What are the best recommendations for what quantities adults (ages 20-60) should take the important dietary minerals in, and what are the costs and benefits of various amounts?
Eat food like a sane person. If you don’t have any underlying problem that prevents you from absorbing a specific nutrient you most likely don’t need any supplementation. If you do think that you might have such a problem speak to a doctor.
Good advice, but you have to already know what a sane person eats to follow it. In a world with several major countries with a two-digit prevalence of obesity, I think lots of people don’t.
Eat food like a sane person. If you don’t have any underlying problem that prevents you from absorbing a specific nutrient you most likely don’t need any supplementation. If you do think that you might have such a problem speak to a doctor.
Absolutely wrong. This mistaken belief comes from a boolean model for health—that is, that you are sick or healthy, rather than one of a million levels and variations of slightly-more or slightly-less healthy. It also fails to acknowledge all the widespread deficiencies, and the safe compounds we’ve discovered that provide health benefits but aren’t found in food.
There’s also the fact that taking supplements lets you optimize micronutrients and macronutrients separately. For example, if you want more vitamin C which is mostly in fruit, but don’t want sugar which is also found in fruit, then it’s easy. The same applies to things you want to avoid. Using supplements prevents there from being a tradeoff between micronutrient intake and other things you might care about.
For example, if you want more vitamin C which is mostly in fruit, but don’t want sugar which is also found in fruit, then it’s easy.
I think that if you don’t drink lots of soda/eat lots of cake/other similarly insane stuff, you’re very unlikely to get too much sugar from fruit alone.
Nope. This comes from the fact that when you do proper studies about overdosing (which is what you do with needless supplementation) various micronutrients you find that it is at best useless and at worst harmful. Then I added my own spin on the cause of it rather than listing studies for each chemical because I can’t be bothered to write a meta study.
… if you want … vitamin C …
Then you should eat at least some fresh food. If you are a normal American or European you should probably also eat more fruit, but you don’t need to worry about your vitamin C intake. (Unless you take more than ten times RDI ie one pill per day, in which case you should decrease your intake of vitamin C and still eat more fruit)
Edit: Based on jimrandomh’s claim below I think that I should clarify that by “needless supplementation” I mean any supplementation done when it has not been demonstrated (eg with blood work at a clinic) that you have a deficiency of that particular mineral.
Edit: Based on jimrandomh’s claim below I think that I should clarify that by “needless supplementation” I mean any supplementation done when it has not been demonstrated (eg with blood work at a clinic) that you have a deficiency of that particular mineral.
Bayes disagrees with you.
If you know that most people in your country (the United States for example) are deficient in vitamin D then prior to having blood work done, and absent any other evidence you have collected that suggests you are an exception, you should expect to be deficient in vitamin D.
This reeks of status quo bias. How do you suppose that ‘eat like a sane person’ (as though that were precise advice) gives exactly optimal nutrition, with no gains to be had from any increase or decrease of anything? It seems vanishingly improbable that there is no substance that a human could benefit from getting slightly more or less of in the diet.
Your comment about “overdosing” is correct, but irrelevant. Note that those studies often also demonstrate that people with bad diets actually do gain from taking multivitamins. The question isn’t whether taking a bottle of vitamin C pills will prevent AIDS; the question is what the optimal intake of vitamin C is, relative if necessary to everything else.
If, for example, there is a slight health benefit to be had from ingesting 1 mg less of msg and .001 mg more of riboflavin than people normally do, then your claim is false. How are you so sure that there are no such benefits for any substances?
How do you suppose that ‘eat like a sane person’ (as though that were precise advice) gives exactly optimal nutrition, with no gains to be had from any increase or decrease of anything? It seems vanishingly improbable that there is no substance that a human could benefit from getting slightly more or less of in the diet.
It does not seem vanishingly improbable to me. Any organism that must eat complex foodstuffs (which includes all animals big enough to see) must deal with the fact that they have no way to obtain precisely the right quantity and proportions of everything that they need. Their bodies therefore need to be robust to wide variations in their dietary content, resulting in a plateau, possibly a very wide one, between deficits and excesses that do measurable harm. If this is so, then there is no such thing as the exactly optimal amount of a nutrient. Instead, there is a broad range, and if you manage to hit that barn door it doesn’t matter where.
