12 ms·

Unless you suffer from a disease that prevents the absorption of copper, I would be very careful with supplements or copper-heavy diets. I made the mistake of (

Unless you suffer from a disease that prevents the absorption of copper, I would be very careful with supplements or copper-heavy diets. I made the mistake of (accidentally) following a diet that had a high copper content and would definitely not recommend having a copper overload. Two years later and I'm far from done from the recovery. Once copper goes up, it's hard to reduce it because it weakens the adrenals and impairs digestion and you end up with a chicken egg situation where you need the adrenals to reduce copper and you can't because you don't have them. Just follow a normal diet. The chances of having low copper levels are small, while the opposite happens more often.

msandford 10y ago
From the article: "According to the Food and Nutrition Board of the Institute of Medicine, an adult’s estimated average dietary requirement for copper is about 700 micrograms per day. The Food and Nutrition Board also found that only 25 percent of the U.S. population gets enough copper daily." Not to put down your experience or the difficulty of your recovery, but the notion that "copper deficiency is rare" doesn't seem to be supported by the article. Have you got better sources? What are they? Being clinically deficient in something (scurvy, say, for vitamin C) versus mildly deficient are two entirely different things.
- gregable 10y ago
  Looking at a bottle of Centrum Mens Multivitamins, they list that it includes 900 mcg of copper and that this is only 45% of the recommended daily value (presumably because too much is bad and folks get some in their diet already). However, this also suggests that the recommended daily value is 2000 mcg, rather than the 700 mcg listed in the article.
  - tormeh 10y ago
    How often are you supposed to take that vitamin?
  - JonathonW 10y ago
    The FDA's Reference Daily Intake (on which nutrition labeling is based) is 2mg [1]. That number differs from the National Academies number [2] (that's the 700 μg referenced in the article, for non-pregnant, non-lactating adults); why, I don't know. [1] http://www.fda.gov/Food/GuidanceRegulation/GuidanceDocumentsRegulatoryInformation/LabelingNutrition/ucm064928.htm http://www.fda.gov/Food/GuidanceRegulation/GuidanceDocuments... [2] http://www.nationalacademies.org/hmd/~/media/Files/Activity%20Files/Nutrition/DRI-Tables/1_%20EARs.pdf?la=en http://www.nationalacademies.org/hmd/~/media/Files/Activity%...
    - wahern 10y ago
      Probably because the methodologies used to determine the proper intake are very rudimentary. For example, for some nutrients the RDA is whatever it takes to start seeing it excreted in urine. The analogy would be like a cup overflowing. How you get from that to recommending the "proper" intake requires making a significant number of unproven assumptions. So there's usually quite significant room for disagreement, especially as new evidence ever so slowly emerges. It doesn't help that trying to pinpoint a single number for each specific nutrient is a rather arbitrary goal. Which is why the "balanced diet" approaches makes the most sense as a general recommendation--it's an affirmation not of what we do know, but of what we don't know.
      - jrapdx3 10y ago
        It's true, determining a) what's required to prevent deficiency and b) what's optimum for health are subject to interpretation of available (and often incomplete) data, hence lots of controversy. I'm familiar with these issues surrounding vitamin D. There's no doubt it's essential, but the optimum intake and blood levels remains uncertain. Nonetheless no shortage of opinions are out there despite the uncertainty of findings backing up any particular stance. IMO the problem in pinning it down is the wide range of effects of nutritional factors like vitamin D. Body systems are in constant flux, and need for vitamin D and optimum amount in circulation varies accordingly. The situation with trace minerals is somewhat similar when the mineral is an essential cofactor in specific enzyme-mediated processes--effects of low intake of the mineral element may not be easily observed from a whole-body perspective, and attribution of particular body manifestations to a mineral deficiency can be hard to establish. I think that's the case with copper and other trace minerals and I don't expect the questions to be unequivocally resolved any time soon. Your idea of a "balanced", intake of diverse good quality foods is the only sensible recommendation we can make, especially since there's quite a bit of research showing merit of that approach.
  - STRiDEX 10y ago
    My bottle of Bayer mens one a day says 2mg 100%
- farresito 10y ago
  I think you are right. In fact, I would go further and say that we don't take enough minerals overall because the food we eat has been processed too much, so we are probably deficient in a lot of other minerals. I guess what I wanted to say is that you will find more people with high dangerous copper levels than low, especially among women because of the copper they add in birth control products.
  - refurb 10y ago
    Could you explain what you mean by "processed" food? Grinding up wheat is processing it, but it does nothing to remove minerals. It seems like "processed" is a catch all and now means "bad".
    - maxander 10y ago
