…and paw paw cream to cure world war

IT was obvious really, when you think about it. If God has meant us to take vitamin pills he wouldn’t have invented knives and forks.

Or Pan Pharmaceuticals.

It’s gone very quiet in my house. We had given up on traditional food. Things you had to cook and cut.

Basically we sit down to a plate of things that rattle or that look like suppositories.

It started with vitamin C.

My wife assures me you can’t overdose on vitamin C tablets because the body doesn’t store it. Maybe.

But you can choke to death on them. Especially the quantity she makes me eat.

Then there’s the B complex, vitamin A, vitamin E, magnesium, zinc, potassium, iron, calcium, yeast tablets, saw palmetto and paw paw.

Actually the paw paw is a cream so it probably doesn’t count, except that my wife swears it will cure cuts, piles, dysentery, brain tumours, your overdraft and world war.

And come to think of it she hasn’t been feeding me saw palmetto lately, which is for the libido.

None of them, I can faithfully report, make any difference.

I felt fine before my wife caught pill-disease (I wonder if there’s a vitamin for it) and I feel fine now.

“But they work!” she insists. “You had a cold last week and I fed you 250 vitamin C tablets and your cold’s gone!”

This is proof?

“But it would have gone anyway!” I yell back. “You think I was doomed to have a cold forever if I didn’t take the tablets?!”

It’s all part of the world’s greatest health scam, if you ask me.

Of course there are people out there who need vitamins: Biafrans, I’m sure, who rarely get to see a green vegetable, could probably use some iron in a form other than bullets.

But here in the west the worst deficiency that isn’t self-imposed is brain deficiency (docosahexaenoic acid will cure that — comes in little soft capsules).

But the world is full of quacks who want us to believe that life would be better with their help. Doesn’t matter whether its financial help or fitness help or health help or moral help — none of us is good enough and someone wants to make us better.

Well I am good enough, thank you very much. I don’t have any money, I am not fit, my morals are probably questionable (and they’d be a lot more questionable if I could find the saw palmetto) and I am healthy enough for my needs.

“But that’s because you’ve taking the vitamins, you idiot,” screams my wife.

“You need something to calm you down,” I scream back. “Ginseng tablets. Or paw paw cream!”

As I was saying… we had given up on traditional food, but that’s all changed.

I have butter on my bread. With cholesterol in it. I take my yeast in a glass full of fermented grapes. I eat fried bread, fried eggs and bacon on a Sunday morning. With coffee.

And I wear a smirk on my face.

My wife is having withdrawal symptoms. The vitamin pills are all in the bin. There must have been more than $1000 worth of the damn things.

I offered to make her up some fried egg tablets but she wasn’t amused.

Happy pills, that’s what she needs.

I wonder if saw palmetto works for women…