Healthy lifestyle in a bottle

March 30, 2009 12:09

For only $9.99! Wow, if only it were actually that simple. A lot of us assume that we need extra nutrients as students – all those late-night study sessions in the library, the countless all-nighters we pull doing assignments, the stress of exams and all that jolly “exercise” on the weekends. In a NZ study done at this university, it was found that 59 percent of Kiwis had taken a supplement in the previous year, and of those people, 43 percent took them daily Being of the fairer sex, a pakeha, wealthy enough to afford them and having a higher education all make you more likely to take supplements, so I’m guessing that a number of you reading this article are too. Have you ever thought about the efficacy of these shiny little pills? Or if you actually, really, truly need them? People who may benefit from a top-up include the elderly, pregnant, and those who have a limited diet (such as vegans). In the life-saving field, people who do better with supplements are under-nourished (think Sudan at the moment), or can’t eat normally (think gastric tubes and disease). But in the study above, it was found that all those Kiwi pill-poppers had diets adequate to fulfil their nutritional needs.

Hangover cure?

Yup, everybody feels like the dog’s breakfast the morning after the night before. However, it’s probably the fact that you are imbibing effervescent water that is making you feel better when you guzzle a bbbbb-better not put any product names in here. What might be a cheaper way to do this? Try some bubbly soda water – no, it won’t make your pee go fluorescent, but I’m hoping that’s not really why you drink it.

Wasted

In fact, that lovely glowing urine reminiscent of phosphorescence in tropical seas is actually the colour of riboflavin, otherwise known as Vitamin B2. It happens to have a bright colour, so we can see it as our bodies throw it out, but pretty much all water-soluble vitamins excess to our bodies’ needs are removed this way. So how much do we need of these vitamin and mineral thingees and what do they actually do? Vitamins and minerals do all sorts of stuff, from making sure that we think and see straight, to keeping our bones from crumbling, and enabling our bodies to use energy from food. Some vitamins and minerals are antioxidants because they fight the evil oxidants in the galaxy of your body. Cool, you’re thinking, that’s all I need to know, now where can I buy them exactly? Well, Luke didn’t just go out and buy the Force, did he? If he had done, he probably would have lost it all wetting his pants when he met Yoda for the first time.

Toxic?

Some excess vitamins and minerals can’t be excreted so easily, and can actually do you harm if you overdose on them. If you go overboard popping Vitamin C because your infectious flatmate is sneezing all over the house, you won’t avoid a cold, and you could get a dose of diarrhoea. More serious ODs can occur on Vitamin A and Vitamin B6. So, if you are taking supplements, don’t double-up just because you have the flu.

The NZ perspective

Here in Aotearoa, we are about to have folate (aka folic acid) added to our bread. This is primarily because folate is necessary for preventing neural tube defects in unborn children, and those helpless mites would benefit from more folate than most pregnant women currently eat. Folate is found in lots of foods, especially green leafy ones, and we munched a lot more of these when we lived au naturel. One caveman was pulled out of a peat bog with his stomach contents intact, and was found to have over sixty different veg in there! That completely dicks on our 5+ a day. We are also advised to consume a quantity of calcium to keep dem bones strong, which we nowadays mostly get from dairy products, rather than wild veg and insects. Another vitamin, Vitamin D, is added to all milk in the USA and to some (expensive) milk in NZ. Among other functions, Vitamin D helps us to absorb calcium, and can be made by the action of sunlight on our skin. But sunlight doesn’t visit us for very long here in Dunedin (we get 500 fewer hours per year than Christchurch!) And if you have darker skin, or are elderly, you need more of it. Hmmm. Naked Day isn’t sounding so stupid after all. We can consume Vitamin D in the form of oily fish and cod liver oil, and a little from eggs. The traditional diet of people living for months without sunlight, such as in parts of Alaska, Greenland, and Norway, is rich in oily fish. Another important mineral we are advised to consume in NZ is iodine, as it is low in our soil. Ironically, this is added to salt, which we are advised to cut back on. Before you take that advice with a pinch of salt (sorry!), do a simple check of the salt you use at home – and replace it with iodised salt. You may save yourself from developing a nasty goiter. The antioxidant mineral selenium is also low in NZ soil, but we probably get enough of this by eating grains grown overseas. If you do want to top up, eat one or two brazil nuts a day.

Staving off death

The link between the risk of cancer and heart disease and the quantity of fruit and veg you eat is well established. That link is more fruit and veg = less cancer and heart disease, by the way, and means that people who get their vitamins this way do just as well, if not better, than those who swallow extra in the form of supplements. My feeling is that we would do better to spend the $9.99 on some extra fresh fruit and veg, or to donate it to the Red Cross for people who actually need supplements.