So apparently your gajillion schmillion cells need a total of 114 different nutrients. When I Google this I come across lots of short articles. They mention the fact and discuss how some are for energy and some are to regenerate. But I would like more detail.
What I want to know is are there any websites that would tell me a list of all the different vegetables and fruits and seeds that I should make sure are in my diet. I know each individual veg or fruit would have lots of different types of nutrients. But I want to know are all 114 in my diet at least each week. even if I don’t get them all in each day.
As it stands there are several vegetables that I eat all the time (carrots, onions etc) to ones that I eat about every 8-9 days (brocolli) to ones that I eat very rarely (rhubarb or kale)
I’d rather not rely on supplements because as they say they are supplements and not replacements for any vegetables(I wouldnt mind taking them if they helped).
Just as I think of it now I don’t eat mushrooms or brussel sprouts. am i missing out in anything significant for example.
You don’t need to worry about it. Most of those nutrients are in most foods, anyway. If you eat a varied diet including meat and multiple different vegetables, you’re probably getting all of them anyway. And if you start falling short of one of them, you’ll generally start finding yourself craving foods that are rich in that nutrient.
Look at it this way: You’ve never worried about it before now, have you? And you’re still alive, after all these years. And all of your ancestors survived at least to adulthood, too, and most of them didn’t even have a clue what a “nutrient” was.
It’s even worse than 114! There may be **thousands **of micronutrients that are necessary for health!
That’s true. It’s also mostly meaningless. As Chronos said, the proverbial good balanced diet will provide everything you need in general. Maybe sometime in the future we’ll have some idea of what every micronutrient does and be able to pair them with individual needs. We are at least decades away from that. Anything you read today that says they can do it is from a scam artist. Period.
Eat whatever vegetables you like, as long as you eat lots of them. Nothing more needs to be said.
I don’t disagree with the previous posters completely. It is true that if you eat a well-balanced diet, things will just take care of themselves. The problem is that many people’s diets aren’t that varied. Many people eat a very limited range of foods and the drive to get more diversity in the diet isn’t as strong as the ones for convenience, food aversions, or just plain laziness. Plenty of people develop very real and serious vitamin deficiencies in 1st world countries despite eating too much in general. We all know people that live off of boxed macaroni and cheese, Ramen noodles, and pizza and little to no vegetables. You can do that for a long time without any ill effects but it will eventually catch up to you. Other factors like drinking too much rob the body of the ability to adsorb and process key nutrients like the B vitamins and that can be deadly in severe cases.
You can take a multi-vitamin every day to cover many of your bases. Doctors often say it isn’t necessary for most people but it helps for some and a year’s supply is really cheap especially if you get it on sale.
Actually, come to think of it, the OP never mentioned eating meat. If you’re a vegetarian, then you do need to make some minimum effort to be sure you’re getting complete proteins. The most common way to do this is via pairs of foods, with rice and beans being the classic (but far from only) example.
Where’d you get 114 nutrients from? There are about 30 vitamins and minerals. Twenty amino acids. Omega 3 fats. etc.
I’m not knocking the idea, I’m just curious where 114 came from if the 30 odd vitamins and minerals and 20 amino acids are added up, that still leaves about 60 nutrients people need.
If you are vegetarian, you may be deficient in creatine or iron, among other things. But I really don’t know much about it.
Then scroll down to the nutritional information. Start counting. Then delete the URL and the cookie and the history and all memory in your brain of ever having gone there.
I disagree with this. As Shagnasty pointed out, many people in the First World do get vitamin deficiencies without noticing. The view that the body somehow notices that <important nutrient> is missing and therefore the person starts to crave <food which contains that nutrient> is not scientifically supported; it sounds rather magic-like. Anecdotes about strange tastes of pregnant women or a few cases of women eating earth turning out to be iron-deficient are not hard data.
The other problem is modern agro-industry, which has pushed the development of bigger products, both with artifical fertilizer depleting natural fertility, and with specialized breeding of seeds, which often gets wheat rich in starch or humoungous veggies, with little vitamin content.
Add to that the natural variation between different kinds of the same family (different branches of carrots, potatoes etc.) and different richness or poorness of soil, and you can eat a whole head of broccoli and still not get enough of nutrient X which is statistically present in broccoli. Or you eat your portion of bread and still lack the essential amino acid because the breeding process lost it.
It’s just not well known how deficient people are because there is no big study testing 50 000 people at random for levels of all vitamins plus minerals plus essential amino acids etc.
