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I Sold Anti-Bloating Products to Irish Pharmacies for 31 Years. Here Is What Was in the Bottles, and the One Thing Every Bloated Woman Over 45 Was Never Told.

I knew in 2008 why the probiotics didn't work. It took until 2023 to find out what does, and it was not on any shelf I called on.

PBy Pauline Dunne · Pharmaceutical and supplement sales, Leinster, 1990 to 2021 · Celbridge, Co. Kildare · 14 min read

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For thirty-one years my job was to walk into your chemist and make sure the bloating products were on the shelf at eye level. For the last eighteen of them, that mostly meant probiotics.

I was good at it. I won a trip to Lisbon for it.

And for the last four of those years I was undoing the button on my trousers in the car park after every single client lunch, with the engine running, before I drove to the next one.

I want you to hold those two things together for a minute, because I couldn't. I had a napkin in my glovebox that explained exactly why the probiotics didn't work. I had written the slide that proved it. And I took them anyway, every night, out of a free hamper.

That is the story. It is not flattering. Here it is.

First, who is telling you this

I started on the road in 1990 selling antacids for a British company, a Nissan Sunny and a map book. In 2003 I moved into supplements, because that is where the money went, and I stayed there until I retired in March 2021.

Leinster territory, later Leinster and north Munster. Something over four hundred pharmacies. I can still drive to every one of them without the sat nav and tell you which ones keep the good biscuits.

I learned to read the back of a box in four seconds. The order is the whole story. Everything is listed by amount, biggest first, and anything after the preservative is there in a quantity you would need a lab to find. Once you know that, the front of the box stops talking to you.

And I learned the thing that changed how I saw all of it, which is which factory makes which brand. There were three probiotic products on the same shelf in Newbridge, at three prices, in three different colours of box. They came out of the same building in the Netherlands. I had been inside it.

I never paid for a supplement in thirty-one years. They arrived in boxes, in advance, with handwritten notes.

The napkin

Utrecht, March 2008. A distributor conference, the hotel bar after the gala dinner. A Dutch formulator, late fifties, who had signed off more products than I had ever sold, two glasses into a bottle of something.

That year my hero product was a probiotic. Big campaign. "Billions of good bacteria" on the front in a nice serif, a smiling woman in white on the shelf talker. I asked him, because I was curious and because I had had a glass myself, why the women who bought it kept coming back to the counter six weeks later for something else.

He looked at me the way you look at a child who has asked a very good question at the wrong dinner.

Then he borrowed my pen and wrote on the napkin under my glass, and I still have it:

"Bacteria don't cut the food and they don't move it. You are selling passengers for a bus with no driver and no fuel."

I laughed, because I assumed he was joking. He wasn't. He tapped the napkin and said the second thing, which I didn't understand for another thirteen years.

"After forty the problem is two things, and neither of them is in that capsule. And when you do sell them something that has the right thing in it, we dose it for the label, not for the gut. Everybody at this table knows it."

I put the napkin in my handbag and went to bed and sold the product for the rest of the year.

The slide

January 2011. I was asked to build the onboarding deck for six new reps. Fourteen slides. I was proud of it.

Slide nine was a table. Down the left, every product in our digestive range, starting with the probiotic. Across the top, two columns: does it help break food down, and does it help move food along. Then a third column for the ones that had a working ingredient, with the dose on our label beside the dose in the published research.

The probiotic had a dash in the first two columns. So did the fibre. So did the charcoal. The one enzyme product had a tick, and a dose below a tenth of anything that had been studied.

It named no brand, because it didn't need to. It was true and it was boring and I had it twice over.

My manager Gerry, a decent man who had never asked me for anything, leaned on the door of the training room the day before, looked at it for maybe ten seconds, and said:

"Dee, leave that one out. It confuses the story."

And I said "grand."

That is the whole conversation. I have had longer exchanges about where to park.

Slide nine is now a stock photo of a couple walking a dog on a beach. That deck ran for nine years. I trained twenty-two people on it.

Why I didn't fight it

I have had fourteen years to be honest about this, so I will be.

Nobody ever asked me for anything. Not once, in thirty-one years. There was never an envelope. I would have known what to do with an envelope.

