The Morning Stack: Layering Supplements for Maximum Absorption

Most people approach their morning supplements the same way: open the cabinet, take everything at once, move on with the day. I understand the impulse. It’s efficient. But absorption isn’t efficient when compounds are competing for the same receptors, when fat-soluble nutrients get swallowed without dietary fat, or when probiotics ride through a stomach still churning with stomach acid from breakfast. Sequence changes outcomes.

This is my actual morning. Not a theoretical protocol. Not a marketing stack. What I do, every day, and why I do it in this order.

The first thing I do every morning, before I eat, before I take anything else, is make coffee and add a scoop of Perfect Collagen®. One scoop, stirred in. It dissolves instantly — no residue, no taste, no clumping. It’s been part of my routine for years and at this point it’s as automatic as making the coffee itself.

The science behind taking collagen on an empty stomach is solid. Collagen peptides are small-chain amino acids — hydrolyzed, meaning they’ve been broken down for rapid absorption. Without food competing in the gut, they cross the intestinal wall quickly and reach the tissues that need them: joint cartilage, skin, bone matrix, tendons. The organic Vitamin C we include in Perfect Collagen® is equally important here — ascorbic acid is a required cofactor for collagen synthesis. Without it, the peptides can’t be efficiently converted into new tissue.*1

If you take cream or butter in your coffee, even better — the small amount of dietary fat supports the absorption of any fat-soluble components and blunts the cortisol spike that straight caffeine can cause on an empty stomach. I typically use a small amount of cream.

“Collagen on an empty stomach, first thing. Let it absorb. Then build the rest of the stack on top of it.”

About an hour after the collagen coffee — usually when I’m sitting down to actually start my morning — I mix a scoop of NewGreens® BerryGreens in water. This is my greens drink, and it does a lot of things at once: it delivers a concentrated dose of organic fruits, vegetables, adaptogens, digestive enzymes, probiotics, and a 5-mushroom blend in a single scoop.

The hour gap matters. The enzymes and probiotics in NewGreens® are most effective when stomach acid levels have stabilized slightly after the morning coffee, and when there’s no competing protein load in the gut. Taking probiotics immediately after a protein shake, for example, creates a competitive absorption environment. Taking them on a relatively clear stomach, with water, lets the active cultures reach the lower GI tract with more viability.

The adaptogen and mushroom blend — which includes compounds like ashwagandha, lion’s mane, and reishi — also benefits from being taken without a heavy food matrix interfering with their bioavailability. Water extraction is actually the traditional delivery method for many of these compounds, and NewGreens® is a water-mixed drink by design.

And yes — I get asked constantly whether NewGreens® is better than AG1. The honest answer is yes, by a significant margin. AG1 is a heavily marketed product with an ingredient list that looks impressive until you realize most of it is in a proprietary blend, which means the doses of the active compounds aren’t disclosed. You’re paying $99 a month, largely for the podcast ad spend. NewGreens® discloses everything, uses clinically relevant doses, and was formulated by a practitioner — not a marketing team. I don’t say this to make anyone feel bad about buying AG1. I say it because after 25 years in this industry, I think you deserve to know what you’re actually getting.

Right alongside the NewGreens®, I take two more products: our Bioactive CoQ10 (Ubiquinol QH) and our Daily Multivitamin. These go together, and there’s a specific reason for this pairing.

The B-vitamins in the multi also work synergistically with the CoQ10 — specifically B2 (riboflavin) and B3 (niacin), which are involved in the same mitochondrial energy pathways that CoQ10 supports. Taking them together at the same time every morning makes physiological sense.

This is the question I get from people who look at this stack and think it’s more complicated than it needs to be. Why not just throw the collagen, greens, CoQ10, and multi into one shake and be done with it?

A few reasons. First, collagen peptides absorb most efficiently without competing food or supplement proteins present — combining them with a heavy greens matrix slows that process. Second, the enzymes and probiotics in NewGreens® work better when they’re not mixed with large amounts of protein, which creates a very different gut environment. Third, fat-soluble nutrients like CoQ10, vitamins A, D, E and K genuinely need some form of dietary fat to absorb — and on a completely empty stomach first thing in the morning, you often don’t have that yet.

Sixty minutes between step one and steps two-through-four isn’t inconvenient. It’s just the difference between a protocol that works and one that looks impressive on paper.

“The supplement industry sells you what to take. Almost nobody tells you when — or why the sequence changes the outcome.”

On training days — which for me is most mornings — after the greens and the CoQ10 and multi, I move into what I call the Athletic Stack before my workout. That’s a separate protocol built around whey protein isolate, Perfect Creatine™, and HMB — compounds that work differently than the foundation stack and need to be timed relative to exercise, not relative to waking up.

I’ll write that one separately. But it builds directly on this foundation — and the reason the athletic compounds perform the way they do is partly because the mitochondrial and micronutrient foundation is already in place when I take them.

Get the foundation right first. The performance layer works better because of it.