Although it's been some time since I got over my sinus infection (after three rounds of antibiotics, the last of which ended a month ago), I haven't felt quite right: lethargic, unmotivated, and painfully bored. As I took my new multi-vitamin pill Friday morning, I thought, "It's just like that time I had those drinks with the B vitamins." (See Feb. 13 comment in linked post.) Indeed, the vitamin pill label showed B vitamins in amounts 25 to 33 times the recommended daily allowances. This was for three tablets, and was taking only one, but that's still way over the top. Even a 100-gram serving of liver has B vitamins in the low single milligrams, or less, not the 50-gram doses of B-1, B-2 and B-6 and the 200 microgram dose of B-12 per three tablets of the vitamin. The bottle recommends taking three to six pills daily. Of course, I stopped taking the vitamins, and today I felt peppy enough to try a new hairdo, buy some clothes and take my dog to the dog park.
This may be another reason I feel better not eating wheat: wheat flour is enriched with B vitamins. Not in the amounts contained in the vitamins, but still several times the amount in a piece of meat, I see from looking around on nutritiondata.com. Apparently, I get all I need from eating meat. Last week, I had a wonderful balsamic vinegar glazed lamb dish at a restaurant, and I've gotten a few new cookbooks. One is called The Odd Bits by Jennifer McLagan; the other is French Cooking in Ten Minutes by Edouard de Pomaine. Both gave me great new ways of cooking cuts of meat I was tepid about. More on that in a future post.
I've had good results with some other vitamins: my vitamin D level is now 52, just within the ideal range of 50-80. Using some information from the Heart Scan blog, I took 3,000 IUs per day. I also used less sunscreen this summer (I have to use some to keep from burning).
Just to be clear, your results may vary with different vitamin dosages. I seem to have an odd sensitivity to B vitamins in anything but very moderate amounts. Some people require B supplements.
This may be another reason I feel better not eating wheat: wheat flour is enriched with B vitamins. Not in the amounts contained in the vitamins, but still several times the amount in a piece of meat, I see from looking around on nutritiondata.com. Apparently, I get all I need from eating meat. Last week, I had a wonderful balsamic vinegar glazed lamb dish at a restaurant, and I've gotten a few new cookbooks. One is called The Odd Bits by Jennifer McLagan; the other is French Cooking in Ten Minutes by Edouard de Pomaine. Both gave me great new ways of cooking cuts of meat I was tepid about. More on that in a future post.
I've had good results with some other vitamins: my vitamin D level is now 52, just within the ideal range of 50-80. Using some information from the Heart Scan blog, I took 3,000 IUs per day. I also used less sunscreen this summer (I have to use some to keep from burning).
Just to be clear, your results may vary with different vitamin dosages. I seem to have an odd sensitivity to B vitamins in anything but very moderate amounts. Some people require B supplements.
Comments
I like to use this site as another good source of nutrient information:
http://www.whfoods.com/genpage.php?tname=nutrient&dbid=108
I don't know what the mechanism would be for affecting my mood. I wonder if it might be an imbalance of nutrients, as I had with zinc and copper. Here's an article from Michael Eades's site in folic acid v. B-12 (although I doubt this is what went wrong in my case--3 pills contain 3,333% of B12 and 100% of folate):
http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/uncategorized/folic-acid-and-cognitive-impairment/
Thanks for the link to the whfoods site.