Today, I'm going to share my supplement graveyard and what you can learn from
failed supplement experiments, so stay tuned. If you're new here, welcome. My name is Amanda
Malachesky. I'm a certified functional nutrition health practitioner and a digestive and allergy
detective. For weekly videos about how to resolve your digestive complaints from the source, please
consider subscribing, and be sure to hit the bell to be notified when I post a new video every week.
If you've been sick for any length of time, you probably have a cupboard or a drawer
or a part of your closet that's full of supplement bottles that you don't use anymore, and today,
I want to share some of mine. But I also want to share how this supplement graveyard can help you.
So by the end of today's video, you'll know how many failed supplement experiments I've done
and you'll know what you can learn from yours. Lots of people think it's a waste of time to have
failed supplement experiments, and it certainly can be a waste of money in some degree. But my
client, Linda, found that one of the supplements she was taking was triggering her diarrhea, and so
having this experience helped her know what to do and what not to do.
And you can too, so let's get started. Okay. So you might think that because
I'm a professional, I have it all figured out with supplements and I don't make any mistakes, right?
Wrong, I make plenty of supplement mistakes and I've definitely, over the years, made lots and
lots of mistakes and had failed experiments. You see, we really don't understand how a
particular product or food for that matter is going to affect us. 100 different people could
give a testimonial about some magical mystical miracle supplement, and they could really truly
experience those benefits, but then you go to try it and you have a different experience. And the
main reason for this is really just that each one of us is entirely unique and we have really unique
physiology and our digestive systems function in a really unique way for each one of us. So
we really have to be thinking about this when we choose the supplements that we're taking
and be willing to learn from our mistakes. Okay. So what do I have in my supplement
graveyard? Let's take a look. I have a big bag of supplements here that I went around my house and
collected from the several places I keep leftover supplements. I have a cupboard, I have a place in
my closet. I have a place in my bathroom. So just to give you an idea of what's in here, I'm going
to show you what this looks like on screen here, and there are an awful lot of supplements in here.
So I'm just going to hold some of these up so you can see what I've got here. I've got
N-Acetyl-Cysteine, which actually is not totally in the graveyard, but I don't use it right now.
We've got cod liver oil, EPA, DHA supplement. Vitamin A. Ascorbic acid.
Biofilm Buster. Ooh, here's a good one,
acacia fiber. Big bottle, haven't really used it. Similase Sensitive Stomach Digestive Enzymes.
Vitamin D in a unique formula from Innate. Pylori-Plex to help with H. pylori treatment.
L-tryptophan. Millennia, oh, wait, nope, that's allicin. This is a garlic supplement. Oh,
intestinal support formula. These are serum bovine immunoglobulins. Hesperidin methyl chalcone,
which is an anti-histamine. Mimosa pudica, anyone? Colostrum, very expensive, fancy stuff, but didn't
work for me. And Vital-Zymes, chewable enzymes. That's just a sampling of what's in my bag here.
There's others, I didn't even include them all. And that's a lot money I've spent,
and yet each one of these supplements has taught me something about my body, my physiology, and how
my body processes things. So I want to talk a little bit more about this.
So I want to talk about a particular couple of supplements that are specific for gut health and
how we sometimes have to work through a little bit of a process to find the right one for our body.
So the first one I want to talk about are digestive enzymes, and I want to just show you
here that I have this one from Klaire. I've got this one from Innate. And I think I have, oh yeah,
and I've got this one from Integrative Therapeutics called Similase. So I know
that I struggled digesting certain things and I'm always looking for a digestive enzyme that's
going to help my digestive systems not have to work quite so hard with everything that I eat
and my naturopath also recommended that I regularly use enzymes. So
I've been shopping for the right enzyme. I was at a conference and I read all these
wonderful, fancy things about this enzyme and I decided to get a trial bottle. And I was using it,
but I just really didn't feel well on it. And I'm not exactly sure why, but I will say
that this enzyme has a lot of different enzymes in it. And one of the things that has in it
is a bromelain and papain-based enzyme, which come from papaya and pineapple. And I have known that I
wrestle with these ingredients sometimes and don't tolerate them very well and they have very high
doses of those enzymes. So this enzyme wasn't any good. Confirmed for me that I may not tolerate the
papaya and pineapple-based enzymes. This enzyme formula, it's supposed to
be for sensitive stomachs because lately when I take enzymes, I've been having stomach pain.
So my naturopath recommended this one for me, because it also has slippery elm, marshmallow, and
deglycyrrhizinated licorice, DGL, in it. But I didn't know this when I ordered it, that it had
the marshmallow root and the slippery elm, but I bloat whenever I eat those. So can't use these.
