The Sunday Morning Muse

Snow in late April. I view it as an intrusion into Spring by an unwelcome visitor. I don't care if the ground is warm and it doesn't stay long. It's a cloudy morning... no sunrise to remark on, and the cat has no interest in looking out the window.

I am musing about supplements today. What to keep taking, what to quit taking. It's a confusing thing...when you read about the latest cure-all or cholesterol fixer, or menopause helper.

Let's start with I was never a vitamin person. Even when I was a kid I don't remember mom buying me many Flintstones to eat with my cornflakes. I think we did that for awhile, and just quit at some point. That pattern followed me into adulthood when multivitamins became out of fashion. Rows and rows of vitamins appeared on shelves mixed in with supplements with strange names making big claims. I tried several along the way... popping Vitamin C for awhile to ward off colds. Zinc for when you got colds, that sort of thing.
I tried this horse pill with all the women's vitamins in one pill. I just didn't want to take it everyday. I didn't like swallowing it. I feared I would choke and that would be it. No sense risking it.

I did the Fish Oil thing for awhile. But never got over the fishy taste and hated taking them. So I quit. I was on the Red Yeast Rice kick for awhile when someone told me it brought their cholesterol down, but then I read where the stuff that works in the Red Yeast Rice was "cut back" in it, and now it doesn't work anymore. So I quit.

These days I have the doc telling me to take CoQ10, which has suddenly become very expensive so I guess a lot of docs are telling their patients to take it. I take it because it is supposed to counteract another drug I'm taking. I do it because it can only help, I suppose. Can't really hurt. But since it is expensive, I'm not taking as much as I should. I know this. Yet I buy other things and walk right past it sometimes feeling guilty.

Looking around, I see Vitamin D and calcium on the shelf. I take those. Mom's neurologist says he gives his whole family Vitamin D....everyday. He is a really smart man, so I feel he is on to something. Calcium is a "given" for women. Bone loss issues as we age. Cranberry pills have become a staple here. Acidity for the
old urinary tract. Again, it can only help, and it can't hurt.

And my latest venture is into Pro-Biotics. The best one I found so far is Align. But it's expensive. So I took it for a few months and felt great....and felt so good I quit taking it. See the pattern there? Acidolpholus is
a bit cheaper, so I picked up some of that, and I've discovered some drug store brands of probiotics that are like 11 dollars for a month's supply, which isn't bad. Unless you already have Cranberry, Vitamin D,
Caltrate, and CoQ10 in your cart and you still need Tylenol and gas pills and hair dye. Then you say, what the Hell am I really doing?  Do I really need more pills?