Perhaps the greatest danger for the post weight loss surgery patient is nutritional deficiency with the gastric bypass diet. Your stomach is now much smaller than its previous size and you simply can’t eat as much as you did before. Your diet calls for you to eat more frequently now, but there’s still a risk of deficiency in vitamins and minerals without help from bariatric vitamins.
Bariatric Vitamins Support Bariatric Diets
The question of using bariatric vitamins to support bariatric diets is a recurring one. Some people may think that the expense of using bariatric vitamins isn’t worth what you get—if they think there’s any benefit at all to it. There are actually several benefits in particular to using bariatric vitamins.
The first, and most obvious benefit of using bariatric vitamins over traditional multivitamin pills is that they’re specially formulated to easily break down and digest. With the size of your stomach now, this is important, since it means that your tiny stomach empties faster. This is important especially now that you’re eating 5 or 6 small meals a day.
Bariatric Vitamins Bypass Malabsorption
For the most part, normal vitamin pills aren’t harmful–they just don’t deliver enough useful vitamins to justify the expense. This is an issue that bariatric vitamins bypass.
Malabsorption is common with most standard vitamins–even the chewy ones. In order to make them solid and hard or soft and chewy, the manufacturer has to add absorption-hindering filler.
Some solid multivitamins try to adjust for this problem by providing anywhere from 2 to 10 times what you actually need in their pills. This can open you up to other problems, specifically vitamin/mineral toxicity.
This can cause additional strain on your body, as the volume of these vitamins spike in your system, causing nausea or other unpleasant symptoms until the vitamins flush out of your system. This can damage your kidneys and liver.
The best way to get your bariatric vitamins is in capsule form with no additional fillers or additives.
