47: The 5 Best and Worst Supplements for Crohn's and Colitis (IBD)

Crohn's and Colitis can be handled naturally and I'm giving you the 5 BEST and 5 WORST supplements to use for your inflammatory bowel disease so you can better understand the natural, functional medicine approach to it all.

TOPICS DISCUSSED:

• The 5 worst supplements that are harming your gut and wasting your money
• The 5 best supplements I give my clients
• Why supplements are not the answer
• Root causes vs. "plant based medication"

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Transcript

Josh Dech:
Supplements are critical for healing your gut and Crohn's and colitis, especially healing naturally. But you're using the wrong ones, and frankly, you're wasting a lot of your money. So I'm going to be showing you the most common supplements that are used in IBD, which ones I believe are a waste of money, and of course, alternatives that you can use. We're going to talk about which ones might actually be harming you without you realizing. And then, of course, I'm going to give you my top five IBD supplements that I give to my clients who are successfully reversing their IBD.

Contrary to what your doctors told you, Crohn's and colitis are reversible. Now, I've helped hundreds of people reverse their bowel disease, and I'm here to help you do it too. Because inflammation always has a root cause. We just have to find it. This is the Reversing Crohn's and Colitis Naturally Podcast.

Now, I do these live trainings in my Facebook group every single week and put the audios here for you to listen to. If you want to watch the video versions of these episodes, just click the links in the show notes to get access to our Facebook group and YouTube channel. And for weekly updates, information, tips and tricks, you can sign up for our email list by clicking the link in the show notes below.

Now, if you don't know me, my name is Josh Dech. I'm an IBD specialist, a medical lecturer and physician’s consultant, as well as a scientific strategist and education director for the RCFCC — that's the Root Cause for Crohn's and Colitis organization.

Now today, we're talking about the best and worst supplements for IBD. Supplements, arbitrarily to manage inflammation, are by no means a solution to IBD. And here's why. I love supplementation for healing naturally, but the goal is to heal. If you are using supplements to manage your inflammation, you are therefore taking plant-based medication. Medications simply manage symptoms. That’s just what they do.

So my goal for you is to make sure that the talk we're doing today — you understand everything is nuanced. These aren't some golden ticket. They're phenomenal, what I'm going to give you, but it's not a golden ticket to just reversing your IBD just like that with a few supplements.

If we truly want to do that, we have to identify the root cause, go after it, understand what we're taking, why we're taking it, the results it should produce, the timelines in which those results should come. But if you're arbitrarily taking supplements hoping your gut will magically get better, you are taking plant-based medication and that's all it is.

So with that caveat being said, everything I'm giving you today, we're going to be going through the top five most common supplements those with Crohn’s, colitis are taking — that's across the thousands of people we've seen now over the years. I'm going to go through what's wrong, why they could be harming you, and of course, my alternatives to those. And at the end, I'm also giving you my top five that I give to my clients who are actively reversing their IBD after we've identified that root cause.

The five worst supplements.

Number one is prebiotics. Prebiotics like inulin, for example — these are often used. The idea is we want to use things like inulin — okay, again, that's a prebiotic — to promote healthy gut microbiome activity, to promote bacterial growth.

The problem is, a lot of those dealing with IBD — you've probably got what's called gut dysbiosis. So if you think of it this way: if you have your gut — it's kind of like a fishbowl. Inside are the fish. Prebiotics are the fish food. That's the food that the bacteria eat. Your fish are the probiotics — the living organism, okay. Then, of course, you have the fish poop, which is the postbiotic. It's what your bacteria make.

Now picture a healthy gut. You can put the food in, the fish eat, they're happy. An unhealthy gut like yours, a gut that is inflamed, is dealing with a bunch of angry fish who should not be there. And they're eating all this, pooping out bad things. So prebiotics are bad for your gut. And this is why I don't recommend them. It's a big problem.

If you take these prebiotics, have gas, you're smelly, you're bloating, symptoms of irritability, gut issues — stop taking them. You're feeding the bad guys.

