Is It A Vitamin, Or A Placebo?

I take vitamins sometimes. When I'm taking them, I'm usually fairly consistent in that I take them every day. But if something breaks that routine for more than a day or so, it's often a few weeks or even months before I'm back in that habit again.

The other day I didn't have much of an appetite and didn't eat much of my dinner(even tho it tasted great!). I hadn't eaten much the day before either, so I decided I'd take vitamins that day.

So, I went and got the Echinacia(sp), Vitamin C, and Multivitamin bottles out of the cupboard. But, for whatever reason, I decided to check their expiration dates before taking them.

Wow! 1 of the bottles had expired in 3/'04 - SIX MONTHS ago. Another one had expired about 2 months ago. But the multivitamins had expired in some month(I forget which) of 2002!

Now, at this point, I should probably mention that all 3 of these vitamin bottles were purchased @BJs. So, they prolly all had around 250-300 tablets in them when they were full.

But still! Even 300 tablets is less than a year's worth. I know I wasn't taking them regularly full-time(as I've already explained), but I can't believe that neither I nor my(RN!) wife checked any of these expiration dates any sooner than this.

Fortunately, I don't think "expired" vitamins do you any harm. I don't know if they do you any good either, or how much if they do, but I don't think they're "harmful".

And that's a very good thing too. Cuz I prolly took about 1/2 of the multivitamins that aren't still in that bottle AFTER their expiration date! :(