Thesmophoria

I tried Celiact this week. For two and a half days only -- and then I had to stop.

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It seemed like a great idea. It has a ton of stuff in it, all of which I was taking separately and some of which I had on order and didn't have access to. I don't have anywhere to buy gluten-free vitamins, since I live in Japan and they aren't very gluten-free-friendly here, and the US bases stock what the servicemen want, and that doesn't seem to be the same stuff I want. So everything comes to me from Amazon via a slow cargo ship. Given the trial and error of supplements, it's slow-going to find something that fits my needs.

Strike one for Celiact: I emailed them to ask if the probiotics in them would survive being mailed to me, especially since the website recommends keeping them in a dark, cool place. Normally I take freeze-dried probiotics, which can take that kind of journey and remain viable. But no response from Celiact, almost a month later.

Strike two: Once it arrived in the mail, the first thing I see, right on the bottle, is that it contains TRACE AMOUNTS OF CASEIN. So -- I wondered if I should take it or not? I was on day 5 of an experimental casein-free diet. I was pretty excited to try it, since I was hoping the magnesium would help with C and bloating. Meh. I could always just start that again. So I started it. But anything specifically made to help celiacs heal should be dairy-free. Even the wildcard box of gluten-free goodies I get from Open Original Shared Link are dairy-free (and AWESOME), even though they have some products oats and beans, which I can't handle. They know dairy is basically taboo to a lot of celiacs.

Strike three: The bloating and C were not noticeably better than they had been with the other supplements I was taking. Plus, I still had stomach aches and whatnot after eating, which Digestive Gold had minimalized. But now I had new problems, and I don't just mean the unexpected gift of neon-gold urine from excess Riboflavin. The day after I started Celiact, I woke up with a sudden dizziness and depression that lasted all day, and then went to bed with an insomnia that even melatonin couldn't crack. This lasted two days until on the third day I noticed the dizziness and depression lifted just over seven hours after I took the Celiact with breakfast, just when my urine had turned back to a normal shade. Coincidence?

So today I'm officially going back off Celiact and picking back up my sundry digestive enzymes, probiotic, multivitamin, and D3. If the dizziness and depression are still gone tomorrow, I'll have greater evidence that they're connected to taking Celiact. If that's the case, I can't be sure it's the casein -- especially since I haven't really done a casein challenge yet -- but at least something in the Celiact would have been the problem. Casein's a likely culprit, though.

For what it's worth, the label on the bottle also said that they were planning to release a casein-free version sometime soon. But by then I'll have already found my rhythm with a different set of supplements.