      Its an imprecise and catchall term, but not entirely untrue. A good example of "processed food" is refined grain (non-whole-wheat bread, etc); there, various outer layers and components of each grain are milled out, leaving just the tasty starchy inner bit. Different parts of the grain will have different vitamin content, if you take only one part you may well end up with a smaller set of vitamins overall. Its not the only reason that that's bad (whole wheat is generally recommended mostly on the basis of glycemic index), but its not necessarily trivial, either.
    - dgreensp 10y ago
      Processing absolutely does remove minerals, along with vitamins and fiber, such as when you make white flour by removing the "bran and germ" of the wheat grain. Most often, one particular part of a food is extracted, potentially subjected to high heats and/or chemical processes in order to alter the taste, consistency, shelf life, or other properties of the substance, and then combined with other such substances. For example, a cracker might consist of flour, soybean oil (i.e. fat extracted from soybeans by soaking them in chemicals called hexanes and hydrogenated), corn syrup (sugar extracted from corn), and corn starch. The human body needs dozens of micronutrients that are easily found in a bite of a naturally-occurring food but easily absent from an artificial food, especially when the necessary sugars, fats, and starches have been sourced as cheaply and conveniently as possible for manufacturing. This isn't a value judgment, and I love eating processed foods.
TomSawyer 10y ago
Would you mind going into some of the specifics of the diet and how you were impaired during your recovering?
- farresito 10y ago
  Surely =) I made the mistake of pretty much removing the consumption of meat and fish and increasing that of lentils, beans, garbanzos, avocado, etc., which are usually quite high in copper. In fact, I didn't even eat egg. So you end up with no animal protein, which usually has zinc (antagonist of copper) and with an excess of copper. So at that point it was a pretty vegetarian (almost vegan diet). if you are careful enough and take zinc, I suppose you could make it work, but I obviously had no idea about this. I also ate more fruit than I should have, which has quite some sugar in it, which also is bad for the absorption of zinc. So yeah, some mistakes here and there :D
  - tyleraldrich 10y ago
    How were you impaired though? I'm not doubting you, but I've been a vegetarian for almost 4 years and the diet you describe is basically my diet (minus high amount of fruit). What negative impact did this have that lasted for so long?
    - nerdponx 10y ago
      Right, this sounds like every vegan diet I've seen, and I'd never heard of copper overdose as a risk for vegans. Was there some preexisting adrenal condition? Apparently zinc supplementation can be dangerous as well except on a short term basis (like for a cold), so I'm not sure I wanna start warnjng my vegan friends yet.
      - farresito 10y ago
        Copper overdose is one of the most common imbalances among vegetarians/vegans; it's just not easy to diagnose, because it doesn't appear in the blood, but you need to get a tissue metal test, and those tests are not too common. Furthermore, they tend to take at least 5 years to appear. I'm not sure if there was a preexisting adrenal condition, but I wouldn't discard that as an option. If you have vegan friends, let them know that they are at higher risk of copper overloading. You could save them a lot of pain in the future (I'm not the only one with this, sadly).
dghughes 10y ago
It's surprising how specific such a thing can be; I read a great article (maybe it was on HN?) about a man who had a bowel disease who suddenly developed heart disease. He was getting worse by the day and was about to get a transplant. A new doctor had a look and took into account the man's disease which caused poor absorption of nutrients. It turns out the man had no selenium and it was causing his heart disease. After an urgent rapid replenishment of selenium and careful diet he's OK. It's amazing how a small amount of what seems like an obscure nutrient/mineral can cause such harm. I agree a normal healthy diet is best.
- rexpop 10y ago
  What comprises a "normal healthy diet?"
  - rabidrat 10y ago
    Soylent released Powder 1.7 a month ago. http://blog.soylent.com/post/154513593367/powder-17-now-shipping http://blog.soylent.com/post/154513593367/powder-17-now-ship...
    - paulcole 10y ago
      1 for 3 ain't bad.
  - brownbat 10y ago
    Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
    - alrs 10y ago
      "Don't eat too much" is a tautology, and "mostly plants" has been debunked.
      - wmccullough 10y ago
        Can you provide sources?
rexpop 10y ago
What comprises "normal diet"?
PepeGomez 10y ago
Getting too much copper is virtually impossible unless you have a rare genetic disorder. The excess copper is excreted in bile. The defficiency on the other hand is widespread, it doesn't show in the blood tests and the symptoms are both vague and insidious. (Chiefly a constant lack of energy, brain fog and incurable anemia)
- mathgeek 10y ago
  Do you have any sources for those claims? I'm sure many of us are, like me, trying to figure out which of all these conflicting claims are backed by science.
  - PepeGomez 10y ago
    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK222312/#ddd00333 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK222312/#ddd00333 http://www.who.int/water_sanitation_health/dwq/chemicals/copper.pdf http://www.who.int/water_sanitation_health/dwq/chemicals/cop...
cityhall 10y ago
The same thing can happen with copper IUDs.

