Low Life | 15 August 2009

The answer to all my problems, I read last week in a fascinating little booklet on fungal infections, is a substance called caprylic acid. Left to run riot, it predicted, the fungus growing in my throat and digestive tract will cause flatulence and itching (which I already have in spades), and eventually psychosis. Caprylic acid, a substance found in coconuts and breast milk, was the best natural substance to combat it, it said. That, combined with as much raw garlic as I can stomach. Of course I can always visit a doctor and get a prescription for some virulent chemical that will have a scattergun effect and kill off the good fungus as well as the bad, leaving me nauseous and debilitated for a week, it said. But the booklet’s author warned sternly against this. Caprylic acid, he said — that was the best thing.

The health-food shop, when I went there to try to find some, was doing a roaring trade. It’s a small high street shop, yet three tills were going flat out. If you stopped to moralise, you might conclude how obscene it is that the most well-fed people in the world supplement their diet with expensive vitamins, minerals and herb extracts, while a billion children in the world go to bed hungry. And the people in the health-food shop looked exactly like the kind of people who might feel a little uncomfortable about precisely this sort of injustice. But to be fair, none of them looked very well — perhaps it was the weight of the guilt they were carrying about — and there’s no getting round the fact that affluence and valetudinarianism go hand in hand.

I scanned the floor-to-ceiling supplements shelves.