HOME COURT ADVANTAGE: YOUR KITCHEN

    Before I start on today's tirade, let me clarify my post about vitamins, because I forgot to mention 

PRENATAL VITAMINS: TAKE THEM

    While good evidence for the use of multivitamins is scant, evidence of the benefits of PRENATAL vitamins is not.   If you are pregnant or trying to get pregnant, you definitely should take a prenatal vitamin daily.    Why?   Because there are 2 things that pregnant women often don't have, or get, enough of (besides sleep): Iron and folic acid.    The placenta of a developing child is an incredibly hungry organ, and to keep it growing and providing oxygen to your baby, you need to be taking quite a bit of iron.   Many women are at an iron disadvantage already- this is simply because whenever you lose blood, you lose iron, and women of childbearing age lose substantial iron with menstruation every month.   It's surprisingly easy to become iron-deficient as a woman; all you have to do is have your periods and not eat steak that often!   Prenatal vitamins help make up for this by having a small amount of iron, since a small amount is all you can absorb from a supplement anyway.   Even if you eat red meat regularly, it's almost impossible to get too much iron when you're pregnant, so I recommend taking a prenatal vitamin no matter what you eat.

     AND, folic acid is probably even MORE important when you are pregnant.   Somehow, this vitamin is critical to the complete development of the nervous system, and even a slight deficiency in folic acid during pregnancy can lead to "neural tube defects."   These are birth defects in which the spinal cord, which starts as a hollow tube that closes off into more of a solid "rope," doesn't fully close at one end or the other.  Babies with neural tube defects usually survive and turn out healthy, but they often have to undergo a complex surgery to repair the defect.   Prenatal vitamins have the full amount of folic acid you need in a day, and they have made a HUGE impact in reducing the frequency of neural tube defects.

IN SUMMARY:  The benefits of prenatal vitamins are clear, and unlike multivitamins, prenatal vitamins have a ton of science and experience to support their use.   And since you can't always predict when you are going to get pregnant, my recommendation is this: if you are even remotely THINKING about getting pregnant, pick up a prenatal vitamin.   They are generally just labelled "Prenatal Vitamin" and they are cheap, and well worth the small cost!

TODAY'S TIRADE: ANNOYING THINGS OF THE WEEK

    I try to be nice most of the time, especially on this blog.   But as my wife and friends well know, sometimes I go off the deep end into relentless tirade about various and sundry topics.  So I just have to vent a bit, by just mentioning a few things I've been thinking about. 

     Here are my top 10 most annoying things of the week, if not the whole summer:

1. MasterCard commercials

2. People arguing that Hillary Clinton should be Obama's pick for VP

3. John McCain's fake smile

4. Competitive cooking shows

5. People bitching about gas prices

6. Wearing flip-flops with pants

7. The NBA on ABC, but only because of Jeff Van Gundy and how much he sucks

8. Having to see everyone's shitty tattoos all summer

9. Vitamin Water

10. Coors referring to itself as "The Banquet Beer"

Most of these are obviously annoying to anyone with common sense.   Let me quickly justify a couple of these, however.  For example, let's talk about "flip flops with pants."  First of all, a flip-flop is not a shoe, or even a sandal.   It's basically like a shower cap, a hair curler, a spandex bikini, or a bathrobe.   If you're going to wear it out of the house, just throw in the towel and wear shorts and a tank-top so that we know you'd basically be walking around nude if it was legal.  When you wear actual pants or a long-sleeve shirt with flip-flops, it just looks like someone stole your shoes.   It also calls attention to your feet, which no one really wants to see unless you have pretty feet.  Men, this rules you out.   I'm sick of seeing your pasty, hairy feet so go get a pair of Vans or something.   If you wear flip-flops with shorts or a skirt, at least the attention gets called to your legs, which have less of a chance of being hideous.

    Now a word from MasterCard.    Tonight's MasterCard commercial during the NBA finals game literally said: "Burger and Fries: 4 dollars.   Making every minute count: Priceless."  It showed some office guy in a tie wolfing down a burger next to a computer.   It made me want to puke.   Why?   Because "making every minute count" in this case meant losing as little work time as possible, even at the expense of health.    It implied that if you eat crappy and quickly so that you can get back to work quickly, you've done yourself a favor.   Actually, you've only done your employer a favor, because for you, the opposite is true: making those few minutes count might actually be shaving hours, days, weeks, or years off your own lifespan.    So do yourself a favor- don't use your MasterCard to get a crappy lunch so that you can contribute to your employer's bottom line.   Do what Dr. Tofohead does- lock up your office and eat a healthy, homemade lunch, so that you can make every minute of your RETIREMENT count.

     I can't resist a quick word about that intolerable beverage "Vitamin Water."  First of all, it should be called "high fructose corn syrup water," because that is primarily what it is.  In addition to a massive jolt of simple, non-nutritious sugar, Vitamin Water has a small amount of vitamins, but much less than a generic multivitamin tablet.    And on a per-serving basis, the vitamins in "Vitamin Water" cost TWENTY times as much as the vitamins in a Centrum 1-a-day vitamin.   So stick to water, and if that's too plain for you, have a shot of high-fructose corn syrup to wash down your multivitamin.

     The tirade is over!