msandford 10y ago

From the article: "According to the Food and Nutrition Board of the Institute of Medicine, an adult’s estimated average dietary requirement for copper is about 700 micrograms per day. The Food and Nutrition Board also found that only 25 percent of the U.S. population gets enough copper daily." Not to put down your experience or the difficulty of your recovery, but the notion that "copper deficiency is rare" doesn't seem to be supported by the article. Have you got better sources? What are they? Being clinically deficient in something (scurvy, say, for vitamin C) versus mildly deficient are two entirely different things.

gregable 10y ago
Looking at a bottle of Centrum Mens Multivitamins, they list that it includes 900 mcg of copper and that this is only 45% of the recommended daily value (presumably because too much is bad and folks get some in their diet already). However, this also suggests that the recommended daily value is 2000 mcg, rather than the 700 mcg listed in the article.
- tormeh 10y ago
  How often are you supposed to take that vitamin?
- JonathonW 10y ago
  The FDA's Reference Daily Intake (on which nutrition labeling is based) is 2mg [1]. That number differs from the National Academies number [2] (that's the 700 μg referenced in the article, for non-pregnant, non-lactating adults); why, I don't know. [1] http://www.fda.gov/Food/GuidanceRegulation/GuidanceDocumentsRegulatoryInformation/LabelingNutrition/ucm064928.htm http://www.fda.gov/Food/GuidanceRegulation/GuidanceDocuments... [2] http://www.nationalacademies.org/hmd/~/media/Files/Activity%20Files/Nutrition/DRI-Tables/1_%20EARs.pdf?la=en http://www.nationalacademies.org/hmd/~/media/Files/Activity%...
  - wahern 10y ago
    Probably because the methodologies used to determine the proper intake are very rudimentary. For example, for some nutrients the RDA is whatever it takes to start seeing it excreted in urine. The analogy would be like a cup overflowing. How you get from that to recommending the "proper" intake requires making a significant number of unproven assumptions. So there's usually quite significant room for disagreement, especially as new evidence ever so slowly emerges. It doesn't help that trying to pinpoint a single number for each specific nutrient is a rather arbitrary goal. Which is why the "balanced diet" approaches makes the most sense as a general recommendation--it's an affirmation not of what we do know, but of what we don't know.
    - jrapdx3 10y ago
      It's true, determining a) what's required to prevent deficiency and b) what's optimum for health are subject to interpretation of available (and often incomplete) data, hence lots of controversy. I'm familiar with these issues surrounding vitamin D. There's no doubt it's essential, but the optimum intake and blood levels remains uncertain. Nonetheless no shortage of opinions are out there despite the uncertainty of findings backing up any particular stance. IMO the problem in pinning it down is the wide range of effects of nutritional factors like vitamin D. Body systems are in constant flux, and need for vitamin D and optimum amount in circulation varies accordingly. The situation with trace minerals is somewhat similar when the mineral is an essential cofactor in specific enzyme-mediated processes--effects of low intake of the mineral element may not be easily observed from a whole-body perspective, and attribution of particular body manifestations to a mineral deficiency can be hard to establish. I think that's the case with copper and other trace minerals and I don't expect the questions to be unequivocally resolved any time soon. Your idea of a "balanced", intake of diverse good quality foods is the only sensible recommendation we can make, especially since there's quite a bit of research showing merit of that approach.
- STRiDEX 10y ago
  My bottle of Bayer mens one a day says 2mg 100%
farresito 10y ago
I think you are right. In fact, I would go further and say that we don't take enough minerals overall because the food we eat has been processed too much, so we are probably deficient in a lot of other minerals. I guess what I wanted to say is that you will find more people with high dangerous copper levels than low, especially among women because of the copper they add in birth control products.
- refurb 10y ago
  Could you explain what you mean by "processed" food? Grinding up wheat is processing it, but it does nothing to remove minerals. It seems like "processed" is a catch all and now means "bad".
  - maxander 10y ago
    Its an imprecise and catchall term, but not entirely untrue. A good example of "processed food" is refined grain (non-whole-wheat bread, etc); there, various outer layers and components of each grain are milled out, leaving just the tasty starchy inner bit. Different parts of the grain will have different vitamin content, if you take only one part you may well end up with a smaller set of vitamins overall. Its not the only reason that that's bad (whole wheat is generally recommended mostly on the basis of glycemic index), but its not necessarily trivial, either.
  - dgreensp 10y ago
    Processing absolutely does remove minerals, along with vitamins and fiber, such as when you make white flour by removing the "bran and germ" of the wheat grain. Most often, one particular part of a food is extracted, potentially subjected to high heats and/or chemical processes in order to alter the taste, consistency, shelf life, or other properties of the substance, and then combined with other such substances. For example, a cracker might consist of flour, soybean oil (i.e. fat extracted from soybeans by soaking them in chemicals called hexanes and hydrogenated), corn syrup (sugar extracted from corn), and corn starch. The human body needs dozens of micronutrients that are easily found in a bite of a naturally-occurring food but easily absent from an artificial food, especially when the necessary sugars, fats, and starches have been sourced as cheaply and conveniently as possible for manufacturing. This isn't a value judgment, and I love eating processed foods.

