I feel like I spend a lot of my life talking about my need for iron supplements, mostly because….

I do spend my life talking about them.

But when you’ve had iron issues all of your life, finding an iron supplement that works and makes you not feel like hell all the time is miraculous and deserves to be talked about.

I’ve taken a different supplement for a few years and while it worked fine, it pretty much gave me the biggest side effect of taking iron every single day which was stomach discomfort. Over time the effect lessened, but it never fully went away. I justified dealing with the discomfort because I was already taking the brand that was known for minimal discomfort so I assumed I wouldn’t get any better than that.

Thank you Instagram for telling me that wasn’t true.

I was scrolling through my stories one day to see someone I follow talk about needing an iron supplement for her pregnancy, doing some research and stumbling upon this Mega Food Blood Builder Supplement. I listened to her talk about it’s benefits in rebuilding your blood cells and how it’s supposed to be easy on the stomach.

Clearly I’ve heard that before.

When she came back a couple of weeks later and claimed that her stomach didn’t hurt from it and that she’d liked it thus far, I decided to do some research on it myself just to see and compare it to what I’d been taking.

The first thing that I liked, obviously, is that this is gluten-free (as well as dairy free, soy free, vegan, and even Kosher) because more stomach upset is the last thing I need. It’s also more natural in it’s ingredients (like including farm fresh beet root) and has more minerals to aid in iron absorption.

Taking iron on it’s own is great, but it doesn’t absorb into the bloodstream well on it’s own. Vitamin C is a great aid in absorption, which almost all iron supplements have, including this one (and the one I was taking prior). But this brand also has Folate and Vitamin B-12 which help for greater absorption than Vitamin C alone.

Seeing all of this in my research, I decided to try it out for myself. I got mine on Amazon, but you can also buy directly from Mega Food’s website.

If you’re someone like me who doesn’t take pills well, you’ll be happy (as I was) to know that these are about the size of typical capsules (they are actually about the size of my probiotic) and they’re pretty easy to swallow. They do have a bit of an aftertaste which I eventually realized was actually the beet root I’m tasting. It’s not a bad aftertaste, but you will notice it.

It took about a week or so of taking these (and stopping my other iron supplement) before I realized that my stomach wasn’t upset anymore. My other supplement made me nauseous for about an hour after taking it and always made me feel constipated (just being real) and this was doing neither of those things. My stomach actually felt better than it had in a long time.

That alone makes me happy to have switched over.

I asked my doctor to do a blood test to check my iron (which was fine with her because apparently she needed to see me anyway). We typically check it every year because I’ve been anemic for literally my whole life I think we’d all given up on the levels ever being normal. Even in taking my old supplement for a couple of years, my levels were still pretty low.

She gave me the results of my blood test and told me that, currently, my iron levels are the highest they’ve ever been. They’re right on the border of normal, in fact. (So I say I’m normal just so I can be normal at something…)

They haven’t been that high, at least, in my adult life. We’re going to check again in 6 months to see if I’m in full normal range and if I am my doctor wants me to scale back my iron supplement to a few times a week to maintain the levels.

I’m not going to say that my old supplement didn’t help, I’m sure it did. But I definitely feel that I’m getting into normal range and am feeling a lot better because of this Blood Builder supplement.