So, are these harmful? Probably. Are they a waste of money? My answer is this: if prebiotics harm you or you feel bad, it's a waste of money. Stop taking it. If you feel good, you're lucky enough to be feeding the good guys, getting good benefits — so use with caution.

The next supplement we're talking about — and this is a common one I see in the IBD space — is going to be greens powders.

Should we be taking greens powders?

Number one, they’re often used to help promote nutrient absorption. You're low on vitamins and minerals and all the things, so we have to take some greens.

The problem is, many greens powders contain things like algae. You get your chlorella and spirulina to keep manufacturing costs low and profits high. Chlorella, spirulina — these algaes are often taken off of farms off the coast of China and Japan and other areas where there's a lot of junk in the water. They absorb heavy metals and toxins, and you put those into your body. So they can actually be toxic.

On top of that, grasses or grass-based supplements — they often contain things that are high in oxalates. And these plant materials can trigger immune reactions, especially in those with GI issues — more bloating, diarrhea. And a lot of them also contain a lot of histamine contaminants, and we know that histamines make IBD much worse.

So are greens powders harmful? Again, possibly. Are they a waste of money? I think absolutely. I don't like using greens powders personally.

I would go with a high quality animal-based organ blend — something that's more bioavailable, has lower risk of contamination. And this might look like Heart and Soil, or whatever that you're finding that your favorite influencers are using. Just double check manufacturer quality and regulations.

The third supplement I see people taking that is extremely, extremely hard on the gut is oral iron supplements.

Your doctor says, “Here’s an oral iron pill. You’ve got gut issues, you’re bleeding, you’re anemic — here’s an iron pill.”

Here’s the problem though. It might be used to treat anemia — that's low iron. We're also assuming that you’re taking it because you’re bleeding.

I’m going to split this into two ways. Number one — if you’re bleeding a lot, taking more iron might make you worse. I see it way more commonly than it helping.

But number two — if you are dealing with anemia, so low iron, but you’re not bleeding a lot… where’s it going, right?

So why are we taking iron? We have to understand that iron can actually be food. A common driver of inflammation and bowel disease is actually parasites. Did you know that? Parasites love to eat iron.

So if you’re consuming oral iron — back to the fish in the fishbowl — you could be feeding parasites, producing more byproducts. Not only are the actual metal shavings causing you problems, but you’re feeding the wrong microbes, producing the wrong byproducts, making you sick.

So keep that in mind. Is oral iron harmful? In my opinion, almost always. Is it a waste of money? Hell yeah. Just grab some liver capsules or something else from it — again, an animal organ blend: liver, spleen, kidney, heart — lots of iron, and it’s extremely bioavailable. It’s not just metal shavings.

Next up, supplement number four is a common one because it’s “so good for your gut” — it’s ferments. Ferments and fermented foods.

They’re used because they’re probiotic, they’re supposed to be gut friendly, they’re supposed to be good for healing and repairing your gut and giving you all those friendly bacteria.

But in IBD, 95-plus percent of the time, they are bad for your gut.

Here’s why.

In IBD, it’s an overactive immune response. And one of the hyperactive immune responses we see is called Th2.

What does Th2 do? It increases your histamines.

Now what are histamines? Rashes, hives, itchy, swelling, if you get stung by a bee — allergy-type reactions.

These probiotic fermented foods are extraordinarily high in histamines, and they’re likely to make you bloated, make you feel worse.

It’s very rare I see someone with IBD who’s actually being helped by ferments and other high-histamine foods like bone broth. So be very very careful with that.

So the question is, are fermented foods harmful? In my experience — almost always. They’re typically irritants leading to bloat etc., that need to be removed for a long period of time.

Are they a waste of money? Yes. Now if you're making your own, it's obviously not going to be a big financial expenditure, but we need to avoid fermented. Focus on low-histamine probiotic introduction.

If you want probiotics, you can look at some Lactobacillus strains. Some release lactic acid and histamines, so we have to be careful with those Lactobacillus strains.

But some, like rhamnosus — great for the gut. Lactobacillus plantarum — good for the gut, low histamine. Also Bifidobacterium strains like infantis, bifido longum, breve, and even spore-based probiotics like Bacillus subtilis, Bacillus coagulans, and other Bacillus strains — they’re low in histamine, great for the gut, and they can be extremely beneficial.

