Plants and animals are our fellow biological creatures. While the chemical combinations in them might not be ideal for us especially if a person isn’t eating a varied diet, supplements can give proportions of vitamins, minerals, and whatever which have never been seen in nature.
One more angle: I’ve heard claims that agricultural soil has much less minerals than it did in the ancestral environment, and more so in recent decades. It’s been a long time since the glaciers came through, grinding the rocks and as far as I know, modern agriculture typically doesn’t include replacing the minerals taken out with each harvest. On the organic side, manure isn’t going to help that much if it’s from animals that were fed low-mineral food.
I file this under plausible theory. It doesn’t address which minerals are low, or how much should be added. One of my friends uses it as a reason to supplement.
I’ve worried about this too, but isn’t this something that can be easily tested? I mean, if nutritionists have really identified the vitamins, etc. we need, divided the thingspace appropriately (are all things called “protein” functionally the same?), and developed reliable ways of measuring nutritional information that goes on the food label, this should show up pretty quickly. (I’m becoming less confident of assumptions like these, in part because of errors like what Phil Goetz found here.)
When standard produce is packaged, how do they get the data for the label? Do they have to regularly test that source’s produce, or is there just a standard lookup table that e.g. all baby carrots can give as their data? (If the latter, that screams “information cascade!”)
Do we have reason to think this out of proportion issue would arise more often with supplements than it would just from diet?
Plants and animals are our fellow biological creatures. While the chemical combinations in them might not be ideal for us especially if a person isn’t eating a varied diet, supplements can give proportions of vitamins, minerals, and whatever which have never been seen in nature.
One more angle: I’ve heard claims that agricultural soil has much less minerals than it did in the ancestral environment, and more so in recent decades. It’s been a long time since the glaciers came through, grinding the rocks and as far as I know, modern agriculture typically doesn’t include replacing the minerals taken out with each harvest. On the organic side, manure isn’t going to help that much if it’s from animals that were fed low-mineral food.
I file this under plausible theory. It doesn’t address which minerals are low, or how much should be added. One of my friends uses it as a reason to supplement.
I’ve worried about this too, but isn’t this something that can be easily tested? I mean, if nutritionists have really identified the vitamins, etc. we need, divided the thingspace appropriately (are all things called “protein” functionally the same?), and developed reliable ways of measuring nutritional information that goes on the food label, this should show up pretty quickly. (I’m becoming less confident of assumptions like these, in part because of errors like what Phil Goetz found here.)
When standard produce is packaged, how do they get the data for the label? Do they have to regularly test that source’s produce, or is there just a standard lookup table that e.g. all baby carrots can give as their data? (If the latter, that screams “information cascade!”)
I don’t know whether nutritionists have identified all the nutrients we need.
And I’m pretty sure that the functioning of living organisms isn’t terribly well understood, even for “ideal” cases.