Hi
@ebethc betaine is trimethyl glycine a methyl doner, I am really not up on all the methylation stuff but that could be part of the wide awake thing.
I find that it works really well for me. I had about 12 yrs of SIBO bubbling away every night like a fermentation vessel and having lots of pain from trapped gasses.
I tried a lot of dietary modification and probiotics and so on, following advice from people such as Dr Myhill and Grace Liu's on SIBO but found that for me that betaine HCL was the last step in solving SIBO.
At the time I was eating a low available carbohydrate high fibre diet with probiotics, ox bile and digestive enzymes. When I started on the betaine HCL I needed 7 x 650mg tablets per meal I am now (two years later) down to 3 - 4 tablets per meal.
Acid does a lot, it enables you to better absorb nutrients and triggers the release of bile and digestive enzymes. For people who are treated soon it may well be enough to set them on a path to recovery. But when I got rid of the SIBO I still had issues with digestion.
I was still producing food coloured stools whenever I stopped taking the ox bile, and that only changed when I was treated for B hominis in December last year (triple therapy), and the stools were mostly bristol 7 for all of that time are getting much closer to bristol 4 now that I am taking antifungals.
I think most of my microbes must have been fungi. My slurries (thick bristol 7s) had been very well fermented and my very occasional stools had just floated as they are meant to. When I started taking nystatin I went to mostly bristol 2 - 4 and everything sank without any sign of fermentation.
I expect that my stomach is still at a rather high pH between meals, which is an issue as it means that it does not provide an antimicrobial barrier between the outside world and me. I also suspect that my sinuses were perhaps providing a resevoir for the fungi and bacteria that were a problem. I had very much improved stools when taking dental probiotics and oral nilstat last year, and am currently on a complicated regimen of nasal rinses and swabs and antifungal and probiotics to try to deal with this source of chronic infection.
One other issue re digestion that you may wish to look at is choline. To work properly the gut also has to move properly.
http://forums.phoenixrising.me/inde...se-acetylcholine-at-low-cost-naturally.46037/.
I hope that some of this helps.