Vitamins!

I admit the human body is an amazing thing. To think that this soft, pudgy, burnable, breakable, stink producing, hairy mass made from nothing more than the elements surrounding us is the closest thing to cold fusion the Universe has ever seen. No computer can even compare when it comes to the ability to remember, rationalize and just plain thinking. To think that there are billions of microscopic organisms living inside us with no purpose other than to use our cells to reproduce, thus destroying our body one cell at a time and our bodies have the ability to recreate new cells and destroy all those teenage-boy-like creatures without us even knowing!

(a picture of an actual Chicken Pox Virus)


I was looking at the bottle as I proceeded to swallow my daily multivitamin supplement pill and I got to thinking. Who names vitamins and minerals? Reading the suppliment facts on the bottle revealed to me that scientists or nutritionists or whomever it was had no imagination whatsoever. Not only that but they never watched Sesame Street as a child. We start off with the vitamins that have the word "vitamin" in their name because if you called them their names without it they would be nothing but a lonely, meaningless letter. Now, pardon my ignorance and lack of will to check wikipedia, but does anyone really know what these are for?

For example; Vitamin "A" is obviously for every part of your body beginning with that letter. Why else would it be called such? So, Vitamin A happens to be very good for... Your Adam's Apple (don't get me started on where that name comes from!) Or was it just the first vitamin ever discovered? The first time someone saw the moon or the Sun (whichever was first) they didn't say "I'll call that the big round thing in the sky 'A' because it's the first one I've seen!" did they?

Vitamin B throws us for a whole different spiel! Apparently there's 12 of them but we only ever get to meet B6 and B12. Vitamin C, as we all know is good for us because our mothers have always told us that fruit and veg is good for you and those and the Sun seem to be our only source. It's also good for scurvy. (a la Eddie Izzard) Vitamin D was only good for the "special" kids in elementary school who got their milk in the red box instead of the blue box.

Although it seems that over the years, or however long it took to get through Vitamins A to E, the vitamin gods became angry or bored with the alphabetized naming of their helpful concoctions, so they decided to be creative! And they came up with your friend and mine, "Riboflavin" and his trusty sidekicks "Thaimin", "Niacin" and "Biotin"! (all part of the "in" croud apparently). I usually would have a hard time putting something into my body that I can't pronounce correctly. Another oddity I've noticed is there's no Vitamin F, G, H, I or J but somehow Vitamin K popped in there. I'm not making this stuff up. It's all from the label on my "New Formula" (trademark) "Centrum" (little "r" in a circle next to the name). What the heck is Vitamin K?! The vitamin that KILLS! Bwa haha! Ahem..

THEN it just keeps going on! The further down the list you go the weirder it gets! 2 mg of Silicon?! I thought that's what prosthetic limbs and scuba gear waterproofing was made of! There are at least five things ending with "-ene" or "-ein" then we have a bunch of metals and acids! Is it really healthy to eat a metal we use for a five cent coin? Or even a metal we use for pipes and pennies? 100 mg of magnesium! Why would anyone in their right mind want to put that in their body?! Do you know what magnesium can do?! It's the white you see in fireworks because it burns the hottest!
To make a long story short (too late), the human body is really amazing. Take care of it and don't take too many vitamins containing iron. Because even though all those killer and questionable materials are in your little pill, it's the every day, rustable metal that will kill you. I should know. I read it on the label.