No cow

At the supermarket the other day I stumbled across the vitamins aisle. I'm in the market for two specific supplements, so I thought I'd at least have a look.

The first is vitamin D. It has long been believed D supplements can be beneficial for folks with MS, and the formal scientific evidence for this is mounting. I'm not looking to megadose or anything, but figure regularly suplementing my D intake would probably be a good thing.

The second thing I was looking for was flaxseed oil. I've used flaxseed in cooking before (it makes a good binding agent in baked goods), but never taken it as a supplement. The reason I would do this is because it is a very good non-animal based source of omega-3 fatty acids, another nutrient of probable benefit to MS patients. As I usually do when buying anything with ingredient lists on the bottle I turned the bottle around to read the list. This is important to do, given the pencant shown by producers for slipping animal-based ingredients in places you wouldn't necessarily expect them.

The big thing I look out for in medicine and the like is gelatin. Those gel-caps may be easy to swallow, but are often made of a substance I avoid. The ingredient list clarified what the gel-caps were made of in the product I was looking at. Sort of.

"non-bovine". OK, thanks. But that raises more questions than it answers. How about porcine? If the gel-caps are non-animal product in origin, why specify cow? Is there a big Hindu market for flaxseed supplements I don't know about? Wouldn't most folks interested in non-bovine material also want to know if pig skin is involved?

I was too confused by all this to buy anything. I'm all for full disclosure and 'say what you mean' and all, but can't figure out just what they are trying to say (beyond the obvious literal 'no cow')