14 ms·

One thing I sometimes worry about -- Under this lockdown for a year, I've been eating a really un-diverse diet, cooking for myself every day basically, not muc

• corndoge 6y ago
  Just take a multivitamin
  • m463 6y ago
    I've been wondering if vitamin technology has been keeping up. for example, I read there is more than one form of vitamin E and just supplementing one might not work as expected.
    • TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
      > I've been wondering if vitamin technology has been keeping up. Definitely they have but not in brands typically found in grocery stores. Look at brands like PureEncapsulations, Thorne, and Swanson for example. I personally take PureEncapsulations ONE multivitamin daily. Be careful with vitamin E... too much is NOT a good thing. And yes, there is more than one kind each with different bioavailability. A lot of multivitamins don’t include minerals, especially iron.
      • collyw 6y ago
        I read somewhere that a large part of the "quality" of vitamin pills come down to how crumbly they are. Small dense vitamins are so good. Big pills are.
      • lotsofpulp 6y ago
        In the US, I wouldn’t take a vitamin without the USP label: https://www.usp.org/ https://www.usp.org/ There’s no government oversight of vitamins and supplements, but at least USP might give the veneer of some verification.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • alert0 6y ago
      Ok, don't take a multivitamin then.
    • Gustomaximus 6y ago
      The best I have found is this: https://www.nuzest.com.au/collections/good-green-stuff https://www.nuzest.com.au/collections/good-green-stuff Not a shill, have Crohns so can get absorbsion issues with food/nutrients. This stuff noticeably helps over a multivitamin pill... maybe placebo but I absolutely feel the difference.
    • vector_spaces 6y ago
      Vitamins are determined by their biological functions, not by chemical structure. Compounds which satisfy the functions of a particular vitamin are known as vitamers of that vitamin. For example cyanocobalamin and methylcobalamin are both vitamers of B12 despite being chemically distinct. It's true that some vitamers are more easily metabolized by certain routes than others. In the example I gave, methylcobalamin is superior when it comes to oral supplements. Also if you can, try taking a multivitamin without minerals, and take a mineral supplement separately. A lot of minerals interfere with one another's absorption along with that of many vitamins (zinc, calcium, and iron should all be taken away from each other and from vitamin supplements).
    • sgt101 6y ago
      Look, I can write a bullshot article telling you that you need to take vitamine frroorofrom and then offer to sell it to you for $20 a pill. If you want to believe it and spend your money, good for me! On the other hand the $5 a jar multivits cover all your actual supplement needs.
    • novok 6y ago
      There is a concept of bioavailbility. Some vitamins & minerals are more absorbable than others, and if you have issues you can be asorbing or converting certain ones not as well as you may think: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioavailability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioavailability Also do we know all the nutrients people need and amount also considering what is optimally healthy, genetics, age, medical conditions? Definitely not.
  • aputsiak 6y ago
    Terry Wahls, the doctor who claims she reversed her MS through diet would only partly agree. In her book 'The Wahls Protocol', she spells a diet regime out from a functional medicine perspective.
    • bennyelv 6y ago
      Unfortunately for people with MS (like myself) she’s wrong. Her original experience is in fact quite “normal” for the behaviour of MS. It gets significantly worse, then significantly better, then worse, etc etc. Her study that then followed up did find a positive result, but had a very small sample size, nowhere near large enough for a highly variable condition like MS. Drug companies have to spend billions running 5-10-20 year studies with 1000’s of participants to verify the efficacy of their MS treatments for good reason. A recent Cochrane review on diet interventions for MS which references her study (amongst others obviously) concluded that “at present there is insufficient evidence to determine whether supplementation with antioxidants or other dietary interventions have any impact on MS related outcomes.” The biggest giveaway that a medical treatment is snake oil in my experience is when it comes with a book for sale for £20 on Amazon.
      • specialist 6y ago
        I am very interested in any research wrt Wahl's protocol. Is this the study you reference? https://www.cochrane.org/CD004192/MS_dietary-interventions-multiple-sclerosis-related-outcomes https://www.cochrane.org/CD004192/MS_dietary-interventions-m... Meta: I deeply appreciate this article explicitly stating "The evidence is current to May 2019." It's so hard for noobs like me to sherlock this stuff. > supplementation with antioxidants or other dietary interventions Those other interventions are macronutrients, to benefit your mitochondria. I'll go back and look, but I don't recall Wahls saying much about antioxidants. FWIW, I believe, but cannot prove, that Wahl's advice to resume eating meat, esp organ meat, benefitted me. I had been working towards vegetarian and suffering terribly from inflammation and autoimmune stuff. I have no idea how or why. I only know that whenever I resume my prior dietary habits (more carbs, less meat), I decline. My fat and produce consumption has remained more or less constant. A lot coconut oil, olive oil, and every big leafy green that fits into the blender.
