Friday this and that......

Remember my last but one post on taking vitamin supplements.......  well interesting that attention has turned to children under 5. Apparently there has been an increase in rickets which is put down to lack of sunshine vitamin vitamin D.  There are all sorts of reasons as to why this is happening.  However at this youn=g age I am not really in favour of giving them a daily pill as has been proposed - surely we should start with looking at their diet and also making sure that they have time to play outside??

What do you think??

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/children_shealth/10402346/Itll-take-more-than-vitamins-to-stop-children-getting-rickets.html

Even though my grandchildren have very fair skins and one is a redhead they still are encouraged to play and enjoy the elements!

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Just finished mixing the ingredients for my Christmas mincemeat and the kitchen smells wonderful with the combination of fruit, nuts, oranges, lemons, apples and spices.  Just waiting until the morning for its 3 hour stint in the cool oven tomorrow.  So easy and so much better than bought!!  Thank you Delia Smith for the recipe - I have used this for years and I always look forward to it!  :)

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Yesterday my husband said   "would you like a little outing"  - I smiled enthusiastically - thinking shopping, lunch.........

It turned out being a trip to the dump!!  All he wanted was the company as he had already loaded all the surplus to requirements into our car.  In some ways it was enjoyable as we both have this need for decluttering and tidiness and clearing the decks.

There's nothing worse than housing things for the sake of it and taking up valuable space.
Also as you get older hoarding is often referred to as a "senior trait" - so determined not to be categorised in that way!!  I must say our recycling centre is amazing there are so many containers for so many different things which can be used in some way.

So maybe its time for your clear out !!!

.......I did get taken to lunch afterwards :)

Popping Pills......................

I was watching a programme on TV last week  "Trust me, I'm a Doctor".  They were looking at why

people take vitamins. They said that if people had a balanced diet, then people would get all the vitamins they need from their food and they concluded that most people who take vitamins excrete this surplus to requirements in their urine - so a waste of time and money.

You can't really argue with a logical argument so why do we take these supplements?  Certainly my husband and I do.  I feel like the pharmacist in a morning counting out the pills!! Maybe its psychosomatic as we believe in the practice or maybe there is this fear that maybe we don't always get what we need from our particular diet?  All I know is that my husband and I on the surface seem fit and healthy.

There has been one occasion when my husband suddenly came out in a rash, and it was itchy and irritating and also unsightly. After seeing our doctor and a specialist they concluded it was probably psoriasis.  He has no history of this in his family and he found it hard to believe that this was the case.

My husband was a Research Chemist and maybe his training helped him to overcome this particular problem. He tried to think of any unusual contact with chemicals or something new he had eaten or drunk.  To cut a long story short he concluded that because we try very hard to keep out of the sun and the fact that he spends a significant part of the day indoors working on his computer... this sudden appearance of a rash could be down to vitamin D deficiency.    Well it was worth a try as the prescribed pills and lotions were not having any significant impact.  So he started taking vitamin D regularly and the rash started to fade and after a fortnight the rash had completely disappeared. Now some could argue this is just coincidence but we tend to think that my husbands remedy was correct.  So this had lead us to be less strict about sun  exposure although still careful.....and  we take a daily vitamin D tablet.

At the moment we are taking 5 as you can see here.......we buy tablets online from either Healthspan or Woods as it is much cheaper than buying on the High Street but we also buy vitamin D, a multivitamin

and a low dose aspirin from Boots.

We have our reasons for taking this combination and they work for us. This is very much a personal decision and  what we are taking may not be doing us any good but the quantities we take will probably not be doing us any harm!

At our age we feel we are doing our best in managing to keep fit and healthy..............still a bit of a lottery :)

Do you have any anecdotes to share??