The Appeal Of The Supplement School

3. The Appeal Of The Supplement School

You may wish to try an interesting experiment, if you have a young child. When the child becomes hungry, offer him or her either a piece of fresh fruit or a large vitamin capsule to choose from. A silly experiment, right? Of course the child or any adult who is truly hungry will select the easily identifiable food or fruit and bypass the colorless, odorless and tasteless pill.

Yet Americans regularly gobble pills, capsules, and powders as a substitute for natural foods and wholesome nutrition. Why is that? Why would an adult put his faith and good health in an unidentifiable pill shaken out of a bottle? Why would anyone eat capsules, pills, vitamin supplements and mineral potions instead of fresh, delicious, succulent and sweet fruits and vegetables?

There are several reasons why the “pill school of nutrition” holds such a powerful fascination for today’s adults. Let’s look at the reasons that people are fooled into buying and swallowing pills for nutrition instead of good wholesome food.

3.1 Eat Anything You Want!

One morning I found myself in a breakfast doughnut shop near an elementary school. I was getting change for a morning newspaper when I looked over to a table where a mother had her two school children.

The mother was handing the boy and girl a cup of frozen orange juice and a big sticky sweet roll for their breakfast before she dropped them off at the nearby school. As the children ate the sugar-laden junk food for breakfast, the mother reached into her purse and carefully pulled out a piece of tissue paper that held two huge vitamin capsules.

In between bites of the doughnuts, she popped the pill into her son’s and daughter’s mouths. “Now swallow your vitamins so you’ll be strong and healthy,” she prompted. She absent-mindedly lit a cigarette and felt satisfied that she had discharged her motherly duties so well. In one fell swoop, she had neutralized the bad effects of a doughnut breakfast and assuaged her guilt by just sticking vitamin pills into her children’s mouths.

Eat anything you like, but just take your magic vitamin pill and all is forgiven. All of your nutritional problems wiped out with just one swallow. Is there any wonder that there is such a strong appeal for a pill?

The public likes the “pill concept.” It is a noncontroversial approach to nutrition that does not require any changes in diet or lifestyle. You can continue eating your favorite junk foods and you never have to question or face your bad living habits. Vitamin pills and dietary supplements are crutches for the nutritionally crippled. They are easy to standardize, profitable to promote, and give the appearance of effects without requiring any efforts.

Quite simply, the pill approach to nutrition is popular not because of what it does, but what it does not require us to do—change the poor eating and living habits that make us turn to supplements in the first place.