I'm all for artificial supplements to vitamins and minerals. Don't forget glucosamine and cod liver oil when you next purchase your power-ups.

Lay in some zinc tablets and echineacea (sorry, too lazy to look up the spelling). The zinc tablets work miraculously well with sore throat/cough/cold prevention and the other stuff boosts the immune system. Works a treat.

Also, cranberry juice and coconuts. Apparently helps with UTIs.

CALCIUM. I talked to a nutritionist. If you eat healthy you normally don't need anything else. But calcium for men and women over 40 with vitamin D is mandatory. 2 to 3 times as much for women as men.

Men do not think they need calcium but they do. They don't usually get the hunch back women do. But broken hips in the 60's are real killers for both sexes.

Otherwise get the supplement you want and take it a couple of times a week. You don't need daily unless you are eating poorly.

Thanks for reminding me. I have to start doing yoga and/or T'ai Chi again--and probably get a proper editing desk--if I don't want to end up with "dowager's hump."

They say one has to take it easy on the cola drinks as well, but that isn't my vice. I'll drink a coca-cola every now and then, but mostly I save my "caffeine allowance" for coffee and tea.

Regardless of your eating habits, I would still use a good store brand multivitamin/multimineral supplement--the more comprehensive the better. I buy them when the stores reorganize their shelves and put everything on clearance once or twice a year. If you take one a day or so there is no potential for harm. And if you are missing something, there is the potential for benefit. Easy choice.

How much time do you have? Because you are unique your nutritional health is really a function of how much time you want to spend educating yourself. Its a big field, to keep things reasonable, depending on your age and family history, you should try and prevent what's likely to come your way.

The theory behind nutrition is you can put off or prevent the need for heroic intervention by alopathic practitioners by strategic nutrition. That's why doctors and pharmaceutical companies don't study it and in general are hostile to the concept, it costs them time and money. The Doctor business model requires that he get you in and out and on a pharmaceutical as quickly as possible if he is going to enjoy a reasonably upper middle class life style.

No one size fits all, for starters you could ask your Grandmother what ailments she had and at what phase of her life she had them. We have been subjected to an ongoing nutritional experiment run by agribusiness and the pharmaceutical industry so we have different stresses than your grandmother had. In her youth diphtheria and scarlet fever were killers, during the 1919 flu pandemic "older style practitioners" believed the flu was spread by miasma.

The vaccines that prevented diphtheria, scarlet fever and flu are now linked to auto immune diseases. It is recommended that by the age of two a child receives 36 vaccinations, each one a full blown assault on the immune system. Its great for the herd but hard on the individual. They recommend 150 over the course of a life time, each one carries risks and some benefit but the risks will catch up with you.

Fluoride has been linked to Alzheimer's, corn syrup in Coca Cola is deadly for diabetics and most vitamin D is useless, D-3 is the recommended form of the vitamin and you can create 50000 iu units just by spending a half hour in the sun. Not all fat is bad or good, the EPA in fish oil is bad for diabetics. Black tea is better than coffee, green tea is better than black and white tea is best of all unless you ad lemon which facilitates the up take of aluminum (Alzheimer's again) in all teas.

In short its a long tedious slog to find the best nutritional program, name your fear and research it, you may delay the inevitable or be hit by a bus crossing the street to the health food store. But then what else do you have to do?