There were lunches. There was Lisbon. There was a Christmas hamper every year, and the hampers kept coming after I retired. One arrived last December, wicker and ribbon, six products, card addressed to "Dee, our legend."

I am sixty-one. I have no territory. I couldn't get a product listed in a cornershop.

And inside that hamper was the probiotic. The 2008 one, same box, new font. The one from the building in the Netherlands. The one on the napkin. The one I know costs a quarter of the price under a different label two shelves down.

I stood in my own hall holding it and finally put the two things together. Nobody bought me. Nobody had to. For twenty-one years I was treated with enormous, unfailing warmth by people who wanted something from me and never once said so. It is very hard to take apart a thing that is being kind to you.

So when Gerry leaned on the door, part of me was relieved. I had been brave for two weeks. Now a nice man had made it somebody else's decision.

And then it happened to me

Fifty-two.

Client lunches were the job. Four a week, sometimes five. Hotel carvery, pharmacist across the table, talk about the new range, the bill on the company card.

And then the car park. One hand on the wheel, one on the button. Sit for a minute with the window down before I could drive. Every time. For four years.

Nobody sees a sales rep below the dashboard. That was how I managed it. I dressed for the top half. Jacket, scarf, good earrings. From the counter up I looked like the woman in the brochure.

Then in 2019 the company moved everything to video calls, and for the first time in eleven years I was sitting at a table, on a screen, with my whole self in the frame, and no car park to go to afterwards.

Third call. Nineteen people on it. The regional director, a man I'd trained, said it as a joke and meant it kindly:

"Paulie, you're looking very well fed. The job's treating you."

Nineteen little boxes of faces and a few of them smiled. I smiled too. If you have ever done that smile you know exactly which one I mean.

I took the next four calls with the camera off and my hand flat on my stomach under the table.

And here is the part I am most ashamed of. That night, like every night for two years, I took the probiotic out of the hamper. The one I knew. The one on the napkin. I took it anyway, because it was there, and because doing something sensible felt like doing something.

What I read when I finally read it

I retired in March 2021 with a laptop, a kitchen table and nothing to sell. So I went and read the papers, not the summaries of the papers, which I had been handed for thirty-one years.

Two things happen after forty, and they happen quietly.

The first is that the amount of digestive enzyme your own body makes falls. No event. No warning. The same dinner you ate fine at thirty-five is arriving in a gut that has fewer scissors to cut it with.

The second is that the gut slows down. The movement that carries food along gets lazier. So food that isn't fully broken down is also sitting longer.

Put those together and you get the thing the napkin meant. Food that sits, half broken down, warm, starts to ferment. Ferment is gas. Gas is the belt. The bloating is not the problem. It is the smell coming off the problem.

And the probiotic. Here is the thing I sold eighteen years of and never once said out loud. A probiotic adds bacteria. It does not add the scissors and it does not start the engine. If food is sitting half-cut in a gut that isn't moving, more bacteria is more passengers on the same stopped bus. That is why the women came back to the counter at six weeks. That is why I came back to the hamper every night and nothing changed.

I went through every product I had sold and sorted them into two piles. Things that addressed the cutting. Things that addressed the moving. The one enzyme product was in the first pile, dosed for the label. The probiotics were in neither. The simethicone pops the bubbles after they've formed. The peppermint capsules calm the bus. The fibre leaflet from the surgery puts more on it.

Thirty-one years. I never sold one thing that did both.

I want to say clearly what this is and isn't. This is me reading, at my own table. It is not medical advice and it is not a claim about anything on a shelf. If you have pain, blood, or weight falling off you, that is a doctor's job, not a retired rep's.

I rang Utrecht

I still had his number, in a Christmas card list I've kept since the nineties. He is seventy-one, retired, in a village outside Arnhem, and he picked up on the second ring.

I told him I was finally writing it. He was quiet and then he laughed.

"Nobody can let either of us go now, Pauline. Ask me anything."

We spoke for an hour and forty minutes. Here is the part that matters.

I asked him first about the napkin. Was I being unfair to the probiotic?

"No. It is a good passenger. It is not a driver. Sell it to someone whose bus is running. After forty, most buses are not."

Then I asked him the question I should have asked in 2008. If the dose is wrong, what is the right one?

"Think of a prescription. The doctor knows you need five hundred milligrams. She writes you thirty, because the rest of the budget went on the box. You take it every day and you feel sensible. Thirty was never going to touch it."

