Watch the video below for an explanation!
Hey, a quick message. I was looking at some of the Q&A questions that have come through in the Migraine Healing Circle as part of the Repattern Migraine coursework. And one of them that came up I thought was worth mentioning today, and it has to do with bitters and with a lot of these substances that are supposedly really good for healing migraines such as butterbur and ginger and feverfew. Those are bitter herbs. And then of course there’s the B vitamin riboflavin, which is really supposedly very helpful for migraine. And I want talk very briefly about the B vitamins and bitters because a lot of people are taking formulas that are supposedly going to help them with their migraines that contain these substances and they don’t work especially well. I want to explain why.
So whenever you have a multivitamin that contains just one single B vitamin, that’s definitely not something I encourage because all the B vitamins work together. People with migraine do benefit from riboflavin, but riboflavin works with other B vitamins. There are actually two other B vitamins besides riboflavin that are my absolute all-time favorite B vitamins for migraine, and you can find out about that in the coursework. The point is they work synergistically. B vitamins have synergistic relationships with each other and to other minerals.
For example, riboflavin helps to increase the absorption of iron, which you need for serotonin, oxygen transport, and for your thyroid function. On the other hand, there are some people who have very high iron who will feel terrible on riboflavin.
So there’s no one size fits all, although I would say most people with migraine will probably benefit from some iron. But not at the expsense of other minerals that iron antagonizes, which is why a Hair Tissue Mineral Analysis is so valuable for developing a nutritional balancing strategy.
Of course, there are a lot of factors as to whether you would benefit from increased iron absorption from riboflavin. It depends on whether you’re post-menopausal. It depends on whether you’re a male or a female since women lose iron through menstruation and men don’t. There are a lot of different factors there. But the point is that the B vitamins need to be together. There are two other B vitamins that work in concert with riboflavin and then there are some other B vitamins that people with migraine don’t tolerate well that actually contribute to chronic migraine because they increase glutamate load in the brain. And I go over all of that in the coursework.
So on to the bitter herbs. Bitter herbs like butterbur and feverfew that are in a lot of these formulations for migraine, if they’re in a capsule form, they’re not going to really benefit you in that form as well as they would taken straight. And that’s because of the way that our liver detoxification pathways are supported with the help of bitters through the taste receptors on the tongue. So when we eat something bitter, the bitter flavor causes an increase in salivation and it tells the receptors on the tongue to communicate with the liver through the tongue to start to prepare for detoxification.
So bitters trigger detoxification in the liver but only if you taste the bitter. If you’re taking a bitter herb in a capsule form and you’re not actually tasting the bitter flavor on your tongue the benefits to your liver are going to be minimal. So taking a bitter tonic – something that you can actually taste – or even opening the capsule and and tasting the bitters on your tongue is going to be much more supportive for those benefits to the liver that people with migraine need.
If you want to learn more about bitters and all the other unconventional ways that I’ve found to support your process of healing migraine naturally, you can check it out in the Repattern Migraine healing migraine naturally, you can check it out in the Repattern Migraine coursework.
