Thursday, September 14, 2006

Mmmm, Vital Amines.

I love vitamins. I take a cocktail of them every morning with my ultra-healthy, quasi-vegan breakfast. I am not a vegan, myself, but my breakfasts seem to have evolved into the specification. I take a multi-vitamin, cod liver oil, fish oil, and an aspirin. Yes, I'm not even 30, but I don't drink, so I need to get my blood-thinning goodness from somewhere.

I know that dietary supplements are not the wonder-pills that I thought years ago, but I haven't really looked up any further information. I think some of its intentional ignorance, since I don't want to find out how useless they actually are.

Still, I think current research is inadequate to truly declare one way or another if vitamins are truly useless. The whole point is not to get rid of wrinkles by next week, or something. It's for the purpose of long-term, overall health. I look forward to a study that goes for years, even decades. I think that will give us some insight. Unfortunately, even then, I can see some pretty big problems. People who are taking vitamins are much more likely to be generally healthy, thus we will be unable to tell whether it was their lifestyle or the vitamins who had any effect.

God, what a pain in the ass. I'm definitely not taking doses high enough to be ridiculous, so I'm going to continue as I have been. If nothing else, it makes provides me with my daily hit of placebo. Mmmmm. Placebo.

Dietary Supplements: Too Much of a Good Thing? (Via LiveScience.com)

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