If you mention "men" on the label, that makes needing multivitamins sort of manly.
All I wanted out of the trip to the drug store was the chance to reap the health benefits of zinc.
I needed a multivitamin. I wanted one that perhaps also had a bit of magnesium in it, and maybe a little copper and iron — something that sounded strong and supportive. You don't always know if you're getting all the good stuff you need when you graze through life, snacking during sports and comedy programs on TV.
Oh, everybody is aware that you get calcium from drinking milk and potassium from eating bananas. That much we all probably learned from our mothers or some health article stuffed into the Sunday newspaper.
But, how many of us have a clear idea of how to chow down on and digest something like pantothenic acid? I personally don't know what foods might provide even close to the 67 percent of the body's daily need of molydenum found in a typical multivitamin. I'm hoping that the source of at least one of them is a big glazed doughnut, but I don't as of this writing have that scientifically proven. Until I do I decided to go with the pills.
Reading ingredients
As I stood in the drug store, I was looking at the back of the bottle of multivitamins I was planning to buy and I discovered that each pill serves up chromium, phosphorus, selenium and biotin, as well as a whole alphabet of regular old A-B-C-D-E (not only B6, but B12, too) vitamins. And the vitamin maker threw in some Vitamin K — 75 percent of what I need. I saw that as pretty generous, an assessment I'll probably regret if Vitamin K turns out to be good only for growing your eyebrows faster, but I figured I could live with the consequences.
If I bought the multivitamins, I would be getting 150 percent of my Vitamin C and 250 percent of my Vitamin D. I'd probably have to live in an orange grove and sit in the sun all day to come even close to those percentages without helping nature along a little.
Let's face it, this was a really good deal. Beyond what each individual pill was offering, I was doubling up on the health benefits by buying in bulk. A Sunday newspaper advertisement offered "buy one bottle and get another bottle free." The store was practically giving good health away. At that price, every other day I would be swallowing 50 percent of my folic acid and 115 percent of my manganese for free.
I calculated that out roughly and was astonished at the amount of money I'd be saving — funds that I could be putting toward a health club membership or some of those little snack-sized candy bars that you can suck down quickly so they don't use up a very high percentage of the maximum daily allowance of guilt.
Making The Man
Most importantly, from a guy's point of view, I noticed that these were "Men's Multivitamin/Multimineral" pills. I make this point because most men don't think they need any help at all, much less from multivitamins.
"I don't need niacin or thiamin or a GPS to know where I'm driving or when we have to stop at a rest area ..."
Beyond that illogical confidence, there's a chance that many man might think that taking a vitamin could be really risky, too. The back of my multivitamin bottle used a lot of label space for "Supplement Facts." Supplement? Is it banned by baseball? Might this, down the road, keep a guy from playing shortstop for a major league team? I say "down the road" because this is a dream that many men, frankly, keep alive for most of their lives, even in our elderly years. Maybe we slide the dream over to first base later in life, but we keep the dream on the field.
Fortunately, the front of my bottle of multivitamins said that the pills inside offered "nutritional supplement with important nutrients for men." There it was on the label — "Dietary Supplement." That didn't mean I wasn't doing fairly good with manhood on my own, but if I wanted to be a better man — maybe a man who could do the Sunday crossword puzzle — I was supposed to take these multivitamins. I think most men would have come to that conclusion.
OK, guys, we're deluding ourselves. Still, it's an argument I wanted to buy into and I hoped that, if nothing else, I'd find out that if Vitamin K really was a brow-bushing vitamin, would when taken regularly under a doctor's supervision also help grow hair back on the top of my head, too.
If anybody had called me on it I was just going to walk away from the checkout counter with the kind of swagger that could only have resulted from an extra dose of iodine and some very manly riboflavin.