Five years ago if you had asked me what an antioxident was I probably would have said it was something you put on silver to keep it from tarnishing. When I heard the term “free radicals,” I was ready to fight for their immediate release. What can I tell you? I was so nutritionally illiterate, I actually thought my multivitamin would fill in the gaps on those days my only vegetable was the iceberg lettuce that lined my ham on white bread. Mea culpa.
It wasn’t until all the “wellness” newsletters began arriving in the mail, and vitamin “infomercials” cropped up on TV, and myriad books on nutrition flooded the bookstore that I found out what my body had probably been crying for all these years. Supplements. Supplements. Supplements.
Once I realized that just by taking 15 or 20 little pills a day, I can prevent or retard bone loss, dry skin, muscle aches, baldness, fatigue, anxiety, constipation, insomnia, and at the same time enhance my liver function, sex drive, appetite, complexion and metabolism, my blood began to rush unhampered through my veins.
As I swallow my supplements each morning, I can practically feel the hair growing on my head. It only takes me about 15 minutes to wash down 1,500 milligrams of garlic, 400 International Units of vitamin E, 10,000 IU of vitamin A, 400 IU of vitamin D, 40 milligrams of zinc, 600 milligrams of vitamin C, 200 milligrams of selenium, 500 milligrams of echinacea, 1,500 milligrams of calcium, 750 milligrams of glucosomine, 150 milligrams of CoQ-10 and 1,000 milligrams of bee pollen. CoQ-10 is a particularly costly whatever-it-is, but as one nutritionist put it, “Can you put a price on being able to tie your own shoelaces when you’re 100 years old?”
There are supplement skeptics who insist we can get all the extra nutrients we need from so-called “enriched” products: cereal, pasta, bread. No offense meant, but I question their reasoning. How can we be sure the ABCs, to name a few, are in there? And if they are, how did they get there? Is each flake of Total cereal injected with the 19 nutrients listed on the box? Are they sprayed on? Or are they put in a paper bag with the flakes and shaken, while a proud worker stands by and shouts, “All the vitamins are in and ah helped”?
Knowing what I now know, I would hate to trust my well-being to some “ghost” nutrients. And the condition of my body speaks for itself. Even a casual observer, noting my luxuriant hair, my flawless complexion and my trim waist would know I’m on something. How else could you explain the spring in my step, my arms moving rhythmically–up, down, up, down–if not for all the joint looseners and motor enhancers I swallow whole.
Maybe, just maybe, I could get by on green leafy vegetables, non-fat milk solids and 16-grain bread. And maybe I could kick the molybdenum and the omega-3 fatty acids and just concentrate on salmon and buckwheat pancakes. Maybe I could, and maybe my eyelashes would curl on their own, but it wouldn’t be me. The truth of the matter is I’ve never been one to go for fads.
