My name is Scott, and I am hooked on vitamins.
It began a couple of years ago – quite innocently – with the usual suspects; Vitamin C and a Multivitamin. A bit of light reading added things like Coenzyme Q10 to the list (CoQ10 wasn’t anywhere to be seen on the Multivitamin jar) and the daily intake gradually grew and grew. Once it became almost impossible to open the cupboard door without spilling various bottles across the bench I realised it was time to take action.
Selling small bottles of vitamins is an enormous industry. As with insurance, sales are based largely on fear. If you don’t take x, bad things will happen to you. Your stress-free days and full nights of sleep will not simply become a rarity (assuming you have them now); they will cease to exist. How anyone managed to cope without several carefully selected pills each day is a mystery.
A few weeks ago I found myself in a health food store. Unsure of which vitamins I needed and which I already had in the cupboard, I bought a new jar of everything (everything on my list, that is – about 15 at last count). Since then I’ve noticed that my grocery shopping bills have been going down, and my diet has been gradually improving. My current thinking is that I’d not only save a considerable amount of money by skipping the vitamin supplementation, it might force me to keep thinking about the foods I eat. After all, vitamins from the right foods are better than those from a bottle. To me at least.