More Thoughts on Digestion

Unless the free samples are out, I generally try to steer clear of Whole Foods. It not just their prices, it the desire they inspire. I’m not someone who generally treats their body all that well – the fact that I pretty much live on sugarfree coffeemate is testament to this – but the danger of Whole Foods is that they make it look so good and fancy and lovely that I walk in there and in the course of 3 minutes I’ve decided to completely turn my life around, eat only organic meats and vegetables, remove all wheat, dairy, gluten, sugar, preservative, etc. from my diet, start using the keeper and buy only chemical free cleaning products. Its trouble.

Last night I was feeling sad and bored so I got in the car and went to Yogurt Park and got a huge container of sugar free frozen yogurt and ate it in record time. I contemplated going back for more, but somehow that seemed too embarrassing. So I actually decided to go to the frozen yogurt store in the next town. I know, I have problem. I’m well aware. But on my way, as I was thinking, ‘Oy, I love this frozen yogurt but it sure makes me feel like crap sometimes’, I passed a whole foods, set back from the street in a tree lined parking lot, glowing warmly with recycled lightbulbs no doubt, hippies swarming.
And I thought, ‘No lily. No. you are poor and you cannot afford to walk in there.’ But I was still sad and bored and had nothing to do, so I parked and went in.
I walked out an hour later having spent literally $100 on a single bag of groceries, but I have a really good excuse this time: vitamins.

Not just any vitamins – no no – food-based vitamins.

I went to the vitamin isle with a question about enzymes. Because my coworker told me that apparently there’s no point in taking lots of multi-vitamins because unless you take special enzymes along with it, you don’t break them down and just poo them out unabsorbed and I wanted to know if that was true.

“Bingo”, said the vitamin guy (really, he did), “but in addition, it’s really important what vitamins you take, because unless you take food-based vitamins, your body has a really hard time digesting any of it.”

“Oh”, I said, “So then its probably not so good that I take Walgreen’s brand vitamins, huh.”

And he laughed and said, “I have a funny story for you:

Recently there was a story in the news about a sewage plan that was on the verge of flooding and totally clogged. What they found upon investigation, was that there were literally thousands and thousands of multivitamins clogging up the place. Whole vitamins. That had passed through the city’s citizens WHOLE and then passed through the treatment plant WHOLE and eventually had collected and clogged up the final stage of the treatment system. Which is both gross and alarming. Basically an entire city full of people were spending like $50 a bottle on Centrum silver and whatnot and just pooing them out without making a dent in them. We’ve been literally shitting away our money! And I just bought a new bottle a couple weeks ago!

But whatever, I’m a sucker so I bought the fancy vitamins as well as the fancy enzymes to help break them down.
Also some milk thistle and some frozen wheat grass and a bottle of kombucha tea, in case anyone was wondering what the hell ended up being $100.

Today, just to make sure I wasn’t completely swindled, I googled it. And its true!

The morals here are plentiful:

Never ever go into whole foods when you’re feeling sad.
Throw out your crappy multivitamins and switch to food-based vitamins immediately.
Buy some digestive enzymes while you’re at it.

Also: Kombucha, while incredibly good for you, tastes HORRIBLE. Just so you know.

The end.