And the second half? The thing that isn't in the capsule?

"The enzyme cuts. But something has to carry it along, or you are cleaning a room with the door shut. Ginger. Peppermint. The old things. Not a laxative. Movement."

I asked him, finally, what he would tell a woman of sixty-one to look for. He thought for a long time.

"Three things. An enzyme at a real dose, in milligrams, printed, not hidden in a blend. Something to move it along, the traditional things, at doses that mean something. And from somebody with no wholesaler, no distributor and no front counter to pay for. You've seen the margin chain. You know where the dose went."

I wrote the three things on the back of an ESB envelope. It is on my fridge.

Eleven months, most of it wasted

I read eighty labels. I wrote to fourteen companies and asked one question: how many milligrams of bromelain, exactly. Three wrote back. None gave a number. That refusal is an answer on its own. A company proud of its dose will tell you without being asked twice.

I found two products that met the first condition and failed the third, dosed properly and priced like they were carrying a pharmacy chain on their back, because they were.

I found a great many that met the third and failed the first. Small, sincere, lovely packaging, dosed at nothing.

And in the eleventh month, the spring of 2023, I found one that met all three, and I did not believe it, and I spent two more weeks trying to find out what was wrong with it.

I couldn't.

What I have been taking

It is called Bloat Relief Complex. It costs thirty-nine euro. It is made by a small company called Bioprime that sells from its own website and nowhere else.

I had never heard of them. That is not an insult. In thirty-one years I had heard of everything that paid to be heard of, and this one hadn't.

I am going to take you through the label the way I would have read it across a pharmacy counter, except this time nobody is paying for my lunch.

Six ingredients. Every single one with a number beside it. No "proprietary blend." I noticed that before I noticed anything else, because "proprietary blend" is the phrase that means we'd rather you didn't ask.

First condition: the cutting, at a real dose

Bromelain, 150 mg. This is the enzyme from pineapple stems. It is the one the napkin was about. It is studied for its role in breaking down protein, which is the part of a dinner that sits longest when your own scissors have gone blunt. 150 milligrams is a number I have never once seen printed on a box I sold. I have seen it hidden in blends at a tenth of that. I put the jar down when I read it and picked it back up again.

Dandelion root, 400 mg. Traditionally used to support bile flow, which is the fat side of the cutting. If bromelain is the scissors for the meat, this is for the gravy. It is also the biggest number on the label, which told me somebody had formulated it by the research and not by the cost sheet.

Second condition: the moving

Ginger root, 250 mg. The oldest answer there is for a slow gut, and the one Utrecht named first. Traditionally used to support the movement of the stomach and to help with that heavy, sitting feeling after a meal. My mother grated it into hot water and I sold it in capsules at a third of this dose.

Peppermint leaf, 200 mg. Traditionally used to relax the gut wall and help trapped wind move on. On its own, which is how I sold it for years, it calms the bus. Beside the other four, it opens the doors.

And the two I didn't expect

Lemon balm, 300 mg. Traditionally used for the nervous stomach, the one that tightens before a lunch you're dreading. I had sold it for sleep. It had never occurred to me it belonged here.

Slippery elm bark, 150 mg. The old soothing one, for a gut lining that has spent four years being shouted at. The quietest thing on the label and, at sixty-one, the one I was most glad of.

Third condition: no wholesaler, no distributor, no front counter. It isn't in any pharmacy I ever called on. It isn't in the chains. It is made in the EU, the doses are printed where you can read them, and it is two capsules with your main meal. No taste. No six o'clock ritual. No special glass.

I ordered it on a Tuesday at a quarter past ten at night with the television on mute. I did not tell my husband, because I had been right since 2008 and being right had put nothing back.

So I ran the trial nobody ran

This is the part I'm proudest of, and it took three months.

I live in a cul-de-sac of fourteen houses. I have lived in it for twenty-six years. I know every woman on it and I know, because we talk, that I was not the only one standing at the back of photos.

So I bought six jars myself. I want that on the record. After thirty-one years of free product I was not starting this one with a gift.

And I asked five neighbours, aged fifty-four to seventy-two, to take it with their dinner for twelve weeks and let me do one thing every Tuesday: the same pair of their own trousers, done up, in my hall, in the same light, and a tape measure at the same spot. Not weight. I didn't care about weight and neither should you here. The belt.

