Vitamins

I don't know which nerves are crossed in my brain (a Chinese saying that I've translated because I love that it's so great at describing random impulses that we get on occasions), but I suddenly remembered my friend's advice when she was in med school telling me that women stop absorbing calcium at age 35, so we better start taking supplements because it's harder to build bone density when we really need to.

Went to Henry's and bought myself a bottle of Sun Harvest Calcium Citrate with Vit D3.

On the way to the calcium aisle, I browsed through the multi-vitamins, like one-a-day type of thing, just to explore my options. If I can take one with calcium and iron, then why not?

Here's the first thing about multi-vitamins that bothers me: why do I need 2000+% recommended daily value of thiamin? Why do I need more than 100% of any one vitamin? At its most benign, as Sheldon of The Big Bang Theory says, that makes for some expensive (and smelly) pee. At its worst, vitamin toxicity. So no thank you.

Same thing with the calcium aisle. I was surprised to find calcium supplements also sold together as cal-mag-zinc. I feel like they are selling fertilizer and that I'll be ingesting fertilizer (yummy steer manure anyone?). You know, the 10-20-10 or some other ratio of nitrogen-phosphorus-potassium. Anyway, eventually I settled on one that had 63% daily value of Ca and 100% daily value of vitamin D3. Even though the instructions told me to take 2 tablets once or twice a day, I'm going to ignore that and take one a day with my dinner. I feel like that's safe enough.

Which leads me to the second thing about vitamins that bothers me: I opened the bottle and swallowed a pill, even with water, that was a tad difficult. Really, were it just a bit bigger, it might as well be a suppository. So what is up with the size of the pills? I might be able to understand multi-vitamins needing to be bigger because of the crap that they need to put in them, but Ca and Vit D3? There are fillers. How about less of that?

One cool thing though that I do like about my shiny new jar of suppositories...I mean pills is that it came in a brown glass jar. How cool is that?