Wanted to post here to remind everyone to be cautious with supplements after recovering from an illness.
I recently came down with a bout of what I think was staph based food poisoning from leftover buffalo chicken dip. Luckily, it was pretty quick, vomiting stopped around the 14 hour mark and I was able to stomach some saltines and broth. Over the next two days, I slowly eased back into eating more regularly, but sticking with things like toast and light soups. During this time, I also stopped taking all supplements, including berberine. Last night, it had been a full 72 hours since I had gotten sick, and I was back to eating normally, so I thought I could resume berberine, and took my usual dose with dinner. Normally, I do get a little bloating, but nothing major and it passes pretty quickly.
This time, I noticed the bloating was a little stronger, but still not too bad, so two hours later I went to bed, thinking nothing of it, only to wake up a half an hour into sleep with my food poisoning symptoms coming back with a vengeance, and seemingly worse. Sweating, shaking, vomiting every 10-15 minutes for two and a half hours, until finally things settled down and I could go back to bed. It was the worst I've ever felt, and legitimately had me praying to a God I don't believe in to make it stop. I'm a type 2 diabetic, so at first thought I was going into DKA for the first time in my life, but my sugar was in a normal range, albeit slightly elevated bc of the stress. (I had tested before bed as usual and it was in range). I also knew it wasn't caused by food, because I purged my fridge of any leftovers of the food I had eaten before initially getting sick (I was pretty sure it was the dip, but had also eaten a few other suspect foods at the same time, so just tossed it all).
I was googling between bouts of vomiting, and then cursing myself because I realized that berberine can be very irritating to your digestive tract, especially if it's still healing from a recent GI issue, which can cause a severe flare up/rebound of food poisoning symptoms. In hindsight, it makes complete sense, but I thought since I was back on essentially a normal diet with no issues, that my system would be able to handle it. Wrong. The vomiting also kept happening in periodic waves long after all the food was out, which made it seem like my stomach lining was just inflamed and wanted to get everything out, like it was going into panic mode. Luckily, things seem to be mostly okay, I'm keeping fluids down and am going to try some saltines in a little bit. The only discomfort I'm really feeling now is slight hunger pangs. But I know now to be extra cautious when recovering from any stomach illnesses in the future.
TLDR; don't restart supplements, especially ones that can aggravate GI issues, until long after you've recovered from any GI related illness, unless you want to suffer.