The Story Behind Palisade

For most of my adult life, if you asked me how I was doing, the real answer was one word. Exhausted!

For a long time I assumed that was just a personality flaw. I’m just someone who is low energy and needs more coffee than everyone else. It took me a shockingly long time to figure out that was wrong. The energy, the low mood, the dizziness, the trouble focusing, all of it had a cause.

I always knew I tended to have low iron, but I finally got my ferritin tested for the first time a few months after having my first daughter. My OB busted in the door and said, “No wonder you feel terrible. Your ferritin is a 9!”

Ferritin is a protein that stores iron in your body, so it’s a useful indicator of your iron reserves. Low ferritin is especially common in women, often due to menstrual blood loss, pregnancy, or not getting enough iron through diet."

Here’s the part that still gets to me. More than half of premenopausal women have some form of low iron. Most of us never hear about it. We don’t get it checked, we don’t get it explained, and we don’t get offered real support when we need it.

Instead, over about twenty years, I collected a lot of advice from doctors that had nothing to do with my blood. Manage your stress. Work less. Maybe try anxiety medication. Have you tried meditating?? The message underneath was always the same, that this was probably in my head.

Once I found out the cause of my symptoms, I thought the fix would be simple. Just take iron. That’s what I did, on and off, for about five years. It helped a little. It also wrecked my digestion and left me feeling puffy and inflamed. I know I’m not the only one, because a lot of women who try iron supplements hit the exact same wall.

By that point I had mostly given up on the iron thing. I figured this was just my normal, and I made my peace with it.

Then I came across an ingredient I had never heard of: bioidentical lactoferrin. I’ve been working in the supplement industry and learned about it at a conference.

I’ll keep the science part short, because that isn’t really what this story is about. The short version: lactoferrin is a protein found in human colostrum that helps your body actually use the iron it has, rather than just forcing more iron in and hoping. For a lot of us, the problem was never only about how much iron we took in. It was about how the body regulates and absorbs it.

After about 4 weeks of taking bioidentical lactoferrin, I felt the fog start to lift. My iron levels moved faster than they ever had with traditional iron pills. My iron saturation looked better. And my ferritin, the number that had been stubborn my whole life, crossed into the 30s for the first time. Without the side effects that had made iron so hard to stick with.

I know that there are a million supplements out there marketed to women. I know how a lot of this stuff gets made, and how much of it over-promises and under-delivers. I also knew that if this ingredient could do for other women what it did for me, it deserved to exist in a form people would actually keep taking.

That’s how we got here. To Palisade, and our first product, Lactoferrin Gummies.

Our formula makes it so easy (and satisfying) to take lactoferrin daily, along with a very high-quality probiotic and nutrients that nourish your gut lining, all in two delicious gummies.* No powders. No mixing. No complicated routine.

Palisade Lactoferrin Gummies are the one non-negotiable in my supplement routine now. I layer it with an iron-rich diet and occasionally pair it with a low-dose iron supplement a couple times a week – only if my labs show that I could use it. (Menstruation causes us to lose iron and ferritin stores.) I can finally say my baseline level of energy feels solid.

If any of this sounds like you, I really hope you’ll give this a try. We made it for all of us!

💜Katie, Co-founder of Palisade