Multi-vitamin Question

To Take Or To Make

The latest Nutrition Action bulletin has a cover story on multi-vitamins that seems to blow the lid off of any claims of benefit from health-wise pill-popping.

Study after study seems to show that there is no increase in life expectancy, decrease in heart disease, and so on down the list of hoped for positive results.

At first blush this is cause for nonplussed surprise. Surely there's a flaw in these studies, we think to ourselves. And yet the data seem overwhelming.

My take? I remember reading about an Indian mystic who claimed that he didn't eat or drink for weeks at a time. Meditation was all it took. And when scientists rigged up a controlled experiment where the fellow was confined to a bed and watched night and day, sure enough, he apparently didn't have anyone sneaking him snacks on the sly; his body just kept on keeping on. Could this then be our default mode? If we barely engage with the outside world; that is, slow breathing, mental discipline, and so forth, perhaps we need very little sustenance.

If so, then it would follow that those who live mainly sedentary lives require relatively little nutrition. And modern humans do live lives of relative comfort.

The question I have, though, is if this is all true, might the inverse also apply? Might those of us who exert ourselves over the course of a typical day, performing manual labor, might we not benefit greatly from a multi-vitamin every day or so? It would be interesting to know the details of the studies in question. When vitamins and placebos were administered, was there a screen for levels of exertion? And if so, was there a pattern?

And finally, what multi-vitamin were being used? Were they organic or synthetic? The article does mention that organic sources (actual fruits and vegetables, as opposed to chemical isolates) don't seem to make a difference. But one would need to know all the details to be sure of that conclusion, because a desk jockey in an office wouldn't likely benefit from either. There might be a difference, however, if manual labor were involved.

...Or, we could all just make our meals out of delicious, freshly-picked produce and that would be that.

Pollution's Wake

"Way Up North Where The Huskies Go...."

One of several 'buddies' at college had a collection of Frank Zappa records that got quite a bit of play, with the most memorable number involving the above title and its rejoinder: "Don't You Eat That Yellow Snow."

Now, I didn't much care for Zappa, and found excuses to be elsewhere, but that line stuck with me to the extent that it seems more than just clever and pleasingly twangy. It speaks the truth.

Pollution, whether of the yellow snow variety, or that described in a recent Discover magazine article titled: "Are Toxins In Seafood Causing ALS, Alzheimer's, and Parkinson's?" is so pervasive in our increasingly crowded world that when remedial steps are proposed, the solution is to minimize the effect rather than to remove the pollutant.

The Discover article describes startling research which seems to link algae blooms (scummy water) to a compound that accumulates in some kinds of seafood--notably pink shrimp, largemouth bass and blue crab--to the above three diseases. It seems there is more to the association than a clear causal link, and that genetic predisposition and healthy living may account for the rest of the story. But, our family does have a pond that is commonly overcome with algae during the warmer months due to fertilizer runoff from farm fields. And our friends do like to come over and fish. And we do have bass in our pond. And my step-grandfather had Parkinson's and was an avid fisherman who likely ate quite a few bass from our pond. Hmmm.

But getting back to my original point, the article goes on to say that if the association could be proven, doctors could then test for the compound that's to blame. That's a good stop-gap strategy, but why not see this story pointing in a different direction? Why not address the cause of the darned problem: scummy water? I suppose that's because the scope of the mess is too large and involves human population numbers, for one thing.

And yet there's probably a minority of people who think that an even larger population is a good thing--crowd 'em in, the more the better! A common argument along these lines is that more people mean a greater chance for geniuses. Only trouble is, crowded slums and other economic backwaters have a hard time producing geniuses, no matter how many people are packed in.

Think of it this way, Where does one find fish without the implicated compound derived from scum? In wilder settings. I bet the chances of contracting any of the three scourges mentioned above is zero when eating from a wild, rushing stream teaming with native fish, far from the nearest urban development.