The fifth and final waste-of-money supplement — or the bad ones for you, anyway — are going to be multivitamins.

Am I saying multivitamins are bad? No.

Am I saying the one you're buying is trash? Probably.

Most of us go to the grocery store and buy the cheapest one we can get. But cheap means cheap ingredients.

Multivitamins are intended to increase your nutrient profile in your body — your cells, your blood, your organs — but again, most are cheap.

Something that’s been trending a lot lately is folic acid. Did you know folic acid — right, we know vitamin B9 — your doctor will give folic acid to you if you’re pregnant.

Folic acid is the artificial form. What we want is actually called methyl folate or even the more bioavailable form you’ll see is called L-5 methyl folate. There’s a whole lot more you can see in forms, but…

Folic acid not only can lead to an elevation of things like homocysteine — which can drive up blood pressure and other issues that can cause imbalances — but folic acid has now been shown to actually block methyl folate, the natural folate from your food, from crossing the blood-brain barrier.

So this fake vitamin — not only does it cause imbalances — it’s actually been shown to decrease your uptake of the real vitamin.

So these fake multivitamins — the cheap ones — we have these cyanocobalamin, where it’s cheaply bound to cyanide rather than a methylated or usable form. They’re cheap.

If you’re going with a multivitamin — again, I’m a big fan of utilizing organ blends or something else — but make sure you’re getting a methylated blend. You can see that where you’ll see the word methyl attached to some of the B-vitamin words, and that’s how we know it’s going to be high quality.

So can multivitamins be harmful? Mostly to the wallet.

In theory, they can also be harmful to you if you’re experiencing a lot of symptoms with them — anxiety, depression, ADHD, the works.

I actually talked about this on my podcast on Reversible with Sage Workinger — that’s Gary Brecka’s wife — and she talked about, she went mental one day. Her depressive episodes, anxiety, irritability, lashing out — and it was actually her vitamins. Because they were the wrong form and it created imbalances in her body. They can be extremely toxic.

So you want to make sure we’re using the good stuff.

So are multivitamins harmful? They sure can be.

Are they a waste of money if they’re cheap? Absolutely.

If they’re high quality and available, then I’m all for them.

The moment you’ve been waiting for — the best supplements that I like to use. That I give to my clients who are successfully reversing IBD — off medications, off the drugs, no signs, no symptoms, colonoscopies are clear — what are the top five that I like to use?

Now again, I want to put the disclaimer in here.

I’m a big fan of supplementation when they’re done tailored and deliberate, with an intention of identifying and removing the root cause and repairing the damage that’s been done to your body so it can then heal itself.

Everything I’m going to give you is an extremely powerful anti-inflammatory rebuilder. But it’s like pouring water on the house when it’s on fire without turning off the gas leak. We have to go after those root causes no matter what.

But these are phenomenal things that I’ve used with clients to help them get out of flares, and that I often use in their process of getting their body’s toxic burden to downgrade or to lessen so that they can have more room for their immune system to heal. It makes them feel better almost immediately.

That’s my disclaimer

So my top five supplements that I recommend to my clients dealing with IBD…

The first one is called R-ALA. That stands for R-Alpha Lipoic Acid — not ALA. If your bottle says Alpha Lipoic Acid, it’s not R-ALA.

And something to keep in mind — this one’s finicky. There are cheaper versions of R-ALA, but they typically break down in the stomach. You want something that’s either phospholipid or like a phospholipid-coated — which is gastric stable, so it gets where it needs to go.

But R-ALA — it’s amazing. It modulates the immune system, it’s anti-inflammatory, it actually downregulates a lot of inflammatory pathways you’re dealing with now in IBD. It downregulates NF-kappa B, it downregulates TNF-alpha, Interleukin-6 — all these inflammatory cytokines — it brings them down.

It actually supports and heals the colonocytes — those are your colon cells. It repairs tight junctions. And part of your immune system overreacting is actually leaky gut — those cells are spread apart. This R-ALA helps seal that back up, reducing the burden on your immune system. And it also improves nutrient uptake.