All five said yes. Two said yes on condition I stopped going on about it.

What twelve weeks looked like

Marie, 72. Widowed, the furthest down the road, and the one who had given up entirely. She said nothing for four weeks. In week five she rang me at nine in the morning to say she had slept through the night for the first time since her husband died, and she didn't know if it was the jar or not, and she didn't care. By week ten she was walking to Mass instead of getting a lift. She is the one I'd ask you to pay least attention to on the numbers and most attention to on the walking.

Colette, 58. The sceptic. Works in a bank, reads labels, asked me for the research before she'd take a capsule. She took it every day and reported "nothing" for three Tuesdays. Week four her daughter-in-law asked her at a christening what she was doing differently. Colette told her to mind her own business and rang me that evening.

Joan, 64. The clearest change on the tape, and the one I'd ask you to be most careful about, because Joan had been taking nothing at all and eating a lot of bread. Some of what happened to Joan would have happened to anyone who started paying attention. I'm telling you because it's true and because I spent thirty-one years not telling women things like it.

Úna, 54. Still working, two teenagers, the one I recognised most. Her word was "flat." Not thinner. Flat. She said she'd forgotten that a stomach could feel like nothing at all at eight in the evening.

Philomena, 67. Saw the least, and I'm including her for that reason. A clear improvement in the evening discomfort, a small change on the tape, nothing she'd call dramatic. She has bought it twice since.

Five women. Not a trial, and I would never call it one. No control, no blinding, and a retired rep with a very strong opinion holding the tape. But it is five Irish women between fifty-four and seventy-two, measured weekly for twelve weeks, which is five more than anybody I ever worked for bothered to do.

And what happened to me

The first fortnight. Nothing. I want to be exact about that, because if you judge it at two weeks you will conclude what I nearly concluded. What I noticed was the absence of things. No taste. No aftertaste. No new discomfort. No ritual. After thirty-one years of products that needed a glass of water at six in the morning and a prayer, that was not nothing. But it was not a result either.

Week two. I slept on my back. I had not slept on my back in four years. I hadn't even noticed I'd stopped.

Week four. The navy trousers. The ones from the Teams call. I am going to hedge this the way I wish somebody had hedged things for me. It did not vanish. But it was measurably, undeniably less. Two holes on the belt. I checked twice because I assumed I'd used the wrong hole.

Week seven. I stopped doing the button. I only noticed because I caught myself in the car outside the Kildare Village car park with both hands on the wheel, and sat there for a minute wondering what I'd forgotten.

Month three. Gerry, retired now too, at a funeral in Naas. "You've lost weight, Paulie." And I told him, flat, that I hadn't lost a pound, and that it had never been weight, and that I'd been trying to tell him that since 2011. He laughed. Then he asked me what I was taking.

I want to say that last part plainly. I did not lose weight. My scales are exactly where they were. What I lost was the thing sitting on top of the dinner.

I take the video calls with the camera on now. Sitting. Whole self in the frame.

Whether any of this is you

If you are past forty-five, see whether any of this is familiar.

• You undo something in the car, or under the table, or the second you get in the door
• You have a "top half" and a "bottom half" and you dress for the one people see
• The same dinner you ate at thirty-five now sits until bedtime
• You look pregnant by evening and flat by morning, and somebody has said it out loud
• You're on a probiotic, and you couldn't honestly say what it has changed
• You have a drawer of things that didn't work, and you're still taking one of them
• You have quietly stopped expecting any of it to make a difference

If even one of those is you, I'd like to say the thing nobody said to me between fifty-two and sixty-one.

It is not your stomach. It is two numbers that dropped after forty and a shelf full of products that only ever addressed one of them, at a dose chosen for the box. You were not failing. You were solving the wrong sum.

What it costs, and how many to buy

Let me do the sum I did in the car, because I had a head start on you. I sold enzyme products at thirty-eight euro a box with a tenth of this dose. I sold probiotics at forty-two that came out of a building I'd been inside. Add up what's in your own drawer. I added up mine and stopped at six hundred, and that's only the ones I paid for.

This is 39 euro. Thirty-nine. I read it twice because I assumed I was looking at a sample size.

