Pirates, Cod Liver Oil and Chewables
Typically, my wife Jen is in charge of our family’s nutritional health. Technically, I can produce or procure food and keep children alive when she is unavailable but grilling and DoorDash isn’t a sustainable lifestyle. I balance this with consistency in vitamin consumption and management. My personal strategy began when I discovered that the Recommended Daily Allowance was based on testing to prevent scurvy and rickets. As an engineer, I wanted to optimize my nutrition and not just avoid diseases that are typically associated with pirates and third-world countries. My search led me to a multi-vitamin supplement called Reliv, which I learned about from a fellow CCL Teaching Couple, and have consumed daily for over a decade.
While struggling with infertility, CCL came to the rescue, introducing us to Marilyn Shannon, her book Fertility, Cycles and Nutrition, and trustworthy Optivite to help overcome PCOS. I assumed the role of daily reminder: encouraging, cajoling, and generally irritating Jen into taking her vitamins twice a day. Once our first baby arrived, PCOS struck again with reduced milk supply and Jen launched herself into research with assistance from our lactation consultant. She improved her personal nutritional health and experimented with various techniques for supplying extra at the breast which helped our eldest to flourish and Jen’s maternal confidence to increase.
Building A Strategy
My wife has a much more targeted strategy based on her copious internet research into ailments, the environment, deficiencies, human development, and the gastrointestinal biome. At various points, she has designed custom approaches for our children to optimize nutrition. She blessed our older children to know the taste of cod liver oil directly from the bottle. Black strap molasses occasionally found its way into their applesauce and maple syrup. There was even the occasional dab of brewer’s yeast! I believe their amazing grades are partially attributable to all those early Omega 3s, but I think our younger kids are glad that we’ve switched to Costco chewables, a much more palatable option that still supports excellent grade point averages.
Now as we launch our kids into the world, I’m proud of their own nutrition and health habits but shocked at how it seems that humans still don’t have a good grasp on the fuel that runs our bodies. I hope Jen has instilled some of her curiosity and research skills and I hope I’ve instilled some sense of consistency for executing the plan. They might need both to find a better option than cod liver oil!
By Jim Volpe. Jim is a contributing columnist for CCL’s Family Foundations, is a Fertility Science Institute Fertility Coach and is on the CCL Board of Directors.