THE SELF-MEDICATION GENERATION

By MICHAEL KRANTZ

Ask Aili Kaups what she ate this morning, and she'll tell you "half a cantaloupe." But that's only half the story. The Brentwood, Calif., literary-agency administrator also had some potassium (for energy), super-oxide dismutase (an antioxidant), lipotropic formula (to fight cholesterol), chasteberry herbs (alleviates premenstrual symptoms), kyolic (aged dried garlic extract), chromium piccolinate (an appetite suppressant), vegetable phyter (dried vegetable concentrate) and 30 or so other nutritional odds and ends.

And that's just for breakfast. In ever greater numbers, Americans are embracing self-medication: a roll-your-own approach to health care that favors home-designed, prevention-oriented vitamin and drug regimens. "Forty-five percent of the U.S. population is using vitamin and mineral supplements," says John Troup of General Nutrition Centers, the U.S.'s biggest retail supplement chain. "It's a trend that's definitely become mainstream."

After a decade of grim headlines about spiraling hospital bills and shifty HMOs, the boom in self-medication comes as no surprise. "People are fed up with the high costs and side effects of drugs," says Earl Mindell, a registered pharmacist and author of Secret Remedies (Simon & Schuster, 1997), a new study of the self-care movement. "We're doubling our knowledge about nutrition every 18 months. So people wonder, instead of treating the symptoms as we've always been taught, why not help your body fight off the problem in the first place?"

The do-it-yourselfers gather data from a broad range of sources: from friends, pharmacists and store clerks to magazines, the Internet and other media obsessed with health and fitness. "The No. 1 source of information is probably Oprah Winfrey," Troup says laughing. His favorite resource: GNC's Interactive BioNutritional Encyclopedia, a touch-screen computer that helps customers navigate GNC's bewildering array of multivitamins, herbs, minerals and, coming soon, "nutriceuticals."

This blurring of nutrients and pharmaceuticals is enabled by the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994, which eased restrictions on supplements while letting manufacturers make health claims that are backed by "significant scientific agreement." "We define nutriceuticals," says Troup, choosing his words carefully, "as products that have very specific and demonstrable effects on a health condition or a disease state."

Make no mistake: this is a big business. Seventy-five years after the A.M.A. called the hype surrounding vitamins a "gigantic fraud," the drug companies are racing to keep up with their increasingly independent customers. Kaups' self-care began 30 years ago, when a doctor suggested vitamin B for her recurrent headaches. "It worked," she says, "but after I read up on it, I knew I could put something together better than what the pharmaceutical company could give me."

And therein lies the self-medicator's quintessentially American creed: I can do it better. As usual, the boomers lead the way; 35-to-54-year-olds, Troup reports, consume more vitamins and supplements than any other group. From Flintstones vitamins to marijuana to echinacea. Back to the garden, indeed.

--By Michael Krantz. Reported by David Bjerklie/New York and Dan Cray/Los Angeles

With reporting by DAVID BJERKLIE/NEW YORK AND DAN CRAY/ LOS ANGELES