Ain't Nothing Like The Real Thing Baby

A lot of recent research has been showing that taking vitamin supplements and other herbal pills don't really help that much fighting heart disease and reducing cholesterol. I used to take echinacea, tons of Vitamin C and Vitamin E because I thought they would help me. Well, it turns out that echinacea doesn't work as well as people hoped it did to prevent colds, Vitamin E can be deadly if you take too much of it and you piss out all the extra Vitamin C your body doesn't need.

I don't buy all the alphabetical supplements any more. I just stick with a multivitamin. I looked at the label contents and my goodness! Some provide way more than the recommended dosage to begin with so why would I need to get an extra bottle of B-12 or E? I used to buy all the minerals I could get my hands on but now I just stick with calcium (with D). The other stuff I take are: flaxseed oil, MSM, glucosomine chondroitin and CoQ12.

I still take the flaxseed oil in spite of the fact that I didn't see a reduction in my bad cholesterol or triglycerides.

Here is the bottom line truth: there is no substitute for the real thing. Eating fish (and not tuna fish in cans) brought down my bad cholesterol and triglycerides dramatically. For the other vitamin and minerals I go with expensive fresh produce: broccoli, corn, tomatoes, blueberries, strawberries, peaches, plums, zucchini, yellow squash and eggplant from the local farmstand. Now that we are eating fish twice a week, our red meat consumption has gone down to once or twice a week and that is healthier for all of us.

My continuing major gripe: why should it be so much more expensive to eat healthy foods?