Many people with food intolerances feel continuously run down and believe that some multivitamin supplements will give them a boost.  Vitamins are largely derived from foods and, for the food intolerant, it matters which foodstuff a particular vitamin is extracted or derived from.  In other words, vitamin supplements have to be chosen with care to avoid causing further food intolerance reactions.  In fact, there are almost no multivitamin formulae that can be assumed safe.  It is far better to purchase individual supplements, to test them for untoward reactions, in the same way you test foods that you eat, and to combine them into your daily routine as and when you believe them to be safe.

With many supplements, it is not just the key ingredient that requires this approach, but the excipients that are used to make the capsule or tablet.  In essence, when looking at a tablet or capsule of a supplement, you may be looking at the equivalent complexity of a meal on a plate.  A supplement that includes amino acid components will certainly have been derived from plant or animal material and it is important to know what that source is.  If it has a bovine origin, then it is likely to produce similar atopic symptoms to those produced by beef or dairy products. One problematic ingredient is sugar.  If it is labelled as cane sugar then it will probably produce symptoms in those who cannot take cereals, but it may also have been de-colourised by means of filtering through bone charcoal, from cattle and this will likely add a bovid component to the allergenicity, which some users will definitely notice in terms of the symptoms produced. That may be upsetting news for vegans.  There is plenty of advice on this at various vegan and vegetarian websites.

One aspect of supplements that helps us break away from the focus on dairy products is the provision of calcium as a mineral supplement, preferably in combination with magnesium.  In combination with vitamin D, calcium can be assimilated from its mineral form.  It doesn’t need to be bound in organic sources. Consuming dairy products just because you need some calcium, when dairy products are the cause of many atopic symptoms, is a crazy solution to the need for calcium. Eating other calcium-rich foods and, perhaps, some mineral form calcium is a much better route to take.  Stomach acids will put most mineral forms of calcium into solution and vitamin D from exposure to sunlight, or from food sources, will help with assimilation of that calcium.  Magnesium is equally essential in the diet.