I Gooped Myself
It was a Tuesday afternoon in early summer when I realized that I was the person in the office who stank. Not “smelled a little ripe,” not “could use a shower,” but stank. An aroma was emanating from deep within my body. As the afternoon sun strained the building’s air-conditioning and my odor situation deteriorated, I furtively sniffed at myself and began running through a list of things that could have gone wrong. Had I forgotten deodorant? Had I plucked my dress out of the wrong bedroom pile? Was I sweating out the previous night’s hot wings and Coors Light?
Then I remembered the new vitamins.
That morning, I had torn open a plastic pouch and swallowed two giant ivory pills, two giant green pills, one mottled-gray gelcap, and an enormous capsule of golden fish oil. The supplement regimen was made by Goop Wellness, one of several product lines that have grown out of Gwyneth Paltrow’s influential lifestyle website, Goop. I’m no expert on the physics of odor suppression, but my instinct was to sink low in my chair in an effort to trap as much stink under my desk as possible. From there, I opened a new browser tab to find out what I had done to myself.
The vitamin cocktail I’d picked up at Goop’s downtown-Manhattan boutique was called Balls in the Air. It promised to defeat fatigue and promote productivity (and maybe make an arch little joke about testicles). Its ingredients include dozens of substances, but the star of the show is a cannonball of B vitamins, including 4,000 percent of the recommended daily dose of niacin and 3,333 percent of the recommended B12. A Google search confirmed my fears: As B-complex supplements break down, they create choline, which can turn bodily fluids into the vat of stink in which I was marinating.
Half-hidden under my desk and paranoid that my co-workers would have to draw straws to see who would give me the talk about proper office hygiene, I tore through digital pages of supplement breakdowns and pseudoscientific ravings about the wonders of megadosing B vitamins. Another Balls in the Air reaction, “efficient energy levels,” aided my search; as far as I could tell, the term was