I think that what you say has to be true at the population level. (The panda provides an obvious counter example, but since the panda is going extinct, that is merely a nit pick. Successful species, such as rats or humans are robust to wide variations in their dietary content.
However, at the micro-level, the truth of this proposition is maintained by ruthless culling. The rat population is riddled with weaklings, who lose out in life due to diet-induced health problems.
As for the human population, we have a different perspective on these matters. I can start from a prior belief that my body is probably robust to wide variations in dietary content, but I need non-zero probabilities on a wide variety of dietary vulnerabilities so that updating will work if events supply evidence.
What we needed in the ancestral environment is exactly the same as what we need now
Already, there are a lot of substances I ingest that cause varying effects—increased productivity, increased creativity, increased fun, decreased pain—that each has its own tradeoffs. Even if it exists, I think the ‘plateau’ doesn’t account for everything I care about, and there is obvious room for improvement.
And it would be really weird if the plateau didn’t have some little peaks and valleys on it.
Moreover, the organism can afford to require precise balance between nutrients foobar and bazqux if they are nearly always found in the same proportions in its food. When you start supplementing foobar but not bazqux, you won’t like the results. And you’ll need a lot of knowledge to take into account all such interactions.
I am not a nutritionist, but I once read in The Economist that something like that was going on between omega-6 and omega-3, and between short- and long-chain omega-3.
Nope. This comes from the fact that when you do proper studies about overdosing (which is what you do with needless supplementation) various micronutrients you find that it is at best useless and at worst harmful.
You slipped your conclusion into a premise, when you called it “needless supplementation”. That’s not what we’re talking about; the goal here is to find which compounds, specifically, do need to be supplemented. And I think it ought to go without saying that if you overdose on anything harmful, you’re doing it wrong.
Basically, nutrition and supplementation is really complex. If you try to take supplements without engaging with that complexity then you might get hurt; but if you do engage the complexity, you can achieve great benefits.
if you do engage the complexity, you can achieve great benefits
Surely the question is whether you can reduce the uncertainty enough (about nutrition in general and your own metabolism in particular) that it starts beating “eat like a sane person”?
That’s obviously the default best recommendation unless someone finds serious evidence of a better way, but I’m pretty sure that the goal of the study is to see if there’s already serious evidence of a better way out there.
Eat food like a sane person. If you don’t have any underlying problem that prevents you from absorbing a specific nutrient you most likely don’t need any supplementation. If you do think that you might have such a problem speak to a doctor.
Good advice, but you have to already know what a sane person eats to follow it. In a world with several major countries with a two-digit prevalence of obesity, I think lots of people don’t.
Absolutely wrong. This mistaken belief comes from a boolean model for health—that is, that you are sick or healthy, rather than one of a million levels and variations of slightly-more or slightly-less healthy. It also fails to acknowledge all the widespread deficiencies, and the safe compounds we’ve discovered that provide health benefits but aren’t found in food.
There’s also the fact that taking supplements lets you optimize micronutrients and macronutrients separately. For example, if you want more vitamin C which is mostly in fruit, but don’t want sugar which is also found in fruit, then it’s easy. The same applies to things you want to avoid. Using supplements prevents there from being a tradeoff between micronutrient intake and other things you might care about.
I think that if you don’t drink lots of soda/eat lots of cake/other similarly insane stuff, you’re very unlikely to get too much sugar from fruit alone.
Nope. This comes from the fact that when you do proper studies about overdosing (which is what you do with needless supplementation) various micronutrients you find that it is at best useless and at worst harmful. Then I added my own spin on the cause of it rather than listing studies for each chemical because I can’t be bothered to write a meta study.
Then you should eat at least some fresh food. If you are a normal American or European you should probably also eat more fruit, but you don’t need to worry about your vitamin C intake. (Unless you take more than ten times RDI ie one pill per day, in which case you should decrease your intake of vitamin C and still eat more fruit)
Edit: Based on jimrandomh’s claim below I think that I should clarify that by “needless supplementation” I mean any supplementation done when it has not been demonstrated (eg with blood work at a clinic) that you have a deficiency of that particular mineral.
