Klebsi Ella's No Starch Diet Tips

Getting your meds without starch.

I’ve found that over the counter and prescription medications as well as herbal supplements can irritate my stomach and trigger a sleepless night if the inactive ingredients have starch. Sometimes it takes a few days or weeks to figure out that was the culprit, especially if it creeps up on me and doesn’t irritate my system right away but does so after a build up over time. Getting that corrected was quite a hassle. No one told me what a hassle it would be!! Doctors and pharmacists at first didn’t take me seriously, and I had to educate them on how important the inactive ingredients can be.

The problem is usually with the inactive ingredients, but check the active ingredients too, especially herbs with starchy spices or tubers in the mix. Sometimes that won’t end up bothering my stomach, but it can, it depends on the formula. You can starch test your meds and supplements too, if it’s a hard capsule just grind part of one capsule a bit into powder and put a little water on the sample before plunking down the iodine. Inactive ingredients in both medications and herbal supplements are usually some type of vegetable cellullose (especially if it’s a time release capsule of any kind), and any number of additives such as gelatin, magnesium, sugar, lactose, sodium etc.  The big problem can be with any starch in the inactive ingredients. Maltodextrin bothers me for sure. I have to avoid it. And now maltodextrin is being increasingly put into over the counter meds and herbal supplements and prescription. Once you look at the ingredients on the box, what you have to do is look up the ingredients on the net and find out if they are a starch molecule based ingredient. Wikipedia is very useful for that, just enter the name of the ingredient and look it up, if it’s not on wiki, google it.

Carole Sinclair mentions the need to get starch free medications and gives a good heads up discussion in her book about the importance it may play in getting you to feel better and not have another source of pain. She doesn’t mention though some of the pitfalls on the way to getting your meds straightened out.

Be prepared not to be taken seriously.

First, no one took me seriously. Not my doctors, not my pharmacist. They all acted like I was some crazy person with some annoying persnickitty little fussy nutty preoccupation, some kind of hypochondria. What happens is you go to the doctor, and even if they agree with the efficacy of your diet, they go ahead and punt the responsibility of starch free inactive ingredients to the pharmacist. They’ll claim the pharmacist can figure it out for you. Basically they don’ t want to spend their 15 minutes of alloted time in the dr. visit they’re charging you and/or your insurance company lots of money for, to look up inactive ingredients.

Ok, so I went to a pharmacy and they did nothing. They pretended to try to find benign inactive ingredients but gave me a prescription with starchy inactive ingredients. I had to go back and discuss it several times to get them to take me seriously. Next, I had to do research, find out which labs that make the same medications have non starchy inactive ingredients and tell the pharmacy to order my medication just from that lab. I did this with Allegra for nasal allergy, and for Trazedone a sleep medication. Initially I was told there is no lab making Allegra or Trazedone with no starch meds, and that the medication is unavailable for compounding. Once I did my own research on the web, and identified a lab company making Allegra (generic phexofenadine) without starchy inactive ingredients, and informed my pharmacy of it, the pharmacy got it for me and it turned out to be 1/2 price the old prescription. With Trazedone my pharmacist finally, after so many problems, actually went the extra mile for me and got it wholesale and compounded it for me without starch at a fairly low price after another compound pharmacist had given me a very high price estimate. Nice, huh? Also, the pharmacies even advertise on the net that they’ll help you so much find your non allergenic meds. Totally false in my experience. I had to make them do it, and do their work for me. But it was worth it, since I am now sleeping better and feeling well.

So heads up folks, on getting no starch meds. You have to fight for it, and do your own homework they should have done for you.

I haven’t outlined in detail the topsy turvy details of how I had to go to several pharmacies, ended up back at my original compounding pharmacy plus one other compounding pharmacy, made a lot of calls to pharmacies advertised online, etc.

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