are vitamins bullshit or what? (1)
Posted 28 September, 2005 in life shiz, preconceived notions
Recently I have begun taking vitamins again. I stopped because I had it on good authority that vitamins don’t do anything. Well, I read it in a book on food, the name of which I can’t recall right now. In any case, it was a hardcover, shiny, important-looking book that had a lot of good and practical things to say about food and nutrients. So I stopped taking vitamins.
One school of thought is that vitamin pills pass through the body mostly intact, and come out in your poo, only to be lost in the sewer pipes forever. This reasoning is why certain “religions” tout liquid vitamin spray as part of their pyramid schemes. Others (like the authors of the book I read) say that the body simply flushes out overabundances of vitamins in your pee, thus making megadoses pointless to take, and that even regular doses of vitamins are somewhat unnecessary. But there are lots of other schools of thought that make taking vitamins mandatory. Yet I’ve never heard anyone say, “She got [insert crazy disease here] because she didn’t take her vitamins.” And weight-bearing exercise, I hear, staves off osteoporosis better than calcium supplements do.
I began taking vitamins again for two reasons. One, my mother-in-law takes calcium everyday, and her doctor tells her she has the spine of a 30-year-old. (She also walks a lot–weight-bearing exercise–which I am trying to do now too.) And two, taking folate helps prevent neural tube defects in developing fetuses. (fetii? feta? feces?) And while I am not yet knocked up, nor yet trying to be, I might as well start taking the folate early. Plus, if it can stop baby brain-farts, imagine what it could be doing for my knackered body! Or not. I don’t really know.
I would appreciate some wisdom on what exactly supplemental vitamins do for one, and how they are absorbed into the body, if they indeed are. I would also appreciate it if someone could tell me why calcium pills are so motherfucking big. Choking down that horse pill every night almost kills me, yet the giant lozenge only contains 60% of my RDA! How much more do I have to take? Can’t they make it smaller? Should I just eat a stick of chalk instead? Sometimes, after many fruitless tries at swallowing this enormous capsule, I give in and chew it instead. It tastes like hell, so please explain to me why I shouldn’t just munch on some blackboard chalk–it would be just as vomitous, and might even contain 100% of my RDA instead of just 60%.
I am slightly weary of being told something is good for me one day, then the next day being warned against ever consuming it, or told it does nothing at all, positive or negative. Can we just settle on what’s good and what’s bad, so I don’t have to feel like it’s pointless to gag on these mammoth calcium bricks?
And don’t even get me started on those conflicting studies concerning Paxil and birth defects.