugar, use stevia, no dyes. But then we just coasted and no one really asked questions. Now there are new players, including us, coming in and saying: you actually can flavor stuff with real fruit. Is it harder? Yeah. Are there more challenges? Absolutely. That's why people do natural flavors — it's made in a lab, it's stable, it's never going to taste different. But we're so firm in our values that if we're out for a month because we couldn't find the right organic fruit that meets our quality standards, that's okay. We could cut corners, but we won't do that.
Genevieve: Let's circle back to our essentials. Just give us a big picture overview of what we identified and developed as our essentials line.
Dr. Abby: A lot of people still think of electrolytes as something you take if you're an athlete, if you're sweating, if you're doing a sauna. But truly, most of us need more minerals because our soil is really depleted, as is our water. We should get our minerals from our water and our soil, but minerals are stripped out through modern water treatment. And most people have great water filters — which is great — but then you lose even more mineral content. Our soils are so devoid of minerals. Even organic, even all of that — unless you could get everything from a regenerative farm, we just can't get the mineral content we did 100 years ago from our food. Minerals are co-factors for pretty much every single biological function our bodies perform. So we have our electrolyte mineral mix — that's our first product. A big difference here is that it doesn't just have the classics people think of: sodium, potassium, magnesium, calcium. We also add trace minerals, which is super important. It's unflavored. I put a scoop in my water bottle every single time I fill it up, because I have a reverse osmosis filter at home so there are no minerals — you need to add them back in, or your body will strip the minerals from your bones and teeth. Alongside that is magnesium support. Magnesium is a super important mineral that should be in our food and our water and largely isn't anymore. It's important for a million things. And then vitamins D and K — another one that virtually everyone is deficient in. I rarely find someone on blood work with optimal levels unless they're supplementing, especially in the winter months, but honestly even in summer for most people because we just don't get outside enough. You need to be outside in direct sunlight with bare skin to absorb it. So that's our essentials bundle — three things that are very hard to get optimal levels of in your body on a consistent daily basis without supplementing. They're all unflavored. You can do a scoop or two of each a day in your water and you're good to go.
Genevieve: We chose to make powdered products that allowed flexibility of adding to food and water. And they're also great for kids. We don't talk about this enough. Kids also need magnesium — they're incredibly deficient in magnesium, just like us. And most kid-focused products are just full of junk ingredients. We've researched going into tablets and chewables and it's basically impossible to make them up to our standards — we would have to add things we don't love. So with the magnesium powder, for example, we have kids dosing on the website. My patients put it in their kids' smoothies, pouches, applesauce, even in water with some juice. It's such a simple way to get those necessary things into your kids.
Genevieve: Do you think these supplements are essential even if somebody has a super healthy diet and lifestyle? And would there be any exceptions where people maybe don't necessarily need all of them?
Dr. Abby: 99% of people do. The one exception would be vitamin D — some patients genetically absorb and hold on to vitamin D beautifully. We always say in our blogs and on social media: please get your levels checked once to twice a year. I like my patients to check their levels in summer and winter. Some people have a genetic SNP on the VDR receptor where they do not absorb vitamin D well even from the sun. For me, I have to supplement vitamin D even in summer. I'm a soccer mom at tournaments four times a week and my levels still won't be great. But for minerals and magnesium — the magnesium content in spinach is something like 90% reduced from what it used to be. And when you're tracking nutrients using apps and databases, those values were assayed many years ago. People actually have no idea how depleted they are in minerals today. If you could get your vegetables from a local regenerative place, the mineral content would be much higher — regenerative agriculture literally puts the minerals back into the soil. But that's probably not what most people are consistently consuming.
Genevieve: Is there any rationale for or interconnectedness between these minerals and vitamins?
Dr. Abby: Definitely. Vitamins D and K are the perfect example and they also work alongside magnesium. A lot of people are saying K really helps D absorption, which isn't exactly true, but they need to be taken together. I have patients whose vitamin D levels are great but I still absolutely have them on vitamin K2, because no one has enough K2. K2 does many things, but its correlation with vitamin D is that vitamin D frees up calcium in the system. Vitamin K2 then goes and scavenges that free calcium and puts it where it needs to go. Without enough K2, which is incredibly challenging to get dietarily, you can get calcium deposits in weird places — kidney stones, bladder stones, joint pain, buildup in the joints, even atherosclerosis. K2 puts the calcium where it belongs. It's super important for heart health — pretty much any woman 30s and above should be on a K2 supplement even if they're not on D, in my opinion, for heart health and bone health. And magnesium is super important — these minerals all work together. You can't just look at it as replacing one thing. You need this full spectrum of vitamins and minerals all working together. Or things can go haywire because we're not meant to just have super crazy high levels of vitamin D and low levels of other things.
Genevieve: And that's obviously why we formulated our vitamin D along with vitamin K. I remember at the outset when we started seeing all these supplements for vitamin D, most of the time it was just vitamin D by itself. As you said, it can get deposited in different places — one of the primary locations is in the cardiovascular system. You end up with deposits in the arteries and atherosclerosis, and it's a risk factor for heart attacks.