Now a typical dose that we can see with R-ALA — it depends on you and your tolerance to it — but it’s anywhere from 150 to 600 milligrams daily, and that’s typically split in anywhere from two to three doses.

But R-ALA is extremely powerful, and there have been studies done where they’ve used R-ALA and found people going into full remission just with this. Does that mean it’s a cure? No. Does it mean it’s very powerful in the right context? Absolutely. It’s a very powerful supplement in the right hand.

Supplement number two — you may have seen this one coming or had questions about it — BPC-157.

This isn’t any supplement — it is a peptide. BPC-157 is extraordinarily powerful. It helps restore blood vessels — it’s called angiogenesis, so generating. It helps restore blood vessels, restores tissues, takes down inflammation.

It’s actually manufactured in your gut, and it’s extremely anti-inflammatory. It’s a phenomenal peptide. But we don’t want to rely on it.

Remember, peptides especially need to be short use. What we’re looking at for something like BPC — anywhere from 2 to 8 weeks. I recommend professional supervision, because taking it too long can actually mess up the positive-negative feedback loops on your healing, and you can have all kinds of issues with long-term healing and repair.

So it’s great for short-term, emergent use. And these doses might look like anywhere from 250 to 1,000 micrograms, split again in two to three doses across the day — for again, two to eight weeks, dependent.

And BPC is nice because it’s gastric stable. You can take a capsule or a pill — you don’t have to inject it like many other peptides. But it can be very, very powerful.

My next favorite supplement that I like to use for those dealing with inflammation and IBD — this one is called Tributyrin.

You might also know this as butyrate. You can typically find it as like a sodium butyrate or something else. Have to watch dosing for irritability. But Tributyrin is the available form. It helps heal the colon cells, it feeds the colon cells, again it reduces inflammation.

It also supports something we call T-reg cells.

T-reg cells are the regulator — remember we talked about Th2, that’s dominant, those histamine producers. We see sometimes Th9 and Th17 that are elevated in IBD.

Well, this Tributyrin promotes T-reg cell activity. That means these regulate these overactive T-cell pathways, and so it helps manage your inflammatory responses. It’s really cool.

So it increases that production, it promotes mucosal healing — that’s a protective layer in your intestines — it helps heal and seal leaky gut, which is leading to autoimmunity.

So Tributyrin is extremely powerful.

One of the issues we see is dosing — it can get a bit expensive. But we’ll typically see doses range anywhere from 300 mg to 5,000 mg — or that’s also known as 5 g — and that can be split two to three doses again during the day.

It just depends on tolerance. Some people do well with less. I’ve given higher doses to clients who felt really bloated — we backed off — but it depends on you.

But it’s an extremely powerful supplement. If you get a nice, high quality one — something like BodyBio or somewhere else that you trust — can be really nice as well.

The fourth supplement on my list, in my top five I give to my clients, is called TUDCA. T-U-D-C-A — tauroursodeoxycholic acid.

It is a natural acid. It’s made by humans. We can get an artificialized, capsuled form — again, more expensive — but extremely powerful.

It helps restore and heal the liver, liver cells, the gallbladder. It supports gallbladder function. It also supports the movement of toxins through bile recirculation and healthy clean bile, so you’re reducing your total toxic load.

It protects mitochondria, cellular function, energy production. It actually helps heal the gut lining, it’s anti-inflammatory.

And in animal models, TUDCA has actually shown to put colitis into remission many, many times over. Now again, there’s a lot of nuances there, but it just goes to show how powerful it can be.

And again, if you get cheap TUDCA, you get cheap results. So you want quality stuff.

But doses typically range anywhere from 250 to 500 milligrams, one to two times daily. And that’s what I put my clients on. It’s extremely powerful, and that’s typically the bottle dose.

You’ll see some might recommend up to 1,000 milligrams, but I find there’s sort of a range where you get cost and benefit ratio, and the best cost-to-benefit I find is 250 to 500, one or two times a day for my clients. Extremely powerful.

The fifth supplement we’re using is going to be working really well in conjunction with the rest.

