Vitamins B(ald) & E(agles) Are Recommended By Crying Chief

    Eagles! Four of us drove up to Lackawaxen, PA several weeks ago to hit a spot where the Lackawaxen River meets the Delaware River on the New York border and bald eagles like to congregate. For the fish. It wound up being pretty exciting because I was thinking about how, growing up in the 70s and early 80s, the word on the birds was that they were disappeared, very rare, nearly extinct. To actually see them around now is exciting and probably worthy of some sort of American Indian quote about soaring hearts or summ'at, but no. We saw about seven of them. My pictures are lame though, because I need a better telephoto lens. Mine is cheap-o. Also, that's all I have to report. So the rest of this blog will be other bad bald eagle pictures, and a response I had to write for English class last year on an article in the NY Times by Michael Pollan. Yup, I'm scraping up the dregs.

    Michael Pollan artfully defines “food” as anything your great-great-grandmother would recognize as such, and his point is that in modern times the industry has drastically altered our perception of what qualifies as real food. Pollan says that part of the reason people have a difficult time eating real food is that when you walk into a grocery store the “most healthful foods in the supermarket sit there quietly in the produce section, silent as stroke victims, while a few aisles over, the Cocoa Puffs and Lucky Charms are screaming about their newfound whole-grain goodness.” He has a decidedly sneering attitude about such health claims, and with good reason; in 1977, George McGovern “prepared what by all rights should have been an uncontroversial document called ‘Dietary Goals for the United States’… calling on Americans to cut down on red meat and dairy products.” The red-meat and dairy industry bellowed, and this very practical advice was drowned out. In Pollan’s view and in mine, the food industry has since waged a campaign of misinformation about American health.

    In 2007, at 35 years old, 5’ 11” and 220 lbs., my doctor told me my cholesterol was high and wrote a prescription for Lipitor. Concurrently I had seen a specialist about my arms frequently going numb during sleep and was told that I had pre-carpal tunnel syndrome, meaning that it wasn’t full-blown and not too late to fix it with arm braces and some other types of treatment. I had a brief conversation with myself at that point that went something like this: “Self, you’re 35. You’re falling apart. You’re too young for this shit.” I decided that I needed to get in better shape. I never filled the Lipitor prescription because of my personal conviction that it is a junk drug, meant to treat a symptom but not the actual problem. I never wore the arm braces because I couldn’t bear the idea of starting down that path towards riding a jazzy with a big-slurp in Wal-Mart. I got a gym membership and lost 35 pounds in about a year. I slowly began changing my diet to whole foods, which became easier the more I exercised because I didn’t want to ruin a good workout with empty calories. I also started getting into vitamins.

    Pollan believes that separating individual vitamins and nutrients from food is missing the forest for the trees. I agree with this to an extent in that I strongly believe that vitamins are not a substitute for healthy food. However, since I began taking natural, non-synthetic vitamins in addition to my healthier diet and exercise, I haven’t had a single cold. I have felt a bit run-down on occasion, which I strongly suspect were cases of my body fighting off what would normally be some such common sickness. I did get bronchitis once, but it only lasted about two days which is unusual for such a normally debilitating condition. While I could attribute this to exercise and healthy eating, and I’m sure that’s a part of it, I know plenty of people who eat well and exercise and yet still get regular illnesses.

    While my evidence for the health benefits of vitamins is anecdotal and hardly scientific, I am wary of ending my vitamin regimen as Pollan, while offering much sage wisdom, had little in the way of science in his opinions on individual vitamins to offer either. My own feeling from reading various sources is that today’s farming practices have reduced the amount of minerals and nutrients in our soil, therefore reducing the health benefits of even the most naturally grown whole foods, which is why I feel that supplementing a healthy diet with natural vitamins is still important.

    Pollan seems to fall into the same trap that he warns us of, asking that we take so-called scientific studies done by nutritionists with a grain of salt and yet at the same time citing a study that says “in the case of beta carotene ingested as a supplement, scientists have discovered that it actually increases the risk of certain cancers.” The error in this stance lies in what he leaves out; that many such negative vitamin studies are done using synthetic vitamins. Synthetic vitamins have been shown in fact to be very bad for you, however when the naturally occurring forms of these vitamins are used in more honest studies, no such negative health consequences are found. Therefore it seems obvious to me that the hype surrounding the supposed danger of vitamins is simply more misinformation from the industry.