Today’s random health report
Photo by Myriam Zilles on Unsplash
Dietary doomsday may be upon us. For instance, how’s the eicosapentaenoic acid?
And should we be REALLY worried about it?
There’s food — as in breakfast, lunch, dinner, nosh — and there’s Supplement. I grew up on meat & potatoes plus a few vegetables, old-fashioned stuff you cook and eat. But the world seems to be geared to popping pills for daily needs, so I supplement with the best of them today.
One of my children told me to take turmeric with curcumin, so I started swallowing those yellowish pills a few years ago. I have no idea why; sometimes I think they give me desert-sand breath.
Then there’s fish oil. Does everybody take daily fish oil? I sort of think so. That’s where you get the eicosapentaenoic acid. It’s a “fatty acid,” which doesn’t sound particularly yummy when you think about it. Plus, I used to take pride in never having dropped acid.
I am more than a little suspicious of it all. Big Pharma, I think, did a mind control thing on my primary care doctor, the one who said I really should take extra iron, and calcium with vitamin D, and if I’m not mistaken she threw in the fish oil. There is no fish oil capsule smaller than a quail’s egg. After I while, I got a new doctor.
Mostly, I am fascinated with CoQ10. Seriously, now. Had you ever heard of CoQ10 before it began starring in every other commercial on MSNBC?
CoQ10 — I’ve been researching this, no easy task — is an enzyme. More specifically it is “Coenzyme Q, also known as ubiquinone . . .” Most healthy people have plenty of it, but maybe — maybe — scarfing a little more might help with one’s blood pressure or metabolism or headache. Apparently, nobody much knows. Just reading about it gives me a headache.
In the small print of the CoQ10 packages are warnings about diarrhea, nausea and heartburn, little things like that. As to whether taking this happy little supplement can actually do any good, phrases like “the evidence is conflicting,” or “it’s uncertain that adding CoQ10 will have any effect” proliferate.
Maybe we should go back to kale and blueberries.
If you want to know how foul fish oil can be, read “Behind the Beautiful Forevers” by Pulitzer Prize winner Katherine Boo. The book focuses on the lives of the poor in India. In it she describes a lake that is near a huge garbage dump. The lake is totally contaminated. And btw, fish oil is extracted from whatever fish are surviving in it.
Whoa. I think you may have turned me off of fish oil forever. That’s sort of like catfish, which I occasionally see on menus in reputable restaurants. But if you’ve ever gone fishing in a southern river and caught one of those repulsive, slimy, bottom-feeder creatures you will DEFINITELY never eat catfish. You and I may have a good book here.
I take a multi-vitamin/multi mineral pill each day, and a couple of other supplements. I hope that they help, but who knows?
Me too. I think the whole business is a nobody-really-knows business.