hi pam, somehow i did not see your most recent question until today.
in my situation, it did not matter whether i was talking about taking pills or swallowing liquids, my throat was sticking mid-swallow at any random time and i could not breathe until i managed to complete the swallowing motion. it sucked.
this was in addition to continually having the feeling of things going down the wrong way, taking a swig of water and having it definitely go down the wrong way, or having food move very slowly through my oesophagus.
i found that separating some of my magnesium intake from the d3 intake made the major difference to all of those problems. i still have some throat weirdness - it's more like i have to clear my throat every now and then, but i can do so effectively now.
after the magnesium timing switch, i had no further problems with taking pills, or eating, or drinking, or just the regular swallowing you do over the course of the day, all of which had been traumatic for some time previously. one exception: the time i stopped all magnesium supplements for a week prior to going to a throat specialist - the issues came back obediently.
as for what to take:
Quote:
I currently take Vitamin D drops and I have a powdered cal/mag complex that can be mixed with food or water. It's not a balanced regimen but at least it's manageable.
So... I am back on the VitaCost site and found a chewable Vit C with mixed bioflavanoids that looks good. I am thinking that I also need a good balanced high potency multi and B-100 as a minimum. Unfortunately I find that it's hard to swallow large pills these days as they make me choke.
What can I do to ensure I'm getting good balanced supplementation as recommended for MS while minimizing choking risk?
I would like to hear whether adding some extra magnesium to your daily intake has been helpful at all. There is a product Natural Calm which is powdered mag citrate which you can get in a variety of flavours and is a nice hot drink perfect for bedtime.
first and foremost, i would consider a good diet to be the required foundation for a minimalistic supplementation plan. so either way you need to be able to swallow!
i don't buy into a few of the mainstream diet recommendations for ms, but if you minimize the baddies and maximize the good foods, you'd be on the right track anyway. i tend to think correcting a few out of whack levels would make many ms patients less sensitive to some of the foods they are advised to avoid.
personally i can't afford all organics when i'm shopping, but i try for at least some.
minimal baked/manufactured/processed convenience foods.
i try to ensure raw or very lightly steamed foods and a quality protein source are part of the daily routine..
guilty fast food pleasures: 6" tuna sub with cheese and veg, no sauce... 16 cheeseburgers per year - sat and sun lunch bbq through the ski season LOL
generally i try not to eat too much from restaurants, except that's another thing that's pretty hard for me during jan and feb.
as far as your supplement list, to me it looks like you are on the right track.
Overall, I am personally in line with the Direct-MS supplement recommendations - although i can't say i niacin-flush regularly any more, and with folic acid i tend to leave it at what's in the Bcomplex
personally i feel that the most important supplements would be:
zinc (my 50mg capsules are the smallest pills i take in any given day)
vitamin D3 (balanced with cal/mag and extra off-timed mag - all doable in liquid format)
a quality multivitamin/multimineral - as for selecting multis, if you don't like premade liquids, there are all kinds of powdered products out there like greensplus, or i think vega? - that you can mix into shakes/smoothies. pretty sure i tried a greensplus sample one time though, and found it pretty nice. you can check out the various options and compare them to what you know is needed for ms patients, boost amounts where necessary.
b100-complex (perhaps with added sublingual b12) - it's possible to find a good capsule that is not a horse-pill. also keep trying with the b complex liquids. see if you can get a sample of genestra b-complex liquid.
vitamin C (should be easy as pie to get a powdered version you can mix into orange juice, or if you like the chewable you mentioned, great!
)
vitamin E (E8 complex - natural ratio - is best in terms of supplements, it's basically oils in gelcaps from what i have seen so far. you can also just boost your intake of sunflower seeds, sunflower seed oil, wheat germ, that sort of thing)
fish oil (as opposed to cod liver oil) (i take big gelcaps but you should be able to get something decent that you can take by the spoonful).
vitamin A - make sure you get the recommended daily amount.
calf's liver, milk and eggs have preformed vit A according to
www.whfoods.com. (love that site)
Food sources of carotenoids include carrots, sweet potatoes, spinach, kale, collard greens, and tomatoes (also from
www.whfoods.com)
i also have a jar of vit A gelcaps and they are tiny so you hopefully would not have a problem with those if you chose to take some. i don't take vit A every day and it's not one i have tended to monitor closely - yet!
eat two brazil nuts per day for selenium. otherwise the selenium 200mcg capsules i take are also quite small, so you should be able to find something
.
HTH! glad you found the sig links handy too
take care
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it's from the SELECT study though.
