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I've been trying to balance my diet recently by filling out all the bars in my calorie tracking app to 100%, and it's surprisingly hard to do. For instance, to
by strken 4y ago
I've been trying to balance my diet recently by filling out all the bars in my calorie tracking app to 100%, and it's surprisingly hard to do. For instance, to get the necessary calcium I have to drink half a litre of milk, folate needs half a bag of cooked spinach (or enriched grains), vitamin e needs maybe 30 or 40 grams of sunflower seeds, vitamin c needs three or four mandarins, and so on.
The first problem is that this isn't always obvious. You can't substitute all leafy greens for spinach, there aren't many good non-milk non-fish sources of calcium, not all nuts and seeds have the right amount of vitamin e. It's quite hard to balance everything even when you're tracking individual foods, and it makes for some very strange meals.
The second problem is that a lot of the important nutrients are coming from foods that are otherwise calorie-dense or have other problems. Citrus fruits are sugary, milk and nuts are fatty, uncooked spinach can cause stomach trouble. It's not necessarily bad to eat calorie-dense food, but it does make things less forgiving when you're trying to eat at a calorie deficit to lose weight.
It makes me wonder if maybe I had long-term deficits in some of these nutrients and just didn't know.
- jimmytidey 4y agoI'm open to being wrong, but it seems highly unlikely a requirement for being healthy is drinking half a litre of milk a day.
- strken 4y agoI don't mean to suggest that it is. The RDI for calcium is 1000mg/day, though, and it's really difficult to hit that by accident unless you have spectacularly good eating habits. The half-litre of milk is one of the many things you could try. You could also eat 100g of poppy seeds, 5 cups of cooked lentils, or a kilogram of cooked kale. The point is that it's genuinely very hard to eat enough calcium, and that's only one of the nutrients that need to be juggled.
- maccard 4y ago1000mg/day is 40% more than the NHS say [0]. (If there's multiple sources then I guess that's a great example of this article! ) The rest of your post is a little ridiculous too - instead of painting the ridiculous quantities why not talk about what a balanced intake might look like? 1 serving of regular yoghurt, a glass of a fortified juice, a leafy green with lunch and a legume with your main meal is more than even the 1000 number. > it's genuinely very hard to eat enough calcium, and that's only one of the nutrients that need to be juggled. Ive found that eating a variety of food stuff, and not hyper optimising for one nutrient goes an awfully long way towards hitting all of those goals. If you followed my suggestion above, you've likely hit your calcium, iron, vitamin A and C nutrients for the day out of ~700 calories leaving an average person 800-1200 calories leftover to burn on whatever they want to! [0] https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/vitamins-and-minerals/calcium/#:~:text=How%20much%20calcium%20do%20I,need%20from%20your%20daily%20diet https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/vitamins-and-minerals/calcium/....
- im3w1l 4y agoJust to add on to what you are saying > The Reference Daily Intake (RDI) used in nutrition labeling on food and dietary supplement products in the U.S. and Canada is the daily intake level of a nutrient that is considered to be sufficient to meet the requirements of 97–98% of healthy individuals in every demographic in the United States. Due to individual variations you may need less. So falling short of the RDI isn't necessarily a problem. Edit: Consider what the RDI for calories would be. If it meets the requirements for 97% of people, then it must be a quantity sufficient for some people with very high metabolism. So eating RDI-calories would likely make a significant amount of people obese.
- alecco 4y agoLow acidic diet (alkaline) helps you more with getting calcium in your tissues than over-focusing on a high calcium diet. Western women drink a lot of cow dairy and yet have osteoporosis, yet Asian women have no problems with "low calcium" diets (low dairy/meat). Macros are no replacement to studies with actual food sources. It's a way to trick you. Edit: [CORRECTION] Asian women have high osteoporosis. I misremembered. This was a terrible example. Also interesting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osteoporosis#Prevention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osteoporosis#Prevention
- neuroma 4y agoIs the claim that Asian women suffer lower rates of osteoporosis despite lower diary because they consume an alkaline diet something which has been studied at a scale and depth to support a causal link?
- midoridensha 4y ago>>there aren't many good non-milk non-fish sources of calcium, >yet Asian women have no problems with "low calcium" diets (low dairy/meat). Asian diets (particularly in Japan) are very fish-heavy.
- tpush 4y ago> Low acidic diet (alkaline) helps you more with getting calcium in your tissues No, this is not a thing, please don't spread misinformation.
- donatzsky 4y agoI remember reading my way down the alkaline rabbit hole some years back. The amount of nonsense there is simply astounding.
- netmonk 4y agoHongkong is the place eating the most meat on earth...Just my 2 cents. So basically alkaline/acid in diet is a blatant exemple of superstition.