Tuesday, December 13, 2011

The never-ending quest to cheat the reaper

It's kind of funny that I just recently did a short spiel on supplementation, and now I am about to launch into another one that indicates that I have, well, changed all that. But, really, information-gathering in the paleo/primal world is an ongoing process, and I have read some smart things written by smart people lately that convince me that I need to adjust my approach.

The bottom line is that I still take a One-A-Day Men's multivitamin and 1100 mg of magnesium, but.... I traded out the fish oil and the D3 for this little beauty -- the vaunted Green Pasture butter-oil/fermented-cod-liver-oil blend in capsule form. I say "vaunted" because Liz Wolfe of Cave Girl Eats speaks highly of this stuff. It is a power-packed wallop of vitamins A and D -- which work oh-so-much better in synergy with one another than separately -- plus the (double-vaunted) supremo power of K2.

(Insert dorky mountaineering joke here if you must....)

K2 is one of those super vitamins that we just seem to be learning more and more about. Not only has Ms. Wolfe given it her seal of approval, but Richard Nikoley of Free the Animal has waxed on about it as well. When you start talking about something that has positive effects on anti-aging, anti-calcification, dental health and heart health, you have a winner. Nikoley says that K2 appears to send calcium to all the places it needs to be -- like bones and teeth -- and none of the places, like arteries, where it shouldn't be. And it works synergistically with A and D, which (you might know if you have been paying attention even a little) are already doing their own little special pro-you tango with one another when taken together.

This whole switch also addresses an ongoing concern I have had for a while that the PUFA (polyunsaturated fatty acid) levels in fish-oil capsules are too high, to say nothing of the fact that the fish that they, er, milked to get that oil probably were farm-raised, not wild-caught. (Mmmm, delicious pesticides). Robb Wolf even backed off the mega-fish-oil-dosing recommendations that he once made, causing the Whole9 folks to readjust their fish-oil spiel recently too by taking down their "fish-oil calculator." It's all enough make even a drummer pause a moment to think. [Pause]. I plan on compensating for the absence of fish-oil capsules in my life by adding in a can of wild-caught salmon to my lunch three times a week.

So, "Why the Green Pasture stuff, Steve-o?" you might ask. Because it's the only fermented, not heat-processed, cod-liver oil that also can be bought with the butter oil in combo, giving you the A/D/K2 whack that you didn't even know you were caring about until you read this.

And yes, it's kind of expensive. I don't know what to tell you about that. Buy the ticket; take the ride. They had me hooked at "anti-aging." I am firmly against aging.

So am going to give this stuff a whirl, a test drive, a spin around the block, so to speak. If Wolfe's and Nikoley's results (although Nikoley is actually not taking the blend, but, rather, just the GP butter-oil pills) are any key, I should be bragging about feeling even better than I already do in no time. If that sort of thing annoys you, uh, beware?


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