  • sneak 6y ago
    This is, in my experience, insufficient.
• mint2 6y ago
  Take vitamin b12 at a minimum.
  • youngtaff 6y ago
    Some people don't absorb b12 via digestion so have to inject it instead
• akamaka 6y ago
  If you found a set of foods that leave you satisfied every day and you’re never craving something else, it sounds like you’re doing pretty great. And if you’re worried about getting enough trace minerals, you could easily add some dark chocolate, seeds, nuts, and fresh herbs.
• chrisco255 6y ago
  Why is it assumed that a diverse diet is necessarily better for you? If you're cooking for yourself, fresh, unprocessed foods, you're already way ahead of the game.
  • collyw 6y ago
    To be fair, the OP wondered if he was missing out on some nutrient. That was the reason for scurvy in the past, limited diet of a ship, lack of vitamin C.
    • gwd 6y ago
      > That was the reason for scurvy in the past, limited diet of a ship, lack of vitamin C. AIUI, it wasn't the limited diet, but the lack of fresh food. What I heard was that basically everything you eat has vitamin C in it (which is why our bodies forgot how to manufacture it on their own -- why bother making your own when it's already all around you?), but that it decays fairly rapidly. So it doesn't matter how diverse your food supply is, if it's all canned / salted / preserved, you're going to have problems. I guess it depends on how "routine" OP's routine is. If they're eating just potatoes and bacon every meal, they're going to have problems. But if they have 2-3 forms of starch, 2-3 types of vegetables, and 2-3 forms of protein mixed together, I think they're probably doing about as well as most human beings have done throughout time. That said, never hurts to take a good multivitamin. :-)
      • undersuit 6y ago
        >But if they have 2-3 forms of starch, 2-3 types of vegetables, and 2-3 forms of protein mixed together, TBF... that sounds pretty diverse.
• colordrops 6y ago
  How diverse does a diet have to be exactly? Most humans lived with a rather limited set of food choices until the industrial age. We didn't evolve to eat hundreds of different food items, and sometimes I wonder the opposite - perhaps we eat too many different things which might introduce some outliers that damage our systems.
  • qlk1123 6y ago
    I doubt that this is true. In the era of colletion and hunting, the diversity of food is based on the near-by ecosystem, which is larger than modern supermarket.
    • PeterBarrett 6y ago
      There is no way that's true. No matter how far a person wandered they're not going to come across a bell pepper, lettuce, carrots, potatoes and any meat they could want.
      • undersuit 6y ago
        You're perspective is skewed. Your knowledge only includes the local plants that we have created into our international rummaging choices. Bell Peppers are just one modern variety out from the ~30 species of chilies we've discovered. Same for carrots and potatoes and lettuce. I look at the variety of edible vegetation I can get at the grocery store and the only thing I really think of is it's a good day that I don't have to walk 20 miles to the fruit trees to pick the fruit before all the animals do. Meat? tons of variety, there are like twenty different cat to dog sized animal species in my Montana wilderness before I even have to get to the large herbivores that have less variety. And meat is special anyways, the mink or weasel you can kill is chock-full of 2-5 years worth of collecting resources from various animal and vegetable sources.
      • washadjeffmad 6y ago
        Have you ever eaten a pine cone? Pine needles "contain more Vitamin C than an orange" (I didn't see it specified if that's by gross weight or dry mass) and make decent tea, and many cultures still boil and eat or cook with pine cones. Modern crops are amazing, but we are literally surrounded by new and forgotten sustenance. It's not always pretty, tasty, or toothsome, but it's there if you have the time and will to turn it into food. I'm also reminded of villages that "modernized" by trading their old fashioned cast iron cookware in for aluminum and began to suffer from anemia as a result. Iron is abundant in the crust, and eating mineral-rich clay is still practiced by humans and animals around the planet, but their solution was to put cast iron charms in the new pots for luck. It's possible they were in iron-poor areas, but if they were swayed to abandon their traditions by the appeal of commercial marketing, it seems likely they mught also eschew any dirt-eating practices they once might have had.
