Other: What EXACTLY is this?
Starting with a perhaps shameful admission: I take multivitamins. Or, more specifically, a multivitamin. Which brand doesn't really matter to me much, as my wife guarantees a reasonably balanced diet. (Marry a cook: I gained twenty pounds in our first year of marriage.) My personal opinion of diets is this: as many colours on your plate as you can. Think about it.
We ran out of multis, so Jenny bought another bottle of "house" brand from our local pharmacy. The "house" brand here is called Exact, for no immediately apparent reason. Now, the word exact means precise or accurate; a fine thing in any drugs you happen to be taking, and a name that inspires confidence. But that's also the name of their soap. Is there any conceivable purpose behind precise or accurate bar soap? If you drop it, maybe.
In accordance with the labeling laws in Canada, there is a list of ingredients and their amounts on the bottle, along with one special feature, listed in "other ingredients": lutein.
Wha?
This bottle of multis advertises that it also is now "with lutein!" Um... hooray? So I went scampering off to my handy Webster's New World, and came up with this: xanthophyll. Not much help there, then. But it also had: a preperation of dried and powdered corpus luteum. And corpus luteum is:
"a mass of yellow tissue formed in the ovary by a ruptured graafian follicle that has discharged its ovum." In other words, it's progesterone, a hormone that's used in ovarian therapy. This is not a comforting thought to me, as I don't really want to piss around with the hormones in my body without a very specific reason to do so.
So what's the moral of this story? I guess that you should always bring a dictionary with you when you go grocery shopping. Sheesh.
We ran out of multis, so Jenny bought another bottle of "house" brand from our local pharmacy. The "house" brand here is called Exact, for no immediately apparent reason. Now, the word exact means precise or accurate; a fine thing in any drugs you happen to be taking, and a name that inspires confidence. But that's also the name of their soap. Is there any conceivable purpose behind precise or accurate bar soap? If you drop it, maybe.
In accordance with the labeling laws in Canada, there is a list of ingredients and their amounts on the bottle, along with one special feature, listed in "other ingredients": lutein.
Wha?
This bottle of multis advertises that it also is now "with lutein!" Um... hooray? So I went scampering off to my handy Webster's New World, and came up with this: xanthophyll. Not much help there, then. But it also had: a preperation of dried and powdered corpus luteum. And corpus luteum is:
"a mass of yellow tissue formed in the ovary by a ruptured graafian follicle that has discharged its ovum." In other words, it's progesterone, a hormone that's used in ovarian therapy. This is not a comforting thought to me, as I don't really want to piss around with the hormones in my body without a very specific reason to do so.
So what's the moral of this story? I guess that you should always bring a dictionary with you when you go grocery shopping. Sheesh.
Labels: Other
4 Comments:
You could not be further off. Corpus luteum is not Lutein. Lutein is a PLANT derived antioxidant that aids in preventing macular degeneration. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lutein
Sometimes, it's amazing what the smallest amount of research will reveal.
Tell you what: let's go over the paragraph together, shall we? To wit:
"This bottle of multis advertises that it also is now "with lutein!" Um... hooray? So I went scampering off to my handy Webster's New World, and came up with this: xanthophyll. Not much help there, then. But it also had: a preperation of dried and powdered corpus luteum. And corpus luteum is: [...]"
The key words here are "But it also had". This means that I was talking about a different item than lutein (not capitalised, by the way: it's not a brand name).
Reading over this, I should have placed a new paragraph there to make it clearer that these were two seperate things. I thought I was being clear, but evidently I wasn't, since you couldn't follow my meaning.
Thanks for the reminder, and thanks for posting.
Ah. I see. In that case, you're probably right to be cautious about that multivitamin. By the way you wrote it, it appeared that you were confusing the two substances. Sorry about the capitalization slip.
No worries - I always know what I'm thinking when I'm writing, but that doesn't mean it always makes it to the screen!
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