Remember, multivitamins are meant to increase nutrients. We do all these things. But here’s what we need to know: if you want to increase absorption, you want to heal your body, you want to remove those toxins which are burdening your immune system — one of my favorite supplement blends is actually called Humic and Fulvic Acid.

These are soil compounds, but they’re extremely powerful as binders.

What binders are is — when you have toxins circulating around your body, they get reabsorbed — binders capture them to be excreted through your detox or your drainage pathways — the exit doors — primarily your bowels in this case.

This is a binder. It detoxes, it captures, it can regulate cell function, it can actually detox your terrain.

Picture trying to plant a tree to grow fruit — and you’re planting that in salted, dirty, filthy, toxic, contaminated soil. It’s never going to grow.

Your gut and your gut microbes need healthy terrain, non-toxic terrain, to give them the best chance to grow the probiotics that they need.

And so this H actually helps clean that soil, so to speak, so your body can plant healthy microbes and have healthy, happy results.

So it’s a terrain detoxer. It also helps in the modulation of your immune system and your immune reactions, improves nutrient absorption as well.

Now, these can be dosed very differently — everybody’s going to be different. They typically come in a blend — that’s what I’m talking about in these cases.

Go slow with binders. Especially if you have mold toxicity or something else — binding too much too fast can actually make you very, very sick. So always go slow.

But a standard working dose might look like — if it’s a liquid — anywhere from 1 to 2 mL, one to two times daily.

Now if we’re looking at a capsule or a powder dose, again doses can range anywhere from 250 to about 500 milligrams, also one to two times daily.

But go slow with binders.

Here’s what I want to remind you: these are all great supplements. They do a phenomenal job in helping control inflammation, inflammatory responses.

But ultimately, we need to understand why you are inflamed.

I’m going to summarize with this.

I describe your body like a cup of water.

Here’s what happens with that cup. Something starts to fill that cup — be it toxins, stress, microbial infections — whatever you have going on.

There’s only three reasons we get sick — toxins, microbes, and deficiencies. So they start to fill your cup up and you start to develop symptoms — gas, bloat, bleeding, mucus, diarrhea, irritability, digestive pain, cramping, whatever you have — until one day that cup overflows.

You go to your doctor. They’re like, “Yep, you have colitis, you have Crohn’s. That just is what it is.”

At no point have they asked:

1. What filled your cup? That’s the first question.
2. Why isn’t your cup able to drain or empty out the bottom like anybody else’s cup? Why are you holding on to all these things?
3. Now that your cup has overflowed, what else has gotten wet? What other systems in your body have become compromised?

The supplements that we’ve listed here today — they’re great for cleaning up some of the water, they’re great for helping empty the cup a little bit — but they’re not a full-fledged repair. That can take sometimes months.

Our programs we run clients through are four months, sometimes six months. I’ve had clients as long as nine, even ten months, to get this stuff fully reversed depending on what’s going on.

So this isn’t to discourage you from taking these supplements — I just don’t want you to have false hope thinking it’s a silver bullet.

But if you need some help and you want some help, you can do that very easily. If you’re watching on YouTube or you’re listening on the podcast and you want some help, you want to look at a protocol and see if it’s a good fit, check the links below in the notes and you can get access to that. Send me an email, ask a question, book a call — whatever you need.

The information is there. We just want to see if it’s a good fit for you.

On that note guys, it’s all we got for you. Thanks so much for being here. We’ll see you next time.

One of my favorite things to hear as an IBD specialist is something along the lines of, “I learned more from you in 15 minutes than from my doctor in 15 years.”

And if this for the first time is really starting to click and it’s starting to make sense and you’re going, “Wait a minute — this might be reversible. I think there’s more that I can do. This condition came out of nowhere. It happened to me out of the blue. I was healthy for 10, 20, 30, 40 years, and suddenly I wasn’t.” And you’re telling me there’s no cause?

If you’re understanding finally that there is a cause, that something is driving this, I want to invite you to check the link in the show notes below. Send me an email, ask a question, see if a program is the right fit for you — because I promise you this:

This doesn’t have to be a lifelong sentence. You’re not doomed to this.
And IBD can be reversed.