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March 2024 I started Thorne. June I switched to MegaFood. October I tried Floradix. My ferritin barely moved. Every quarter for two years, I did the same thing. Get bloodwork. See the number. Feel my stomach drop. Open Reddit. Read a thread. Switch brands. Wait three months. Get bloodwork. Repeat. I switched brands seven times in 24 months. I have read more iron supplement reviews than my own GP has. I know the difference between ferrous bisglycinate and ferrous fumarate. I know what NSF Certified for Sport means. I know why Floradix needs refrigeration. And after all of that, my ferritin went from 14 to 21. I was telling my sister about it over the holidays. She is a nurse practitioner. She listened to me list the brands I had tried, the protocols I had followed, the supplements I had paired them with. She said something that has stayed with me. "You keep changing the brand. You haven't changed the format." I went home and I sat with that for a week. Every single bottle in my cabinet was a pill of some kind. Capsule, tablet, liquid, chewable, slow release. Different brand. Different form. Same delivery method. Same delivery method. I went looking for what changed if you changed the delivery method. What I found is that my sister was right and the supplement aisle is not built to tell you this. Your gut has a fixed number of iron transport receptors called DMT1 receptors. Every pill you swallow has to fit through them. Once they are full, the rest of the iron in the pill passes through your digestive tract unused. On a good day, that means your gut absorbs 10 to 15 percent of the iron in any pill. Ferrous sulfate, bisglycinate, fermented, chelated, slow-release, liquid. They all funnel through the same biological bottleneck. Switching the brand doesn't change the bottleneck. I had been trying for two years to optimize the inputs going into a closed pipe. The only thing that would have actually changed the outcome is changing the route. There is a category of iron supplement I had never tried because it was not in the aisle I was shopping in. A strip. A small raspberry strip that dissolves on your tongue in 30 seconds. The iron absorbs through the lining of your mouth directly into your bloodstream. It bypasses the DMT1 ceiling entirely. Different route. Different math. Same dose I was already taking in pill form. 19mg. Daily. The brand is called CAVAÉ. The product is the Melt. What convinced me to try it is not the brand's website. It is a comparison piece written by a woman who had been on the same brand-switching cycle I was on. She ranked the five iron supplements I had rotated between, plus the strip, against one metric. Day-90 compliance. The percentage of women still taking the supplement at the point when ferritin would finally be starting to move. For every pill on her list, the number is around 50 percent. For the strip, the number is 94 percent. That is a 44-point gap. Half the women who start a pill protocol quit before the lab would have shown anything. Not because they are weak. Because the pill is making them quit. I bought a tin the night I read it. I have been on it for eleven weeks. My ferritin two weeks ago was 31, up from 21. Ten points in eleven weeks, after seven brand switches in two years moved me seven points. The variable that moved my number was not a smarter pill. It was a different route. If you are about to switch to your seventh brand, please read the comparison first. It is the most honest write-up of the iron aisle I have ever found. It will save you a year. I have linked it below.