Supplemental Income Needed

So, what's your view on supplements?

I get spam e-mails occasionally from Prevention, king of the low-fat health magazines, and am always seduced a bit by their professionalism. Being in publishing myself, I've always found their books -- expensive books, by the way -- very attractive and fun to look through.

Today's e-mail blast, in large blue and green type: "Want to Lose 20-60 Pounds or More? You need help from the world's most effective "weight loss wonders"! You'll find them all in your free-preview copy of The Natural Fat-Loss Pharmacy!"

It's all about supplements. Dietary supplements -- I think today's buzzword is "nutraceuticals" -- you can take to "speed up the fat-burning process." Supplements that cost so much you practically need a "supplemental income," so to speak, to pay for them.

The late great Dr. Atkins got into dietary supplements as well--particularly his own brand of them--and I always wondered if they really made any difference or if it was just a clever money-making scheme. I note that Atkins Nutritionals stopped making them once the Atkins craze cooled off.

One of my favorite low-carb books is Jonny Bowden's Living the Low Carb Life, a most rational exploration of all the major low-carb or controlled carb eating plans.

He also highly advocates a number of supplements. Once, just to see what it would involve, I made a list of the recommended supplements and looked them up on the Vitacost website, and it totaled well over $100 for a month's worth of these "beneficial" food supplements. The list contained: GLA, Alpha Lipoic Acid, GTF Chromium, a B-Complex, a separate B5 supplement, Omega 3, L-Carnitine, 5-HTP, Magnesium, Green Tea Extract and L-Glutamine. I ended up buying a bottle of Centrum for $10 and leaving it at that except for a milk thistle/dandelion root combo for liver health that I started taking after having slightly elevated liver enzymes turn up on blood tests for a couple of years running.

But I wonder..... What do you take besides a multivitamin? And what does it do for you?