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We Lymies can sure spend a bundle when it comes to treating our bugs with herbs and vitamins, can’t we?
Over the past two (and nearly a half) years of throwing all kinds of ammunition at the army of critters in my body, I’ve asked myself at least a hundred times whether Borrelia Burgdoferi and Company are getting blown away by my arsenal, or are laughing at the thousands of dollars I’ve spent on supplements. Weapons designed to keep my organs functioning, weapons designed to detox the body, and more weapons to kill the pathogens….it’s never-ending.
I can’t know with certainty what’s furthered my healing and what hasn’t. I might have a clue but any positive change I get in my symptoms could be due to any of the twenty or thirty pills I take a day, or none of these.
The issue of knowing which supplements a Lymie needs deserves an entire dissertation, which, lucky for you, I won’t attempt to write today (or probably any other day). What I will share are
a few tips for making sure you get the most out of your supplements.
1)First, not all vitamins and supplements are created equal! Those you find at your local health food store may be good but they may also have been sitting on the shelf a long time, and their potency is questionable.
2) Combination supplements may counteract one another. For instance, it is rumored that calcium and magnesium use the same metabolic pathways in the body, so buying a combo supplement of these will compromise the effectiveness of one of the two minerals.
3) Many companies use unhealthy fillers and preservatives in their products. If you see a fancy word you don’t recognize on the ingredients label, watch out!
4) Supplements can come from contaminated sources. Consider fish oil. Unless the distillation process is impeccable and the species of fish used is one thought to be less contaminated by mercury, some of this contamination may seep into the product.
5) Some products aren’t manufactured in a bioavailable form, and the body cannot utilize what isn’t available to it. A simple example would be purchasing vitamins in tablet form, when a person has insufficient HCl in the stomach to digest the vitamin.
6) Study the interactions between vitamins, or you might be throwing money down the ol’ john.
Iron competes with magnesium for first place in the bloodstream, chlorella and Vitamin C cannot be taken together, and the list goes on….Okay, so you can’t be obsessive about it, but a little knowledge can go a long way.
So line up your army, and get ready to battle the bugs!