Sabire Djamgoz, TabHealthcare's founder, on the chemistry degree, the chain of flower shops, and the search for supplements worth taking.
I have an organic chemistry degree and a husband who reads cancer biology papers for a living. We talk about supplements at the dinner table the way some couples talk about gardening.
My working life has been varied. I trained as a psychotherapist, did a long stint as HR director at a multinational, and ran a chain of flower shops along the way. The flower shops were the most fun. The chemistry is what stuck.
I've taken supplements daily for most of my adult life. The chemist in me reads every label the same way. I want to see the form of the active ingredient first, then the dose, then everything else that ended up in the capsule.
What I kept finding on UK shelves wasn't quite what I wanted. Magnesium in basic forms that don't absorb well. Single-ingredient capsules where you'd need three or four to cover one health goal. Long ingredient lists where the active ingredient turned up after the fillers.
So I went looking for combination formulas in well-researched, bioavailable forms. They existed. They just weren't easy to find here.
It took years to find what I was looking for. The supplements TabHealthcare sells are made by Tab Ilac, a GMP-certified facility co-owned by Dr Elif Pahsa, who practises functional medicine, and Aytekin Pahsa, who's spent decades in the nutraceutical industry. Their formulas use patented bioavailable ingredients like ATA Mg®, magnesium bisglycinate and methylated B-vitamins, combined so one tablet does the work of three or four. When I found them I stopped looking.
I started TabHealthcare Ltd to bring them to the UK. The customer I had in mind is the one who reads the back of the label before the front.
