Health food

News reports have been abounding lately that vitamin E supplements may not be as good for you as previously thought. I'm not terribly surprised by this.

I worked in a health food store, Sunflower, in college, a small mom & pop one, not one of the near WalMart ones that are now much more common. There, I learned that people believe that if something is good, even more of something must be better. That's safe with some stuff, like vitamin C - it's water-soluable, and if your body doesn't need it, it will excrete it with no problem. Things like vitamin E are fat-soluable. It sticks to the fat in your body and just hangs out there until it's used or you lose the fat. And if you don't use it and it just keeps adding up ... well, eventually you're going to poison yourself.

Even when I worked at Sunflower, it annoyed me to see people gulping down pills without even asking if they needed them. They paid huge amount of money for a bottle of multivitamins, then buy blue corn chips because they were "health food."

Want to get healthy? Eat better and exersize more. Eat your dark, leafy greens and nuts if you want extra vitamin E. Or vitamin C, for that matter. Don't subsist on fast food and chips and then think you can make it all up because you swallow a vitamin pill.

Lecture done.

PS: It's 11/11.

UPDATE: I stand corrected. You can get too much vitamin C. But it's sure a whole hell of a lot harder with a water soluable vitamin.