Walk into any wellness shop these days and you'll trip over three products stacked next to each other: collagen peptides, vitamin C, and vitamin E. The marketing is relentless. The claims are big. And if you're someone preparing for an ayahuasca retreat or recovering from one, you've probably wondered whether any of this stuff actually matters — or whether it's just another expensive distraction from the real work.

Here's my honest take, written from years of talking to retreat-goers, facilitators, and the odd integrative-medicine doctor who was willing to answer my questions without rolling their eyes. This isn't a pitch for supplements. It's a sober look at what these three ingredients do, where the science actually lands, and whether any of them deserve a spot in the suitcase you're packing for Peru, Costa Rica, or wherever you're headed.

Why Retreat-Goers Keep Asking About Aging and Recovery

Plant medicine attracts a surprisingly age-diverse crowd. I've sat in ceremonies with twenty-two-year-olds reckoning with early trauma and sixty-year-olds trying to make peace with divorce, parenthood, careers that didn't go where they'd planned. What unites them, more often than not, is a sense that the body is also part of the conversation. You can't do deep psychological work in a nervous system that's running on fumes.

So the question of how to support the body — before purging in a maloca, during the dieta, and in the weeks of integration that follow — comes up a lot. Collagen, vitamin C, and vitamin E all get mentioned because they share a basic job description: helping tissue stay resilient under stress. And ceremony, let's be honest, is stress. Beautiful, meaningful stress, but stress all the same.

That doesn't mean you need to pop pills. It does mean it's worth understanding what these three nutrients actually do, so you can make an informed call rather than a marketing-driven one.

What Collagen Actually Is (And What It Isn't)

Collagen is the structural protein that holds you together — skin, joints, gut lining, blood vessels, the connective webbing between muscles. Your body makes it from amino acids. Production slows as you age, which is why skin gets thinner and joints get crankier somewhere in your thirties.

Supplemental collagen is almost always hydrolyzed, meaning it's been broken into smaller peptides your gut can absorb. The honest science: there's decent evidence it modestly improves skin elasticity and reduces joint discomfort over several months of consistent use. There's less evidence it does anything dramatic in a short window. If you're imagining a two-week pre-retreat collagen cleanse that transforms your skin, lower your expectations.

Where it might genuinely matter for retreat-goers: gut lining. Ayahuasca, San Pedro, psilocybin — all of them interact with the gastrointestinal tract. People with sensitive guts sometimes find that steady collagen or bone broth intake in the weeks before a retreat helps them feel more settled going in. I'd call that anecdotal but plausible.

Vitamin C: The One Most People Underestimate

Vitamin C has an image problem. It's been around so long, and marketed so heavily for colds, that people treat it like a quaint grandparent nutrient. That's a mistake. It's actually central to collagen synthesis — your body literally cannot build collagen without it. It also doubles as a potent antioxidant, mopping up the free radicals that pile up during physical and emotional stress.

A retreat is a free-radical factory. You're sleep-deprived. You're eating differently. Your nervous system is cycling through peaks and valleys that would exhaust most people in a normal month, compressed into a week. Supporting your body's antioxidant capacity isn't about chasing eternal youth — it's about not feeling like roadkill on day four.

Food sources are excellent: citrus, peppers, kiwi, broccoli, strawberries, the kind of produce that may or may not be available at your retreat center depending on where you go. If you're heading somewhere remote, a modest supplement (500mg daily, nothing heroic) is a reasonable insurance policy. Megadosing isn't necessary and can give you diarrhea you really don't want in a shared maloca.

Vitamin E: The Fat-Soluble Teammate

Vitamin E is where things get interesting. It's a fat-soluble antioxidant, meaning it protects the fatty membranes of your cells — including, importantly, the ones in your brain. Vitamin C handles the water-based environments; vitamin E handles the fatty ones. They literally recycle each other in the body, which is why nutritionists tend to talk about them as a pair.

For plant-medicine work, the brain-protection angle is where my attention goes. Psychedelics put your neurons through an unusual experience. Supporting cellular membrane health in the weeks around a ceremony isn't going to make the medicine work better, but it may support the body's housekeeping afterward. That's a plausible mechanism, not a proven one. Treat it as such.

Nuts, seeds, avocado, and good-quality olive oil are the easiest food sources. Most people get enough from diet alone. If you're on a very low-fat eating pattern (which, by the way, isn't ideal pre-ceremony — your brain needs fats), a modest supplement makes sense.

How to Think About Supplements Around a Ceremony

Here's the part most supplement articles skip: timing. Many retreat centers ask you to stop supplements and medications for a window before ceremony. This is for real reasons — some supplements interact with the MAO inhibitors in ayahuasca, and even benign-seeming nutrients can confuse the dieta.

Rough guidelines I've seen used by reputable facilitators:

• Stop high-dose vitamin and herbal supplements at least two weeks before ayahuasca ceremonies, unless your facilitator advises otherwise.
• SSRIs and other psychiatric medications require a longer washout, planned with a doctor — this is not a DIY situation.
• Collagen peptides are generally considered neutral, but tell your facilitator what you're taking.
• Resume gentle supplementation only after the integration period, when your body has settled.

If your retreat has specific guidance, follow their guidance — not a blog post, not a supplement company's marketing, not even me. The people running the ceremony know their lineage and their protocols.

Do You Actually Need Any of This?

Probably not, if you're eating reasonably well and sleeping enough. The supplement industry would like you to believe otherwise. But the single biggest predictor of how well a retreat-goer handles ceremony isn't their nutrient stack — it's their baseline health, their sleep, their nervous-system regulation, and their emotional readiness.

I've watched people arrive at retreats with suitcases of pills and still have a brutal time because they hadn't slept properly in a month. I've also watched people show up having done nothing fancier than eat clean food and take long walks, and move through ceremony with remarkable grace. The pills aren't the point.

That said, if you're genuinely low on something — vitamin D is the most common deficiency in retreat-goers I meet, oddly enough — supplementation matters. Get a basic blood panel before you spend thousands on a retreat. Fix the real gaps. Ignore the imaginary ones.

A Grounded Approach to Pre- and Post-Retreat Support

If I had to boil this down to practical advice for someone three months out from their first ceremony, it would look like this:

1. Eat whole food. Boring but true. Vegetables, fruit, clean protein, healthy fats. Your collagen, vitamin C, and vitamin E will largely take care of themselves.
2. Sleep. Non-negotiable. Seven to nine hours. Your nervous system cannot do deep work on four hours a night.
3. Reduce inflammatory inputs. Alcohol, processed sugar, and chronic stress do more damage than any supplement can undo.
4. Hydrate properly in the weeks before travel. Dehydration is the single most common complaint I hear from first-timers.
5. Talk to your facilitator about any supplement or medication you're taking. Honesty here is safety.

After the retreat, integration is where the actual change happens — not in the ceremony itself. A diet that supports your body's recovery, time outside, gentle movement, honest conversations with people who get it. That's the stack that matters.

If any of this has you thinking seriously about taking the next step, a range of ayahuasca and plant-medicine retreats can be browsed on our marketplace here. Choose carefully, ask the hard questions, and remember that the body you bring to ceremony is the body that has to carry what you learn back home.