How Australian Women Now Build Their Own Stacks

My ferritin came back at 14 last spring, which my GP told me was the lowest she had seen in a non-anaemic patient in months. I had been training for a half-marathon for six weeks and had ignored the symptoms (tiredness I was blaming on work, irritability I was blaming on perimenopause, the inability to climb a flight of stairs without complaint) for the whole time. Women in their early forties are not supposed to need iron supplements, apparently. I am writing this piece partly because of that.

The other reason is a conversation I had with a pharmacist named Mel at a small chemist on King Street in Newtown about three weeks ago. She has been running that pharmacy for nine years. We were talking while she sorted a fresh shipment of magnesium glycinate onto a shelf that, she pointed out, used to hold reading glasses. "The women's supplement aisle in here has been redesigned three times in five years," she said, more matter-of-fact than irritated. "And the questions women come in with now are completely different from what they used to ask."

That is what this piece is actually about. The shift in how Australian women are putting together their own supplement routines, and why a pharmacist on King Street is the canary in the coal mine for it.

What used to be the script

For most of my career writing about women's wellness in Australia, the standard supplement advice for women under fifty was pretty thin. A multivitamin. Iron only if you had ferritin drawn and it came back low (which, in my case, it eventually did but only because I asked). Vitamin D in winter if you remembered. Most other things were considered the domain of either athletes or supplement nerds, and the average woman trying to hold her life together was steered away from them.

The problem with that script was less the products on it and more the assumption underneath. It assumed every woman under fifty had basically the same body, the same diet, the same hormonal context. A thirty-five-year-old training for triathlons. A forty-seven-year-old whose periods were getting weird. A fifty-two-year-old whose mother had broken her hip the previous winter. The standard advice was the same for all three. Which, looking back, was clearly not enough.

I think what changed is that women started noticing.

Three things shifted at once

Diets, first. More plant-based meals across the country. More intermittent fasting (which I still have mixed feelings about but is real). The high-protein lower-carb structuring that was originally for CrossFitters has somehow ended up at Pilates studios. The standard public health nutritional guidance was not written with any of those in mind, and the gaps showed up in bloodwork before they showed up in journalism.

Access to research, second. Open-access journals, summarised explainers, podcast saturation. A friend of mine called Sasha, who runs an architecture firm in Melbourne and could not have named a single vitamin five years ago, sent me a link to a Mayo Clinic creatine review last March with a one-line note: "Have you seen this?" That is the world we are in. I am not patronising. I am saying it has actually changed, and not just for the wellness influencer crowd.

Willingness to push back, third. A decade ago, a tired forty-something walking into a GP appointment was usually told some version of "you are probably fine". Now she is more likely to be told "let us check your ferritin and your B12 and your vitamin D, and we will see". That changes what women end up taking, because they finally have numbers.

Which brands actually adjusted

The supplement retailers that responded properly to this shift are the ones still doing well. The ones still selling pastel bottles with names like "her balance" or "her glow", and nothing specific behind the labels, have lost ground, particularly with women in the thirties-to-fifties range who can read a research summary and know when they are being marketed at. The retailers that built deeper catalogues and disclosed their sourcing have grown. The Australian retailer EliteSupps is one I send friends to when they are starting from scratch, because the alternative is bouncing between six different websites trying to compare actual EPA content in fish oil capsules.

I have not been paid to say that. I just send people there because it saves them time.

What I tell friends, in roughly the order I tell them

I have had this conversation enough times that there is a script now.

Protein first. Almost every woman I have ever discussed this with undereats it. The number that holds up under actual training is 1.4 to 1.8 grams per kilogram of body weight, spread across three or four meals. That is more than what your average women's magazine prints, less than what the bodybuilding internet recommends, and roughly where the actual research has been for a decade. I weigh 62 kilos. That means I am aiming for around 90 to 110 grams of protein a day. Most days I make it. Some days I do not.

Then bloodwork. Vitamin D, full iron panel (ferritin, not just haemoglobin), B12, sometimes thyroid. A GP can order all of these at once. They are cheap. They tell you more about what you actually need than any influencer recommendation, by a wide margin.

Then, only after the foundations are in place, the optional layer. Magnesium glycinate for sleep, taken about an hour before bed. Creatine if you do any resistance training, especially after thirty-five. Omega-3 if your diet does not include oily fish a few times a week. Calcium if your diet is low on dairy and you are heading into perimenopause.

Beyond those, the marginal benefit shrinks fast. Most of us would do better putting less money into more products and more money into fewer products taken consistently. I have not always followed my own advice on this.

The creatine question, which I keep getting asked

This is the supplement I should have written about three or four years earlier than I did. I was wrong about creatine for years. I thought it was a strength-sport product and most women would not benefit much. The newer research is fairly conclusive that I was wrong, particularly for lean mass preservation through perimenopause and for bone density when paired with even modest resistance training. The Bondi pilates set worked this out before I did. The Inner West marathon crowd worked it out before I did. I am late to my own beat on this one.

Hand on heart, I started taking 5 grams a day in February. Three things happened over the following six weeks. I sleep slightly better. My deadlift went up enough to notice. The recovery between my Tuesday and Thursday training sessions is more consistent than it has been in years. I cannot prove any of these are creatine and not just consistency, but I am sticking with it. The research suggests I should.

The hormonal context nobody else will say out loud

If you are between forty and sixty-five and reading this, this section is for you.

The supplement conversation in this stage of life is upstream of one specific thing. Oestrogen drops. That accelerates loss of bone density and lean muscle at the same time. Anything that slows that trajectory has outsized leverage. Resistance training. Adequate protein. Vitamin D at properly dosed levels. Calcium if dietary intake is low. Possibly creatine. Possibly omega-3. The stack that worked at thirty-five is not the stack that works at fifty-two.

The single best resource I send people to when they want to read past the wellness marketing is the Australasian Menopause Society. I have referenced their material in I do not know how many articles over the years. It is non-commercial, evidence-based, written by clinicians and consistently sober about what actually has research behind it. No upsell. No bottles to buy. Exactly what a confused fifty-year-old in a GP waiting room needs.

I wish I had known about them earlier in my own thirties. I think a lot of women would benefit from finding them earlier than they typically do.

What I would skip

The universal rule of supplements is that anything promising to fix five things at once is doing none of them well.

Most BCAA products are pointless if you eat enough protein, which most women I work with do once they actually count it properly. Pre-workout proprietary blends hide their doses because the doses are not impressive. Most of the pretty pastel-packaged "women's wellness" supplements are charging twice the price of the equivalent unpackaged version. The branding is the product.

I have probably bought all three at some point in my career. That is part of the data set.

Back to King Street

The conversation with Mel ended with her telling me the question she gets most often now is not "which supplement should I take". It is "which test should I ask my GP for". I think that is the more useful question, and it is the one this piece is really for.

The supplement industry will keep adding noise. It will keep launching pastel bottles. It will keep paying influencers to mention them. None of that is going to slow down. What has changed is who is walking through the door of a pharmacy on King Street, and what they are willing to ignore on the way past the front display.

Contributed by West Media on behalf of EliteSupps

Image credit Pexels