Why I Keep NOW Vitamin B-100 in My Kitchen

The wall of bottles at my grocery store is taller than I am. I have stood in front of it with my reading glasses on and my purse still over my shoulder, deciding nothing at all. I am 63, I retired from a middle school library after 31 years, and I live alone in a small two bedroom house in Dayton, Ohio. What I wanted was not a shelf of promises. I wanted one bottle whose label I could read slowly, with a pencil, and then keep taking without thinking about it. NOW Foods Vitamin B-100 is the one that ended up in my cabinet 18 months ago.

The cabinet is the upper one to the left of the sink. Door closed, away from the stove, because Dewey, my cat, treats the counters like a highway and nothing in this house is meant for him. Five bottles live in there and the NOW Foods B-100 is fourth in, bought after the magnesium and before the vitamin C. One index card is taped inside that door with what I take written on it in pencil. I take that card to my doctor at my yearly physical and she has seen all five bottles on it. That is the whole system. No app, no chart on the refrigerator, no binder.

Why this one. Three reasons, and not one of them is a claim about what it does inside my body. First, the NOW Foods label is short enough to read in a single sitting, and it states plainly that the capsule is a vegetarian capsule, gluten free and vegan. Second, it is one capsule for me, taken at breakfast around eight in the morning with food and water, sitting in the AM lid of my blue plastic seven day pill box that I fill every Sunday evening at the kitchen table. Third, the bottle is a bottle and not a jar, so it stands on the shelf without my rearranging anything.

I should be honest about the part most bottles never mention. I cannot tell you I feel a difference from any one of them, and I would not trust anyone who says they can. What I can judge is the label, the capsule size, the smell when the cap comes off, and whether I still bother to take it in month fourteen. On those four things, the NOW Foods bottle holds up.

The cap comes off and there is a strong vitamin smell, the kind that makes you pull your head back the first time. The label lists choline bitartrate, inositol and PABA among the ingredients, and the printing is small, so out come the glasses and the pencil. There is also an asterisk beside a phrase about energy production, and that asterisk means the FDA has not evaluated the statement. I read that part out loud to myself the first time, the way I used to read a copyright page.

One more plain thing, because nobody told me. B vitamins turn urine bright yellow. It started the first week, it is harmless, and if it surprises you the way it surprised me, now you know.

I cannot tell you I feel a difference from any one bottle, and I would not trust anyone who says they can. What I can judge is the label, the capsule, and whether I still bother in month fourteen.

Keeping up is the part nobody writes about. A bottle of 100 capsules lasts me a bit over three months at one a day, so I am not shopping for it often and I am not deciding about it often. Both of those matter more at 63 than they did at 40. The Sunday fill takes about eleven minutes with the radio on. If something runs out midweek, I write it on the index card and pick it up on the next grocery trip.

Where it sits against the rest of my card. The multivitamin I have taken longest already carries some B vitamins, and I found that by setting the two labels side by side at the kitchen table with a pencil in my hand. I showed my doctor. She was fine with the overlap for me, and that was a decision for me alone, not a rule for anyone reading this. She is the one who picked the vitamin D amount and the one who said magnesium was fine. She also had no reason for me to change the NOW Foods B-100 once it was on the card.

The pharmacist at my grocery store is the other person I ask. He is the one who told me to keep the magnesium at dinner, away from the multivitamin with iron, so those two never go together in my day. He is also the person I would ask first if I were on a prescription. If you are on one, or pregnant, or managing a health condition, ask your own doctor or pharmacist before you buy anything at all, this included. I am not a doctor and I am not going to pretend to be one on a web page.

What I looked at and did not buy. There is a methylated B-complex on the same shelf with a longer label and a longer word in its name. I read it twice and put it back, because I could not tell from the printing what I would be gaining, and because my doctor had no reason to switch me. That was my call for my own cabinet. It is not a verdict on the other bottle, and I would not want you to read it as one.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

If you were across from me with a cup of coffee, here is what I would say, and it would take about a minute. Read the label before you read the reviews, mine included. Take your card to your doctor so somebody with a license knows what is in your cabinet. Do not add a bottle because someone on the internet said they take it, and I am someone on the internet. Add one thing at a time so you actually know what you are keeping up with.

And if the smell or the size of a capsule is the thing that would make you stop, that is a real reason and you should listen to it. A bottle you skip is a bottle you wasted, no matter how good the label looked in the store. The NOW Foods B-100 stayed here because it is one capsule with breakfast, the label is short, and the bottle lives behind a closed cabinet door where Dewey cannot reach it.