TomSawyer 10y ago

Would you mind going into some of the specifics of the diet and how you were impaired during your recovering?

farresito 10y ago
Surely =) I made the mistake of pretty much removing the consumption of meat and fish and increasing that of lentils, beans, garbanzos, avocado, etc., which are usually quite high in copper. In fact, I didn't even eat egg. So you end up with no animal protein, which usually has zinc (antagonist of copper) and with an excess of copper. So at that point it was a pretty vegetarian (almost vegan diet). if you are careful enough and take zinc, I suppose you could make it work, but I obviously had no idea about this. I also ate more fruit than I should have, which has quite some sugar in it, which also is bad for the absorption of zinc. So yeah, some mistakes here and there :D
- tyleraldrich 10y ago
  How were you impaired though? I'm not doubting you, but I've been a vegetarian for almost 4 years and the diet you describe is basically my diet (minus high amount of fruit). What negative impact did this have that lasted for so long?
  - nerdponx 10y ago
    Right, this sounds like every vegan diet I've seen, and I'd never heard of copper overdose as a risk for vegans. Was there some preexisting adrenal condition? Apparently zinc supplementation can be dangerous as well except on a short term basis (like for a cold), so I'm not sure I wanna start warnjng my vegan friends yet.
    - farresito 10y ago
      Copper overdose is one of the most common imbalances among vegetarians/vegans; it's just not easy to diagnose, because it doesn't appear in the blood, but you need to get a tissue metal test, and those tests are not too common. Furthermore, they tend to take at least 5 years to appear. I'm not sure if there was a preexisting adrenal condition, but I wouldn't discard that as an option. If you have vegan friends, let them know that they are at higher risk of copper overloading. You could save them a lot of pain in the future (I'm not the only one with this, sadly).

dghughes 10y ago

It's surprising how specific such a thing can be; I read a great article (maybe it was on HN?) about a man who had a bowel disease who suddenly developed heart disease. He was getting worse by the day and was about to get a transplant. A new doctor had a look and took into account the man's disease which caused poor absorption of nutrients. It turns out the man had no selenium and it was causing his heart disease. After an urgent rapid replenishment of selenium and careful diet he's OK. It's amazing how a small amount of what seems like an obscure nutrient/mineral can cause such harm. I agree a normal healthy diet is best.

rexpop 10y ago
What comprises a "normal healthy diet?"
- rabidrat 10y ago
  Soylent released Powder 1.7 a month ago. http://blog.soylent.com/post/154513593367/powder-17-now-shipping http://blog.soylent.com/post/154513593367/powder-17-now-ship...
  - paulcole 10y ago
    1 for 3 ain't bad.
- brownbat 10y ago
  Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
  - alrs 10y ago
    "Don't eat too much" is a tautology, and "mostly plants" has been debunked.
    - wmccullough 10y ago
      Can you provide sources?

rexpop 10y ago

What comprises "normal diet"?

PepeGomez 10y ago

Getting too much copper is virtually impossible unless you have a rare genetic disorder. The excess copper is excreted in bile. The defficiency on the other hand is widespread, it doesn't show in the blood tests and the symptoms are both vague and insidious. (Chiefly a constant lack of energy, brain fog and incurable anemia)

mathgeek 10y ago
Do you have any sources for those claims? I'm sure many of us are, like me, trying to figure out which of all these conflicting claims are backed by science.
- PepeGomez 10y ago
  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK222312/#ddd00333 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK222312/#ddd00333 http://www.who.int/water_sanitation_health/dwq/chemicals/copper.pdf http://www.who.int/water_sanitation_health/dwq/chemicals/cop...

cityhall 10y ago

The same thing can happen with copper IUDs.