• benlumen 6y ago
  An effervescent multivitamin drink (Berocca or equivalent), Omega 3 and a decent dose of Vit D should cover you. And if in doubt, have a side of steamed broccoli.
  • sva_ 6y ago
    Increasing omega3 was a major one for me, definitely decreased chronic inflammation. The problem occurs if one's omega6:omega3 ratio is off, and most westerner's diets are very high in predominantly omega6 fatty acids[0] (such as olive oil, and most other oils). Though if you choose to supplement omega3, make sure it is controlled for mercury-contaminants. With fat-soluble vitamins such as Vitamin D, be vary of vitamin toxicity (Hypervitaminosis[1]), as they accumulate in the body. But you'd probably have to take a huge amount over a long time to get there. Another interesting supplement might be L-Carnitine[2], especially if you eat little/no meat. [0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12442909/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12442909/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypervitaminosis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypervitaminosis [2] https://examine.com/supplements/l-carnitine/#effect-matrix https://examine.com/supplements/l-carnitine/#effect-matrix
    • Delk 6y ago
      How did you figure out the change decreased chronic inflammation? Was there a change in inflammatory markers or something? Or more of a hunch?
      • sva_ 6y ago
        I'm a bit shy to admit, but the most objective marker was a significant reduction in acne (on my shoulders). But overall I also feel a lot calmer, I digest food better, I sleep better, and some other things that are hard to pinpoint. I just have an overall greater feeling of well-being. I know this is only n=1 and hard to prove that it's due to omega3, but I just really feel like it is closely related. I also have to point out that I've eaten a vegetarian diet since about 2008. I always thought I had a pretty healthy diet and blood work confirmed that, but it appears that it didn't control for omega3 concentrations. Part of that diet was that I consumed large amounts of (in particular) olive oil (omega6), and almost negligible amounts of omega3.
• sneak 6y ago
  I find myself having weird food cravings when this happens. I take a multivitamin every day but during the pandemic I've also been eating the same half-dozen things, over and over and over. It's definitely missing something (that the multivitamin is insufficient in completely replacing) because sometimes I'll order delivery takeout from somewhere and feel like a new person after eating it.
• dgellow 6y ago
  If you want to know your situation, I believe that you can just go to a general doctor and ask for a blood test. I heard that's common for people with vegan diet. (I haven't done it myself yet, so I'm not sure what metrics they can give you)
• bllguo 6y ago
  I think a blood test can answer these questions, at least to some degree. My doctor had me undergo a blood test at my physical and it exposed my lack of vitamin B12
• tpush 6y ago
  If you're that concerned, go to a doctor and do a blood test to see what's up. But please don't take nutrition advice from an internet message board about software and startups.
• kashyapc 6y ago
  I don't think you're deprived of any nutrients. Sticking to a well-chosen, consistent diet is a feature, not a bug. Most of us living in modern cities have a dizzying array of options to the point that today more humans die due to obesity today than to malnutrition. Heck, even more than 2000 years ago, people were conscious of too much food variety. Here, look at Seneca riffing on it in a letter to his friend (titled 'A beneficial reading program'): "You must stay with a limited number of writers and be fed by them if you mean to derive anything that will dwell reliably with you [...] 'But I want to read different books at different times,' you say. The person of delicate digestion nibbles at this and that; when the diet is too varied, though, food does not nourish but only upsets the stomach."
  • threatofrain 6y ago
    It’s not obvious why you think food diversity is related to diabetes risk in the modern age.
    • kashyapc 6y ago
      Fair question. I did anticipate it, as my argument wasn't watertight. I mean to say that the sheer variety aggravates our boundless appetites, which are difficult to restrain as-is. Couple that with the unhealthy eating habits our modern age "encourages" (I put it in air quotes because we have personal agency to push back). And we can see where this is going. The details are very much debatable, but the broader point stands.
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• npsimons 6y ago
  I switched to a whole food plant based diet after reading "How not to Die", and I believe it's served me well during the pandemic, cooking for myself and hitting my micronutrients pretty much every day. I check using cronometer.com, and in pretty much every category I'm getting more than enough. Eating the same thing every day isn't the problem; it's not eating enough different things to get all your nutrients. Just for example, I pretty much eat beets, broccoli, blueberries, almonds, bananas, mango, dates, oatmeal, greens, legumes (lentils, chickpeas or kidney beans), turmeric, flax seed and nutritional yeast (for B12)) every day. My labs a week ago were perfect, I'm actually over for vitamins D and B12.