A Time of Magic

I can understand the need for vitamin supplements in the war years and indeed in the post war years of austerity when diets weren’t quite what they should be. However, these days it seems something of a puzzle given the wide range of foods commonly available and the overall improvements in our diets over the years.

Yet, still there are significant numbers of vitamin supplements on the supermarket shelves.

To be fair, some of that is down to the rise in the numbers of vegetarians in the post-war period. Some vitamins simply aren’t in non-animal products so they’re going to have to take them unless their food is contaminated with microbes of faeces-based fertilizers (so, no, there are no 100% vegetarians). Similarly there are others on various diets that exclude one or more vitamins. But even so it does seem odd that there are quite so many vitamins on the shelves.

One of the biggest problems with eczema is that it’s generally caused by something or other in your environment that you’re allergic to but tracking down that something can take years and kids can grow out of it before they’ve worked out what it was.

Thus although obviously attacking the problem at the root is best it’s rarely possible so eczema treatment tends to attack the symptoms instead thus there’s a whole host of creams and bath oils which basically aim to moisturise the skin and thereby get rid of the eczema. Our little guy seems to have worked through an enormous number of these over the years but annoyingly the eczema seems to go away all by itself now and again. That’s happening increasingly frequently of late so it may be that he’s gradually growing out of it.

In some shops you find enormous numbers of different diet pills and many of them with very similar names.

Of course the reason why you’ll find nuphedragen and probably a dozen with names barely distinguishable from that is that they try to relate the name to some prescription diet drug or, in some cases, to one that was rumoured to be totally effective but subsequently banned by the authorities.

However, whatever the reason it does make for a whole host of confusingly similar names.