What I’ll Actually Put In My Body Now

The cave floor is cold in October in a way that has nothing to do with temperature and everything to do with age. I noticed it properly for the first time last winter, crouched over the fire pit, my left knee announcing itself the way old joints do… not with pain exactly, more like a complaint lodged through the proper channels, patient and unimpressed. I am sixty-six years old and I live in a cave in rural Spain with no A&E, no out-of-hours GP, no NHS 111 to ring and offload the decision onto someone with a lanyard. Whatever goes wrong with this body out here, I am the first and often the only line of defence. That fact has a way of sharpening your thinking about what you actually put into yourself.

So when a friend produced a tub of something “natural” for his back a few weeks back, all turmeric and good intentions, I found myself doing something I don’t think I’d have done twenty years ago. I asked what was actually in it. Not the ingredients list, which told me nothing useful, but the evidence. The trials. The dosage safety data. He looked at me like I’d asked for the tub’s passport.

Here’s the uncomfortable bit, the one I keep circling back to. I’ve built an entire second act of my life around distrusting institutions… walking away from the systems, the queues, the permission slips, the idea that someone in an office knows better than I do what I need. And that instinct, the one I’m rather proud of, is precisely the instinct an entire unregulated industry has learned to monetise. “Natural” isn’t the opposite of corporate. It’s just corporate wearing better boots.

I want to be clear about what I’m not saying. I’m not saying trust the pharmaceutical industry unconditionally, hand your body back to men in suits, resubscribe to the whole apparatus I spent a career inside and then deliberately walked away from. RAF Police doesn’t leave you naive about institutions. It leaves you fluent in exactly how they fail people, quietly, on paper, with a form to sign afterwards absolving everyone involved. I know what institutional failure looks like from the inside. I’ve filed the reports.

But there’s a second kind of failure I didn’t clock properly until I was standing in a cave weighing up a tub of turmeric capsules, and it’s this: the absence of a system isn’t automatically safety. It’s just a different kind of blind trust, dressed in earthier language.

Because here’s what the supplement industry actually is, once you strip the packaging off it. In most of the world it isn’t required to prove a product works before selling it. It isn’t required to prove a dose is safe before someone takes it. Nobody is tracking, with any rigour, what happens when that product interacts with the four other things a person is already taking, or when someone with a compromised liver decides more must mean better. When something does go wrong, it tends to get filed as “cause unknown”, because nobody built the machinery to trace it back. Compare that to the machinery built specifically to catch pharmaceutical harm, imperfect as it is, and the asymmetry becomes obvious. One industry gets investigated when it fails. The other gets a testimonial.

And the industry knows exactly who its best customers are. It isn’t targeting the gullible. It’s targeting people like me. People who’ve already done the work of distrusting the mainstream, who are primed and ready to accept an alternative, and who therefore skip the second, harder step… checking whether the alternative has actually earned that trust, or whether it’s simply borrowed the credibility of my scepticism without doing any of the work scepticism is supposed to demand.

That’s the trick. It doesn’t ask you to believe something new. It asks you to redirect a belief you already hold.

I think about this most acutely out here because the stakes are so unglamorously literal. There’s no safety net underneath the decision. If I take something that quietly wrecks a kidney, there isn’t a hospital forty minutes down a decent road. There’s a bumpy track, a phone signal that comes and goes, and friends who mean well but aren’t doctors, in the same way that a man selling turmeric on the internet isn’t a doctor either, however confidently he writes.

So what have I actually landed on. Not a system, because I don’t trust systems out here any more than I trusted them in uniform. Something closer to a discipline. I ask the same three questions of anything before it goes in my body, whether it arrives with a corporate logo or a hand-written label at a Spanish market stall. What’s the actual evidence, not the story. What’s the failure mode, because everything has one, and if nobody can tell me what it is, that’s the answer. And who benefits if I don’t ask the question at all, because that tells you more about a product than its ingredients list ever will.

It’s not a satisfying framework. It doesn’t fit on a tub. It won’t sell anything, which is rather the point.

I still don’t know if the turmeric works. I know rather more about who profits regardless of whether it does. Some nights that feels like enough. Other nights, knee complaining, cave cold in the particular way October manages, it feels like I’ve simply traded one kind of faith for another, slightly better armed against it, but not exempt.

Until Next Time