Séamas O'Reilly: Why I packed 187 supplements for my 17-day trip home to Derry
Séamas O'Reilly. Picture: Orfhlaith Whelan
I have long been sceptical about nutritional supplements, not least in this new era of online life where their qualities are evangelised by the world’s most annoying people. (Podcasters).
Certainly, the empirical evidence on the effects of the trillion dollar industry is underwhelming, with zero research to prove they are the panacea they’re touted as, and only a little evidence that they do much of anything at all.
A while ago, however, my wife came into possession of a set of supplements from a friend.
As will become clear, this is neither an endorsement nor an attack on that product so I don’t mind naming them, not least because the fact they’re called “Heights” will shortly become relevant.
The above-named supplements are a subscription service, and my wife took roughly a month’s worth from our friend (who had more than she could use) and set to taking the prescribed two-a-day dose as a tester.
She saw some good results and wondered if we should subscribe ourselves.
Since I am God’s one true perfect miser, I balked at the £40 per month price-tag and offered to work backwards from their stated ingredients and purchase a cocktail of pills that contained the same elements for a fraction of the price.
This I duly did, amassing more than a year’s supply of the requisite vitamins and minerals for £50 — a tenth of the outlay for the name brand.
There are caveats to this perfect scheme. It’s true that taking two elegantly designed capsules each day is infinitely more chic than my own plan, which involves tumbling through six bottles to find 11 separate pills and taking them all together in one big gulp each morning.
My wife was so unimpressed by this ordeal, in fact, that she became disinterested in my miser’s wheeze after a few days, and implied that I, too, would become bored by the rigmarole before long.
So, out of something like pure spite, I’ve been working my way through this horde of pills, by myself, ever since.
I hate it, mostly. The little extra labour it requires does feel like an achievement I suppose, like I’m a brave and hardy explorer foraging for pill-shaped food.
There is also the accidental benefit that this process is so time-consuming — 90 seconds rather than, say, five — and involved — swallowing them is no treat for the throat or tastebuds — that forgetting whether you’ve taken them is basically impossible.
This was a faff made infinitely more unpleasant when a few of the more foul-tasting capsules burst, coating the rest in a decidedly unsavoury nutrient dust that made my daily ingestions even less edifying than usual.
So cumbersome are all these labours, in fact, that I’ve taken to referring to my counterfeit Heights operation as “Lengths”, pleasing literally nobody but myself, and — hopefully — the sickest among you, my devoted readers.
I’ve now been taking these dreaded doses for 18 months.
I had originally intended to take them until they ran out, but hadn’t clocked the simple fact that buying all the pills separately meant getting them in mismatched quantities — six months’ worth of this, 100 days’ worth of that, etc.
Since I can’t stand the idea of having pills left unused, and since their periods of depletion always overlap, the process of restocking them is effectively eternal.
However, the main reason I’m still doing it, a year and a half later, is more tragic still. The fact is, they appear to be working.
I haven’t been sick once in that time, having previously been sick roughly every three weeks in the years beforehand.
This was partly — perhaps largely — due to the health-wrecking gauntlet of raising two small kids, and the communal petridish of maladies to which you are exposed as they begin the process of licking every surface or human they come into contact with at school or nursery.
The fact that I have remained in medium-to-perfect health during this experiment is surprising, even annoying, for someone who has never believed in the efficacy of such things, and has not once enjoyed taking them.
I settle my sceptic’s nerves by telling myself their benefits are likely marginal, and perhaps the tiny effect they’re having on my body has been just enough to keep the worst effects of illnesses at bay.
Or maybe, I tell myself, I’d be exactly the same if I wasn’t taking most of them, it’s just the cod liver oil or the zinc that’s doing the job all by itself.
Perhaps my vitality in this period is entirely a coincidence, although my previous ill-health, and the fact that my wife and kids have each been sick dozens of times during this self-same stretch of time, make that hard to square.
My final consolation is that they’re just a placebo. That, in some odd way, the practice of taking 6,000 of these bloody things, day in, day out, and knowing that I’m taking them, is forestalling disease in and of itself.
This comforts me for a moment, flattering my prior belief that vitamin cocktails are snake oil, and I too smart to be taken in by such a ruse.
But then my thoughts begin tumbling in existential dread. If I really can make myself healthier simply by believing it to be so, what other mysteries of the body and mind have I yet to discover?
And if I believe it to be a placebo, will its effects still work?
It’s enough to make me hope that my most loathed of realities is true instead: the horror of imagining that these blasted things just work, and that the podcasters were right all along.