And then this one, this is just a straight forward digestive enzyme, a pancreatic enzyme
with a couple of extra things thrown in. And this one I have found is more tolerable for me.
I've lately been brought ... It's been brought to my attention by my naturopath that sometimes
people react negatively to the protease, which is the protein digesting enzyme in their enzymes and
can get stomach pain from them. If that's why they get pain when they take enzymes, that can be why.
And it's looking to me like that is happening for me, and so this enzyme supplement has
a neutral protease and it's also a relatively low amount. So this enzyme is the one that I've
found that works the best for me. It doesn't have the papaya and pineapple enzymes and
it doesn't have any extra ingredients that are going to bloat me or cause me trouble.
And just through trial and error, I figured out that this was the right way to go with enzymes.
So another gut supplement that I hope you've been working to include in your normal program
are probiotics. They're excellent for supporting your gut health in lots of different ways. And
there's a million products out there that are all aiming to help support your gut.
So here's one that you may have heard of called MegaSpore. It's all the rage, people are really
into it. It's a soil-based probiotic, which is nice because it brings a little bit more diversity
into our gut microbiome, from what most people are taking with their probiotics, which are usually
a lactobacillus bifidobacteria blend. So I got ahold of this probiotic and I used
it for some time and I worked up slowly to a dose that worked well for me and it worked really well.
Then I stopped taking it for a little while, probably because I ran out,
and then the next time I reordered it and tried to use it again, I couldn't take it anymore. It
was causing me some digestive distress. So we do have to be responsive with our supplements
and be paying attention to what our body's telling us about them. It's good to pay attention
sometimes and take a break from supplements to make sure that they're still working for us.
Okay. Another one that I want to talk about that's kind of an interesting situation is
good old vitamin C. We all know that vitamin C is super great for preventing illness and supporting
our immune health. But I have this one, this is a vitamin C powder. And I also have over here
Ester-C, which is a form of vitamin C that's supposed to be more absorbable. And I also
have a liquid liposomal vitamin C that's in my refrigerator, so I didn't bring that one out.
But the funny thing about vitamin C is sometimes if you have an oxalate sensitivity, vitamin C
can trigger oxalate trouble. And I have tried all these different kinds of vitamin C and I feel like
I could probably benefit from vitamin C, but I, as of yet, have not found a form that I can tolerate
other than in very low doses without triggering a lot of back pain and a major flare of symptoms.
So sometimes we can't even find one that works for us,
but what this has taught me is that I really do have sensitivity to oxalates and that is very,
very clear and there's some of them that are very strong triggers for me.
So higher doses of vitamin C were a really easy and clear way to test that and to realize that,
okay, yes, high doses of vitamin C, which are high in oxalate are triggering my oxalate symptoms.
So what do these failed supplement experiments tell us? They can really help isolate for us the
mechanisms of some of our symptoms. If, just for example, like I was talking about just a moment
ago, if we think we have an oxalate problem and we know that vitamin C is high in oxalate
and we take vitamin C and get symptoms that we associate with oxalate. So that's a pretty good
clue that that's what we're dealing with. I definitely want to invite you to pay really
close attention to when you have side effects from your supplements and to consider what those really
might mean. Tell me about some of your failed supplement experiments in the comments below.
Here are some ideas about how failed supplement experiments can help eliminate specifically what's
going on for you in your body and what kinds of mechanisms are at work for your symptoms.
Remember to just pay really close attention when you have side effects from your supplements and to
keep some ongoing notes maybe for yourself and to try and understand based on the
ingredients of the different supplements what kind of problem might be going on.
So if you're someone who feels like you could benefit from some of this tracking and
figuring out how to think into some of these situations, I really invite you to download my
gut guide called The Roadmap to Gut Recovery. It maps out the process that I use with my
clients to help them eliminate these kinds of things for themselves in their day-to-day life.
And you can download your free copy of that by visiting confluencenutrition.com/contact, and I'll
be sure to leave a link for that below this video. Or if you've already tried a lot of stuff and
you're still feeling really confused about where to go next or what's happening for you. I really
encourage you to schedule a free 30 minute assessment session with me where I can help you
maybe map out some of the next best steps for you. And we can also talk about what it would be like
to work one-on-one with me. You can schedule that by visiting confluencenutrition.com/contact, and I
will also leave a link for that below this video. All right. Well, I hope this video helped
illuminate for you that all those failed experiments with your supplements aren't
really failures at all. They're actually providing you with really important
information about your ongoing health and your project of understanding how to heal yourself.
If you liked this video, please consider liking and sharing it with those that you
know that could benefit from it, and I will look forward to seeing you all next time.