D is for Deception

Campers, I know you are all waiting breathlessly for every tiny detail of my glorious lunch with DMR at Le Bernardin.

Well, my tale will have to wait. Today, confronted by hurricane-force winds and horizontal driving rains, we pondered the difficulties of savoring our meal while sitting in damp clothes, hair wildly askew and cheeks ruddy from the cold, dripping NYC rainwater all over Eric's pristine linen tablecloths. How would we enjoy our stroll up 5th Avenue afterwards, when every streetcorner would require a death-leap over gutters torrentially awash? Could I with good conscience subject my lovely silver Element to the whims of the crazy truck drivers on I-78, refusing as they do to make concessions for extreme highway conditions? I would have braved it had there been no other choice, but the restaurant's reservations folks were very understanding and re-booked us for Friday, two days hence. A bit of rejiggling of my oh-so-busy social calendar (sadly, I had to postpone a lunch date with The Cycling Scientist) and - hey presto - we were in business.

This unexpected hiatus has given me the leisure to contemplate the latest quack-perpetrated confusion in my life, vitamins and minerals.

At the beginning of the whole gluten-free fiasco, it was decided by others that urgent and drastic doses of Vitamin D would solve just about everything that was wrong in my life and probably bring about peace in the Middle East, too. I can't speak for the Palestinian situation, but I was vexed by the question of how to introduce secosteroidal calciferol into my own benighted sphere of influence.

As we all know, Vitamin D is best skin-synthesized through the photochemical process. Given the rapidly shortening days and my horror of outdoor pursuits, however, ingestion seemed to be the better solution. Foods rich in Vitamin D include catfish, salmon, mackerel, eel, tuna, fish liver oils, and beef liver. Problems there, too. Due to environmental and health concerns (fish oil pill production is destroying the oceans! tuna are virtually extinct! eels are fed birth control pills!) several of these piscine sources are off the menu and beef liver is one of the few ingredients (another being coconut) that gives me the screaming heebie-jeebies. Sir was therefore duly dispatched on a late-night pharmacy run and returned home some time later clutching two huge bottles of what can only be described as horse pills, fully loaded with the magic ingredient.

A week later, I was felled by a variety of really appalling symptoms, which (out of concern for my readers' delicate sensibilities) I will refrain from cataloging here. Careful detective work linked my decline to the onset of the horse pills. I made the command decision to stop taking them and was back to normal in a couple of days. I decided not to tell my quack because I live to please and didn't want to disappoint him: honestly, I cause the poor man enough trouble as it is.

Keeping my guilt to myself, my ears perked up in the car as I drove to work yesterday, listening to NPR's Morning Edition as is my custom. The phrases 'Institute of Medicine',  'new study', 'Vitamin D', and 'hogwash' caught my attention. Sure enough, it turns out the whole Vitamin D imperative is a conspiracy perpetrated by testing laboratories working in collusion with supplement manufacturers to increase profits through blood testing and vitamin sales. I'm paraphrasing, of course, but that's my reading of the situation.

Vitamin D is 'not a panacea', says Dennis Black, Professor of Epidemiology and Biostatics at UCSF (but what does he know, right?). Not only can the benefits of Vitamin D be directly related to bone health only, an excess can lead to kidney stones and possibly increase the risk of bone fractures. Most folks are doing fine, it turns out, with what little exposure to sunlight they have and with their regular diet, ramping up about 600 int'l units per day without too much trouble. My capsules contained, like, ten times that. No wonder I went down like an old nag at the Grand National.

I think I'll be satisfied with my humble multivitamin (Vitamin D: 400 iu) and go for a walk tomorrow at lunch to soak up the sunshine - provided the typhoon has subsided, of course.

Next up: hold on to your toques blanches, campers - it's Top Chef All Stars!