Your Top 3 Supplements for Travel
Take care of yourself when you’re on the road
After you’ve had your vaccinations and the travel doctor’s provided you with half your baggage allowance in prescription meds, you’re ready to narrow your green pharmacy down to the following supplements. These supplements are intended as a guide only, friends. Please, visit your health care practitioner or travel doctor before you travel.
Heat Stable Probiotics for Travel
Backpackers face many perils. Mosquitos, high altitudes, plane food and the repercussions of new foods introduced to a sheltered digestive system.
A good quality heat-stable probiotic will help maintain a healthy level of digestive flora. This gives the gut some much-needed support during and after antibiotic use. It also helps with bloating, abdominal pain and the inevitable changes in bowel habits that accompany life on the road.
Probiotics also provide nutritional support to the immune system, enabling them to multi-task and pull their weight in your backpack. Aeroplanes, buses, hotels and street food all come with various fodder for the immune system, which gets put under pressure when we travel.
If you aim to travel light, heat-stable probiotics will help cover both the immune and digestive systems in one.
A Good Quality Multivitamin for Travel
A good quality multivitamin can help fill in the missing nutritional links that befall a travellers diet. Macro and trace minerals, vitamins and amino acids have many roles in the body, the effects of which can be summed up as the maintenance of general health and wellbeing.
If you lack these in your diet, it’s a challenge for your body to provide you with sufficient energy levels and the ammunition to cope with stress. And you need both for successful travel.
Multivitamins that include antioxidants can also help counter the effects of free radicals. Free radicals are unstable molecules that, in excess, can damage cells in the body. Substances that generate free radicals can be found in food, medications, the air and water.
Like heat-stable probiotics, a good multivitamin is worth its weight in nutritional gold when food options are limited.
Activated Charcoal for Travel
To be clear, charcoal as a supplement is not the same as the remains of a fire. Don’t be tempted to freedom camp to that level.
Activated charcoal is best used to aid those times when you catch the bad kind of travel bug. Charcoal supports the body’s cleansing efforts via its porous surface and has done so for a long time to treat drug overdose and poisoning.
Charcoals porous surface has a negative electric charge that causes toxins with a positive charge to bind to it. This process is called adsorption, as it pulls everything to its surface without absorbing it.
Once bound, the digestive system can eliminate the invading agents, chemicals and harmful toxins in the usual manner — made easier if you take the probiotics mentioned above.
These three supplements will help keep you healthy on the road, so you can take on the world and all the adventures that travel entails.
Bon voyage!






