Replied By Mike (Montreal, Quebec) on 09/16/2011

In other words if your stool is exactly the same as before you have noticed any major digestive problems then HCL Betaine has worked for you and your are able to produce sufficient stomach acid.

As for the second question, I would caution you against taking too many tablets at a time since that might cause your stomach to be more acidic than what it is able to neutralized before the food enters into the colon which at all time must be alkaline. Otherwise in the long run there may be blood in your stool. If you want to take large amount of HCL during each meal make sure you use common sense and consume LARGE AMOUNT of highly alkaline food such as plenty of raw vegetables and yogurt. A little baking soda would also be very helpful as well. You must try to balance your PH in your stomach yourself by eating the right combination of food at mealtime.

The purpose of consuming HCL Betaine is to bring your PH level so low as to kill all the pathogens that is mainly responsible for producing white tongue. The other benefit of taking HCL is of course to help your body better assimilate the vitamins and minerals it needs for optimum health which is very important for helping your immune system to further improve the color of your tongue.

At this point I wish to mention that in my case I have just recently discovered the real reason behind my white tongue as a result of a most recent incident I have just experienced. After eating a very fatty meal and having been under a lot of stress lately, all the sudden my white tongue has reappeared. The mucous on my tongue was so thick that it would interfere with my breathing. I was very shocked that this has happen and at that point was looking for immediate answers. Because I continued to consume large amount of HCL, the color of my tongue went back to its normal color in just a matter of a couple of days.

The only explanation I could come up with is that Betaine HCL turned out to be only a band aid solution to a hidden digestive problem that my body was experiencing. In my particular case my white tongue was the result of an continuously infected gallbladder whenever I am under a lot of stress and at the same time consuming a very fatty meal.

When a gall bladder gets infected either from passing a stone or due to excessive body stress, the bacterias travel from the gallbladder into other parts of the body. White tongue is the result of your body's defense mechanism against these bacterias by producing larger amount of mucous in order to trap these bacterias some of which appear on your tongue. The consumption of Betaine HCL helps your immune system to eliminate these bacterias before they are trapped inside the mucous that appear as a white coating on your tongue.

If you discover that you have the same gallbladder problem I have then I suggest you focus on eliminating excessive fats from your diet and increase raw fruits and vegetables consumption. Do not eliminate fat completely from your diet since that will cause your gallbladder not be be functional at all and therefore will become even weaker in the end. A daily dose of Extra Virgin Olive Oil should cure most gall bladder problems because of it's antibacterial properties and ability to assist your liver in producing good quality bile for better digestion and much better control over harmful bacterias that can attack and even destroy your gallbladder in the long term.

You must investigate what can be causing an infection inside your digestive system that lead to white tongue. In the meantime until you are able to pinpoint the reason, your are producing much less damage to your body from bacterial toxicity if you consume HCL Betaine on a regular basis.

Gallbladder infection on a regular basis can become a life threatening situation on two fronts: (1) the gall bladder no longer functions so it becomes nothing more than dead tissues inside your body which can lead to a deadly infection (2) It can block the main bile duct from the passing of a stone that could result in permanent liver and pancreas damage beyond repair that even a surgeon cannot save your life on the operation table in the worst case scenario.

White tongue should be taken as a potentially deadly disease which in my opinion is the body's way of telling you that there is a recurrence of a continuous bacterial infection somewhere inside your digestive system that potentially can go out of control and cause serious damage to your body and possibly death. In my case it was the results of an extremely weak gall bladder issue all along.

Replied By Joseph (Medford, Oregon) on 09/25/2011

Before betaine started working for me, I had a HUGE stomach, I'm a 25 year old male, thin frame, but my stomach looked as if I was carrying twins, not an overstatement at all. I had been taking other supplements (whole foods multi, fish oil, I've probably tried 50 different supplements) but nothing helped. I had tried digestive enzymes but they did nothing on the stomach, they just made my already thin frame look even thinner, which was not a good thing. I discovered my stomach didn't start going away until I would take 2 betaine tablets 20 minutes before a meal, and they had to be tablets.

4 months later a lot of the stomach had gone away and it was now in good proportion with the rest of my body, the issue is though, I had lost too much weight. The betaine had started to really thin me out, after about 5 or 6 months I started having bad insomnia that I'm still battling. I quit taking any sort of supplement that could lead to excess energy, tried a bunch of different things for sleep, but nothing helped. Finally I started thinking it was the Betaine HCL and the fact that I was now under weight causing my insomnia.

I started to play around with the timing of the dosage but just as I suspected, if I don't take them 20 minutes or so before the meal my stomach just starts expanding again. I started taking 1200 mg which is double what I had been taking after the first bite of a meal, and that's been an alright compromise, I'm building muscle better, very slightly though, but the belly slowly starts to build up. I'm not sure about my current weight as there's no scale in the house, but to give an example, at my worst before the betaine I was 170, normal weight was about 147 or so for me. Using the betaine I dropped down to 131, I'm 5'6. So I'm kinda stuck here. If I were to just stop taking betaine, I would have an obese stomach within a week. I ran out for one day, and the difference between my stomach was night and day, isn't that crazy!? The only thing that works for me keeps me too under weight so I don't know what to do here.

I've read that some of you take a crazy amount of capsules or tablets? Should I be doing the same? Maybe go from 1200 mg to 2400? Any suggestions or comments would be much appreciated. Thank you.

Replied By Littlelight (Sf, Ca/usa) on 09/25/2011

It doesn't seem right that the betaine Hcl could be repsonsible for the weight loss--but bloating and weight loss are certainly signs of worms/parasites (among other things. ) What is your elimination like?Could you have contracted giardia or some other bug?

One common way to determine how much Hcl to take is to the "challenge test. " That is, take a tablet before a meal, and each meal add one more tablet until you get to the point where you feel "heat" in the stomach.

The "heat" feeling is the too-much indicator, so back off to the previous number of tablets.

Hcl is mostly for digesting the food in the stomach. The amount of bloating you describe sounds like it's coming from the intestines, so you likely have more going on than just low stomach acid. You might want to get a stool test, but they do often come back with false negatives, at least in the US. If you can get a complete digestive panel done, that might be useful to rule out IBS etc.

Replied By Oliver (Dallas, Tx) on 03/30/2012

Try magensium citrate and potassium gluconate in varying doses seperately to figure it out (and not potassium chloride as its the chloride in the HCL that inhibits magnesium).

I take magnesium and potassium before bed and try to get a lot of natural sources of these minerals in my daily diet.

Be aware that I have researched and found that bloating accompanied with these deficiencies of magnesium and potassium to be caused by bacterial/fungal or viral infections.

Also have discovered that taking iodine in the form of lugols has lessoned the amount of magnesium and potassium needs.

When I take HCL my lips get really dry and peel which alerts me to take mg/potassium

HTH

Replied By Andy (Dallas, Texas) on 05/02/2012

Replied By Qchan (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia) on 03/04/2013

Perhaps, you can help me. Kindly, list down the places or shops that do stock them. And if anybody out there can help out too, please do. Buying over the internet involves massive customs issue, and may eventually not be released!

Thanks a lot.

Regards, QChan