The vitamin and supplement industry loves people like my
father. According to Statista, a statistics gathering website, “in 2010, sales
of <vitamins and nutritional supplements in the United States >
reached 28.1 billion U.S. dollars and were expected to increase to some 36
billion dollars by 2017.”
On my parents’ kitchen table is a little tray about 10”x12”
filled with pill bottles. Some are prescriptions, but most are supplements that
my dad has ordered from catalogs he received in the mail.
“You should try this,” he tells me. “It will do
blahblahblahblah” words he’s read in the catalog that promise a miracle. He has
heart failure. He’s 87. He has a stent and a pacemaker. He pays who knows how
much a year for pills that promise a better life.
He holds a bottle in the air pointed at me: “this has saved
my life.”
A few years ago, mom went off with my sister for her
birthday for a few days and I stayed with my dad. I invited an old friend and
her mother who had been our neighbor years ago and had moved away to my
parents’ house because they were coming in town. When mom returned and found
out they’d been over and had tea at the kitchen table I could tell she was a
little upset. Then it dawned on me that all the pill bottles on the table
bothered her.
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