Which Supplements I Take

I know very, very little about supplements.  As much as I enjoy learning about real food and traditional diets, the topic of supplementation makes me go limp and pass out.  I start hearing Charlie Brown's teacher in my head and nothing that I read on the topic will stick.

I think I mostly balk at the idea of supplementation because it feeds off of the concept of nutritionism (that food is nothing more than the sum of its parts), with which I disagree.  It's that idea that all you need is a good multi-vitamin to fill in the gaps, and you're good to go.  Or that you can improve a food by adding something or taking something away.  Poppycock, I say!

Also, trying to learn about supplements on your own is a deep, dark rabbit hole that will result in you self-diagnosing a dozen deficiencies and spending a small fortune in the process.

Still, there are a few supplements that I see mentioned so frequently as being universally beneficial that I do take some.  Even though my diet is based on traditional food principles, it is still a very modern diet with definite shortcomings.  I know how important organ meats are, but I just...I just can't.  At least not in sufficient quantities.  And I know that our soils are depleted, and if it isn't in the soil, it isn't in the food.

I take:

Cod Liver Oil

This used to be a household staple.  It used to be a baby's first food before cereals came along and ruined everything.  Our parents might remember taking it as a kid.

Fermented cod liver oil is a whole, real food supplement that provides fat-soluble vitamins A and D in proper ratios.  It is not the same thing as fish oil, which is generally highly processed and rancid.

The Weston A Price Foundation strongly advocates supplementing with fermented cod liver oil.  When he studied the diets of traditional cultures, Dr Price found that their diets contain up to ten times more fat soluble vitamins than modern diets.  They are especially important for women trying to conceive.  There is a list of informative articles on their website; here is one that covers the basics.

As far as I know, there is only one brand of fermented cod liver oil, and that is Green Pasture.

I take the dosage recommended for pregnant and nursing mothers, which is 2 teaspoons a day.

A few pro tips:

>>You will save yourself a bucket of money by sucking it up and taking the liquid rather than the capsules.  Just do it.
>>You will save another bucket of money by taking advantage of their volume discounts - it saves $10/bottle to buy 12 at a time.  Go in with a friend, find a co-op, or just buy them all for yourself because they have a pretty long shelf life if kept cool and dark (I think 2 years, but don't quote me).
>>The cinnamon flavor is the best.  Trust me.  It is spicy, but does a great job covering up the fishy flavor.
>>Here is my method for taking it:  get your chaser ready.  I chase with raw milk because the FCLO actually blends with the fat in the milk and helps to not taste it.  Shoot some under your tongue and follow immediately with the chaser.  I can take a half teaspoon at a time this way.

Butter Oil

If you're going to take FCLO, you might as well take high-vitamin butter oil.  Another WAPF recommendation, Dr Price discovered that an unknown factor (he called it "Activator X," but we now believe it is the vitamin K2) found in the butterfat of animals grazing on rapidly growing spring grass, helps to activate and make useful other vitamins in your diet, particularly the fat soluble vitamins in cod liver oil.  Green Pasture offers the two as a blend, but it is cost effective to take them separately.  Compared to taking FCLO, butter oil is a breeze.

I take it one of two ways - either blended into a smoothie (about half a teaspoon, which you can't taste) or in "yellow tea" (see below).

Probiotics

Even though I do have fermented foods and/or drinks daily, I also (albeit irregularly) take a probiotic supplement.

With the constant daily assault that our guts take, even when you're trying to heal your gut, I think it's a really good idea - a necessity - to replenish your beneficial bacteria.  Good gut flora is so, so, so vitally important to your overall health.  Fermented foods and drinks (real pickles; sauerkraut; kefir; kombucha; real, full-fat yogurt) are the ideal source, but probiotics are probably a good idea as well.  I like to get as wide a variety of different bacteria and beneficial yeasts as I can.  I regularly eat fermented carrots, Bubbies brand pickles (which are actually fermented), and sauerkraut, and I regularly drink kombucha and milk kefir.

I take GutPro brand probiotics.  A tiny bottle is expensive, but much cheaper than high quality pills.  Like most things, don't bother taking a cheap probiotic.  I take it fairly irregularly...probably 3-4 times a week, mixed in a drink.  I give Felix a teeny tiny bit as well.

There are lots of good brands of probiotics.  Biokult, Natren, and Perscript-Assist to name a few.

Magnesium

Another one that most everyone is deficient in no matter what their diet looks like.  In addition to being depleted in the soils, magnesium stores are depleted in your body when you are under stress and consume sugar.  Calcium and magnesium need to be in balance with one another, but we tend to over-consume calcium in relation to magnesium.

This blog post is a good place to start reading about magnesium.

But truth be told, it was this post that got me to start actually supplementing.  Magnesium deficiency is apparently a factor in morning sickness.  Since I will likely, at some point, be pregnant again, and would do just about anything to avoid having morning sickness again, I will supplement the shit out of some magnesium.

I made magnesium lotion and use it at night before bed.  It's best to supplement transdermally, and the magnesium oil spray made my skin itch and burn like crazy.  The lotion doesn't itch at all.

Trace Minerals

While magnesium is a particularly important mineral, minerals in general are something we don't get quite enough of anymore, with purified drinking water and depleted soils and processed foods.

I use ConcenTrace, and add a few drops into whatever I'm drinking.  I don't really keep track of how much I take; I just leave it on the counter and whenever I get a drink I put a few drops in.  I don't like the flavor in just plain water, but I can add 5-10 drops into tea, kombucha, or a smoothie and not taste it.

Gelatin

Good for the gut, good for the skin, good for the joints, good for the cellulite (bad for the cellulite, rather).  I put it in yellow tea and smoothies.  Skip the Knox and go for Great Lakes.

Bonus: Yellow Tea

Yellow tea is really more like soup, but Felix calls it yellow tea, so yellow tea it is.  Bone broth is a big time staple in a traditional diet, and this recipe started out as just plain bone broth in a mug, but morphed as I tried to find ways to pack as much nutrition into a single mug as possible.

>Bone broth
>1T gelatin
>1 egg yolk
>High vitamin butter oil (I never measure...maybe 1/2-1 teaspoon)
>1T Coconut oil
>Real salt to taste (which is more than you'd think)
>Fresh garlic or garlic powder

I put cold bone broth in the mug I'm going to use (to measure how much I need), then pour it in a pot with about a tablespoon of gelatin mixed in.  It needs to sit for a little bit before you heat it up in order to fully dissolve.  While it's sitting, I add everything else to the mug.

After a minute or so, I heat the broth to a boil.  I let it cool slightly, then add it incredibly slowly to the mug.  Just a few drips at a time at first, while stirring.  This keeps you from making scrambled egg yolk.    After a few spoonfuls it's safe to pour it in faster.  Keep stirring the whole time.  The egg yolk ends up emulsifying the fat, and you get a nice silky mini soup.

Felix LOVES this stuff and asks for it just about every day.

I'm not very consistent in taking any of these except the cod liver oil.  I don't freak out if I forget something one day, and in fact, it's pretty rare that I do every single one of these in a day.

Felix also takes all of these, just in smaller doses.  He will finally take cod liver oil, about 1/4 teaspoon a day.  He gets butter oil in the yellow tea and in kefir smoothies.  Occasionally I'll remember to put a tiny bit of probiotic in a drink for him, but he drinks kombucha and kefir daily and real pickles daily, so I don't worry about it too much.  I put magnesium lotion on his back when he'll let me...which isn't often.