Dr. Abby: And then there are so many people pounding calcium supplements for bone quality. It's still so widely recommended, and in horrible forms that are not absorbable — basically taking a chalk supplement every day. I highly encourage people to have this discussion with your healthcare provider. Especially women as they age are often encouraged to start taking calcium supplements without any awareness of the vitamin D conversation, vitamin K conversation, for bone health. In my opinion, minerals are actually what's needed to increase bone health instead of just pounding calcium.
Genevieve: Yeah, and calcium — when you do supplement — you want to make sure it's not a really high dose at any given point. I would never personally go above 250-300 milligrams. It should be the equivalent of what's in a serving of calcium-rich food. If you wanted to supplement more than that amount in a day, you would split it up across two or three times to mitigate absorption issues. So you've used this stuff in clinic for many years — what are some of the benefits you see people experiencing from taking these supplements?
Dr. Abby: With electrolytes — I'm not someone super sensitive to supplements. I usually take all these things and feel nothing. But the one supplement I immediately feel a difference with, and this has been the case for 15 years, is electrolytes. I take electrolytes and I immediately feel clearer, more energy, brain fog gone, fewer headaches. I'm prone to dehydration headaches and that just doesn't happen if I'm taking an electrolyte supplement daily. So for electrolytes: recovery, muscle tension and soreness, headaches, brain fog, energy are the big things. Some people also notice a big improvement in their skin because anything that dehydration can cause, electrolytes can help. A lot of people are so chronically dehydrated even though they drink a lot of water. I'll have patients who drink 120 ounces of water a day and are always thirsty and still feel dehydrated. That person is mineral deficient. Our body needs minerals to hold on to the water and be hydrated — so it just runs right through them. Magnesium is another one where if you are deficient, you almost always feel a difference when you start supplementing. The big buckets for magnesium: anxiety and stress — it can really support that, especially magnesium glycinate which is great at helping people feel more calm and less anxious. Muscle soreness and tension and joint pain — magnesium can help with that a ton. If you hold a lot of physical tension in your body, magnesium can help tremendously. And sleep — probably the biggest testimonial we get is: my gosh, I got the best night's sleep ever when I started taking that product. Magnesium is also amazing for heart health. Anyone who has any type of heart issues should definitely take magnesium every day. And there's an amazing research study on PMS and menstrual symptoms and magnesium — women took between 150-300 milligrams daily just during the luteal phase and had insane positive results: less cramping, fewer mood swings. So many women who suffer every month are just magnesium deficient. And then vitamin D — go back and listen to our episode on seasonal depression. Chronic pain, chronic inflammation, people diagnosed with fibromyalgia literally just get their levels up and symptoms resolve. I had a patient with crippling postpartum anxiety and depression, and her vitamin D level was 12. Missed for months by her doctors. I put her on a high dose and within a week she emails me: I'm better. And it's so simple and inexpensive — they were going to put her on four different medications. So for mood, immune function, joint pain, inflammation, autoimmune stuff — anything that relates to immune function, vitamin D can support it.
Genevieve: I think what most people don't realize is that vitamins and minerals are essential — meaning we can't survive without them. What they're doing in our body is making it so that the trillions of processes that happen at a cellular and molecular level every moment of every day are able to carry out. They make it all happen. And when you don't have them, you see that list you just rattled off of clinical outcomes. You could have kept going. There will be a lot of inter-individual variability in responses to supplementation, but that's because these nutrients do so many different things in everybody's body. As a final thought — how would you like people to think differently about supplementation than the general attitude we have right now?
Dr. Abby: I want people to think about supplementation from a much more foundational perspective. If you haven't nailed the foundation, don't go searching out in the crazy weeds yet. And yes, still eat all the vitamin- and nutrient-rich health-promoting foods first. You can't out-supplement that — that's not what this is about. But the foundation is: eating clean food, drinking clean mineral-rich water, getting sleep, getting sunshine, taking care of yourself, supplementing basics that we know we need and are deficient in — and see what that does. That is the 80% of most people's issues. And I see this in practice again and again. People are buying some crazy liver protocol, some parasite thing, some this and some that. I use those things with patients too. But we start with the foundation. That woman with the postpartum depression — I could put her on a bunch of herbs and things that can help boost your mood. But that is just like a step away from the pharmaceutical approach, which is just to suppress symptoms rather than get to the root cause. If you've got severe vitamin and mineral deficiencies and you fix that, then it's done. You shouldn't have to take ashwagandha every day forever to feel normal. That's an amazing tool and I use it with patients — but setting that foundational approach first, instead of just looking for a bunch of natural band-aids, is what I'd encourage. And get back to the basics: go to bed earlier, drink your water, get outside. Most people know, when they tune in with themselves, what probably needs to be adjusted in their lifestyle to help them feel better. And it usually goes back to all the basics.
Genevieve: I absolutely agree. The parting message at Fringe is really always to get back to nature and the supportive processes that we know are tried and true. Now we're in an environment where we actually have to do the same thing with supplementation — there are some things we simply are not able to get for a variety of reasons. Those are the foundations met through supplementation. Then, once you've addressed those things, that's when you can start layering on additional therapies. That term you used — natural band-aids — is a really important one, because people don't often think about whether what they're taking is just getting rid of symptoms, or whether it's also looking at getting to that foundational level of supporting the body to do what it knows how to do. Thank you everybody for joining us on the Fringe. We'll see you next time.