It costs that because there is no wholesaler, no distributor, no counter and no rep getting lunch. That is the whole explanation. It is the same sum as the thirty-eight euro box, running the other way.

One honest word about quantity

A jar is thirty days. Thirty days gets you what I got in thirty days: the absence of the bad things and the sleep. It does not get you week seven and it does not get you Gerry at the funeral. That work is done in the second and third month, and you cannot reach month three on one jar.

There is a thirty-day money-back guarantee. I want to do that arithmetic out loud rather than wave at it. Thirty days is exactly the first chapter. If at the end of it you have not noticed the absences, the sleep, the evenings, you send it back and you are out nothing. I have sat in four hundred sales meetings and I never once saw a company I sold for say that, and I would ask you to think about why. You can't bring a half-used box back to a pharmacy counter and say it didn't work. You're expected to conclude you used it wrong, or you're just your age, and buy something else.

And one more thing, because it's true. It sells out. Not in the way with a flashing "3 left" and a countdown. I've built those pages. It sells out because they make it in small batches and a lot of women tell a lot of other women. I have been caught twice on a reorder, which is why I buy three now.

The things you're reasonably thinking

"I've never heard of them." Neither had I, and I'd heard of everything that paid to be heard of. They don't advertise and they aren't in shops, which is why it's thirty-nine euro and not a hundred and thirty-nine.

"Thirty-nine euro can't be any good." I spent two weeks on this exact objection, because I was trained by the same industry you were to read price as proof. The price is a statement about the absence of a supply chain, not about the formula. Read the milligrams. I've never seen those numbers on a box that cost more.

"I'm already on a probiotic." So was I, for two years, out of a hamper. Probiotics add passengers. This is about the cutting and the moving. Ask yourself honestly whether the probiotic has changed the evenings. Mine didn't.

"Is it too late for me?" Marie is seventy-two and walking to Mass. I'm sixty-one and thirteen years into this. It was not too late for either of us.

"Is it a medicine?" No. It's a food supplement. It is not a treatment for anything and it will not cure anything, and if you have pain or anything that worries you, see your GP first, not me. What it is is two capsules with your dinner, at doses that mean something, from people with nothing to pay for but the jar.

What actually changed

I sent the hamper back. No note. I couldn't think of one that wasn't either rude or dishonest, and I'd had enough of the second.

I stopped doing the button. I stopped standing for photos. I stopped dressing for the top half. I stopped, somewhere around week nine, putting my hand on my stomach under every table I sat at, which I had done so long I thought it was how I sat.

I nearly didn't order it. I had the tab open for two nights. I had been right since 2008 and being right had not put one thing back, and some part of me would rather have stayed right than tried one more thing and been wrong again. I think that is where most of us stop. Trying and failing again hurts more than not trying.

I knew in 2008. I had it in writing. It took me until 2023 to do one thing about it, and the thing was not on any shelf I ever called on. I'm sorry it took this long and I don't think the apology is worth much.

Last month a woman I trained in 2011, still on the road, rang me to ask what I was taking. I told her. Then I told her to go and find the slide, because I'd left a copy on the shared drive, and nobody ever deleted it.

If you've seen yourself here

In the button. In the drawer of things that didn't work. In the quiet giving up.

If you too undo something the moment you sit down. If you too have a top half and a bottom half. If you too eat the same dinner you always ate and carry it until midnight. It is not your stomach. It is two numbers, and a shelf that only ever gave you one.

Give it the three months. Not the thirty days, the three months. That is where it happened for me and for four of the five. If it's in stock, order it tonight, because I've been caught twice. If it isn't, put your name down and wait, because the ones I sold for thirty-one years will still be there when you get back.

"Nobody can let either of us go now, Pauline. Ask me anything." The formulator, Utrecht, 2008 and again last spring.

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Bioprime · 30-day money-back guarantee · Made in the EU · Free shipping over 50 euro · Ships to Ireland in 3 to 6 working days

Food supplement. Not a substitute for a varied, balanced diet and a healthy lifestyle. Do not exceed the recommended daily dose. Keep out of reach of young children. Consult your doctor if you are pregnant, breastfeeding, taking medication or have a medical condition. The author's experience and the experiences of the women described are personal accounts and illustrative; individual results vary. This article is not medical advice.