Bayes disagrees with you.
If you know that most people in your country (the United States for example) are deficient in vitamin D then prior to having blood work done, and absent any other evidence you have collected that suggests you are an exception, you should expect to be deficient in vitamin D.
This reeks of status quo bias. How do you suppose that ‘eat like a sane person’ (as though that were precise advice) gives exactly optimal nutrition, with no gains to be had from any increase or decrease of anything? It seems vanishingly improbable that there is no substance that a human could benefit from getting slightly more or less of in the diet.
Your comment about “overdosing” is correct, but irrelevant. Note that those studies often also demonstrate that people with bad diets actually do gain from taking multivitamins. The question isn’t whether taking a bottle of vitamin C pills will prevent AIDS; the question is what the optimal intake of vitamin C is, relative if necessary to everything else.
If, for example, there is a slight health benefit to be had from ingesting 1 mg less of msg and .001 mg more of riboflavin than people normally do, then your claim is false. How are you so sure that there are no such benefits for any substances?
It does not seem vanishingly improbable to me. Any organism that must eat complex foodstuffs (which includes all animals big enough to see) must deal with the fact that they have no way to obtain precisely the right quantity and proportions of everything that they need. Their bodies therefore need to be robust to wide variations in their dietary content, resulting in a plateau, possibly a very wide one, between deficits and excesses that do measurable harm. If this is so, then there is no such thing as the exactly optimal amount of a nutrient. Instead, there is a broad range, and if you manage to hit that barn door it doesn’t matter where.
I think that what you say has to be true at the population level. (The panda provides an obvious counter example, but since the panda is going extinct, that is merely a nit pick. Successful species, such as rats or humans are robust to wide variations in their dietary content.
However, at the micro-level, the truth of this proposition is maintained by ruthless culling. The rat population is riddled with weaklings, who lose out in life due to diet-induced health problems.
As for the human population, we have a different perspective on these matters. I can start from a prior belief that my body is probably robust to wide variations in dietary content, but I need non-zero probabilities on a wide variety of dietary vulnerabilities so that updating will work if events supply evidence.
That explanation seems to require:
“everything that we need” is optimal
What we needed in the ancestral environment is exactly the same as what we need now
Already, there are a lot of substances I ingest that cause varying effects—increased productivity, increased creativity, increased fun, decreased pain—that each has its own tradeoffs. Even if it exists, I think the ‘plateau’ doesn’t account for everything I care about, and there is obvious room for improvement.
And it would be really weird if the plateau didn’t have some little peaks and valleys on it.
Moreover, the organism can afford to require precise balance between nutrients foobar and bazqux if they are nearly always found in the same proportions in its food. When you start supplementing foobar but not bazqux, you won’t like the results. And you’ll need a lot of knowledge to take into account all such interactions.
Right, that’s what’s being called for. A lot of knowledge.
That sounds plausible. Any specific real-world examples?
I am not a nutritionist, but I once read in The Economist that something like that was going on between omega-6 and omega-3, and between short- and long-chain omega-3.
Dunno what you mean by “normal”, but I suspect the median American or European take significantly less vitamin C than would be optimal.
You slipped your conclusion into a premise, when you called it “needless supplementation”. That’s not what we’re talking about; the goal here is to find which compounds, specifically, do need to be supplemented. And I think it ought to go without saying that if you overdose on anything harmful, you’re doing it wrong.
Basically, nutrition and supplementation is really complex. If you try to take supplements without engaging with that complexity then you might get hurt; but if you do engage the complexity, you can achieve great benefits.
Surely the question is whether you can reduce the uncertainty enough (about nutrition in general and your own metabolism in particular) that it starts beating “eat like a sane person”?
That’s obviously the default best recommendation unless someone finds serious evidence of a better way, but I’m pretty sure that the goal of the study is to see if there’s already serious evidence of a better way out there.
There isn’t really, my paper is basically suggesting that this null hypothesis is not rejected. A sad state of affairs.