Taking supplements, causing heart palpitations?

Hi everyone,

I started experimenting with vitamin/mineral supplements about two weeks ago to see if it would help my UC. It has actually given me great relief and took me out of a pretty bad flare but now I'm having trouble with heart palpitations. What happens is sometimes when I stand up or sit down too quickly, i'll get this pounding at the base of my throat and it is uncomfortable. It happens when I get even a little worked up in any way that causes my heart to beat faster.

It is definitely concerning to me, but I am very reluctant to stop taking my supplements with how much relief that they have given me from UC. So now I am asking for any input on what might be causing the palpitations.

Liquid Vitamin D3/K2 - 2000 IU of D3 a night (500% of DV) and 250% of DV for K2

Liquid Vitamin A (retinyl palmitate) - 7500 IU (150% of DV)

Liquid Zinc Supplement - about 20mg/day (~150-200% DV). It includes a bit of copper as well so as not to create a copper deficiency but the supplement is formulated to have much more zinc still

Liquid Magnesium Oil Supplement - Basically just a water-based solution of MgCl. Not really an oil, but it says it is. It says use 4-5 sprays but I use maybe 6 spread throughout the day. Unsure exactly how much I am taking in.

Centrum Men's Health Multivitamin - I know that taking supplements can cause deficiencies in other areas, so in addition to my a fairly wide variety of foods in my diet, I take a multivitamin to just try and avoid nutrient deficiencies caused by supplementation.

So what's the most likely cause of my heart palpitations? They started happening yesterday and have become more frequent so I am thinking supplements are the likely cause. Could it be that messing with my electrolytes too much is doing this?

I would stop and slowly reintroduce things, but this level of dosage with supplements has been giving me way more improvement in symptom reduction and quality of life than I ever thought it would. The fevers are starting to fade away, I'm having much more control and less urgency, more formed stools in the morning, a big reduction in blood, etc. The flare I was in was pretty bad and caused a lot of pain so I am kind of frightened about just stopping cold turkey and starting again.

Anyone have any thoughts/experience with this?

Be careful of the vit A. You can overdose on it.

Glad your doing better, is it possible that stress was causing these symptoms? Sometimes we don't always know how stressed we are! because by the sound of it you have come out of a bad flare and understandably would feel stress at the thought of everything going back to how you were before......... just a thought!

Poppie: Yes, that is certainly possible! But the palpitations started happening as I was getting out of the flare which made me afraid that one of these supplements were causing it. That scared me because I didn't want to stop them for fear that I would flare again. Stress certainly made it worse when they started happening though.

Canada Mark: Yeah, I've had a lot of horrible things happen to me from messing with my salt/fluid intake beyond obeying my body's natural cues. Foot cramps, headaches, severe dehydration, heart palpitations, low and high blood pressure. I don't feel thirst anymore for whatever reason, and my intake of a lot of salty foods has dropped fairly dramatically. The electrolyte balance in the body is super important and also pretty sensitive which is why I've learned it's best to just eat/drink foods that will give you the various electrolytes and let your body sort out how much it needs.

It's definitely a challenge especially when worrying about becoming dehydrated from this disease.

If your palps don't get any better through correcting electrolyte balance, I'd get it checked out by a doc if it persists. Blood tests may be better to really figure out if its a deficiency/imbalance of something or something else.

For sure, thanks for sharing LL. It's easy to think since these are vitamins and we face having to take so many terrible drugs that it won't be so bad to go overboard with vitamins, but they can hurt if we do.