Tuesday, July 8, 2008

I am SO confused

The doctor says 'you have osteopenia, you should take 1500 thingies (I can't remember if they are milligrams, International Units (whatever those are) or something else) of Calcium and 1000 thingies of Vitamin D every day. So I up my vitamin intake and start looking at food content. I could have sworn a law went through recently that said companies needed to clarify their nutritional information on food packaging. Evidently my brain is so tiny and compromised by chemo that I can't process the information provided. I decided I should probably start drinking milk, eating yogurt more regularly and seeing about eating some cheese provided it doesn't have a high fat content meaning I get to eat reduced fat cheese which usually tastes like an eraser.

I read the milk content and it says you get 40% of your RDA of calcium in a cup. But 40% of what? It doesn't tell me how many thingies I am getting. I check the yogurt container - same deal. Now what? I have to go google the RDA chart and then do math. Why is this so complicated. Why can't they just say how many thingies it contains and not give me a percentage? I admit the math isn't complicated but a nice round number of thingies would be much more user friendly.

Just so you know you are supposed to get 1000 milligrams of calcium and 400 International Units of Vitamin D each day. This leads the next question - what is an International Unit? I have no idea. I'll just call it a thingy.

Speaking of confusion, tonight for dinner I need to cook these funky squash. I started going to a local farm stand that is organic and grows some weird vegetables. The green ones are a kind of zucchini, I can't remember, but the yellow ones had a weird name and are in the zucchini/summer squash family. I will treat them as zucchini and probably saute them with some onion and garlic. I do this a lot - buy weird new vegetables and then figure out how to cook them. That way we get to try different things. However, every so often, I just get too weird and it turns out yucky.

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