The idea that “many” people in developed countries suffer vitamin deficiencies is highly dubious.
There has been recent debate about supposedly suboptimal intake of things like vitamin D having untoward health impact without causing overt deficiency syndromes (i.e. rickets), but a lot of this is, well, debatable, and taking mega-vitamin supplements could actually be harmful.
What the vitamin and micronutrient alarmists argue is that your body is perilously close to or actually suffering from various deficiencies that only artificial supplementation can address. The reality is that even “average” suboptimal Western-type diets supply one’s needs in this regard quite nicely, and if you attend to advice to eat a diet rich in fruits/vegetables/nuts you’re virtually certain to be quite nicely covered as far as antioxidants and whatever other goodies they contain.
Eat not too much, and mostly plants, and you need not worry about getting 114 or 287 or however many nutrients that are supposedly vital for existence.
Something to consider is that patients can survive for years on total parental nutrition where the solutions contain only the nutrients known to date. It doesn’t seem likely that any major components of nutrition remain undiscovered, or TPN patients would have died long ago.
I think a lot of the suggestion about “114 nutrients” is the old scam about “too much is better than not enough”. It isn’t, always, and most of the time if you take supplements you are just fortifying your urine with micronutrients.
Furthermore, most of those amino acids are readily converted, one to another, by your body. Depending on how you count, there are only about 8 or 9 essential amino acids that you need to have in your diet (and most sources of protein will contain plenty of them, with the possible exception of tryptophan, if your diet is heavily corn based).
As far as the other amino acids go, it does not matter which you get, so long as you get enough protein in general (although almost any source of protein will, in fact, contain plenty of each).
So, basically, you are right, but the true figure is even lower than you suggest.
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Somebody mentioned coenzymes. Coenzymes are not nutrients as such, although they are substances that are essential to your body’s metabolism. In general your body makes its own coenzymes out of variou components of the diet. In several cases, these components are vitamins (actually some of the vitamins are pretty much the same thing as the coenzyme already, some need a bit of processing). Indeed, the reason most of the vitamins are needed in the diet is because they are needed to provide coenzymes. However, we should not count both the vitamin and the coenzyme derived from (or identical to) it as seperate nutrients. That is to double count.
You don’t have to lump everybody who worries about nutrients into the “alarmist” camp. There are enough serious scientists and doctors studying these things.
One of the new discoveries about Vitamin D levels was not about rickets at all, but about lower life expectancy in elder women. The study was done with the nurses at John Hopkins univ., where the night shift got less sunlight and therefore, presumably less vit. D., and had a lower life expectancy, even taking the known stress of night shift (known from other studies) into account.
The scientists don’t recommend a change in the amount necessary from the hundreds to the thousands light-heartedly or because they are on the take; they do it because their evidence points towards higher levels being beneficial.
And I also said that we simply don’t know about the vitamin levels of normal people, because nobody has done a big study. So blithly assuring people that everything is peachy because the only worried ones are alarmists wanting to make a buck is not based on any science.
Worrying about deficiences due to secondary evidence, like the actual measured levels of nutrient in the food itself, is however scientific.
It’s true that you can “survive” on the known nutrients. But you can live better and healthier if you get full plants instead of a vitamin solution; the secondary phytho-components (like the colour compounds) were only recently discovered. Among scientists and doctors (not the alarmists) it’s well established that the body accepts nutrients better not in isolated, chemically pure form, but in a mix, because some stuff needs other stuff to be better absorbed.
The recommendation of “5 portions of veggies or fruits a day” from the cancer society is based on decades of research that this is better for you, just as fiber and movement are good for your health in long term, although you can survive short-term without it. Your quality of life and your health outlook are improved once you can stop solutions and eat normal again, though.
(That’s one other factor when considering if your diet gives you enough of the nutrients: it’s useless if your spinach portion contains enough iron for you, but because you didn’t add the orange juice, your body doesn’t absorb 70% of the iron present and lets it pass through. Same for carrot juice with vit. A - without oil, the vitamin will not be absorbed.)
In fact, because research so far was mostly based on life-threatening deficiences like scurvy and lack of niacin etc., we still don’t know enough about the positive effects of nutrients. Maybe every third person is lacking not only Vit. D in the new high levels, but also needs more <essential amino acid>, and if he got sufficient levels, people would feel better and be less tired. But we don’t know if people have sufficient levels, and we don’t know how low-level deficiency looks like. We only know how serious scurvy looks like, but not other small effects, or long-term effects of being low on Vit. E for two decades or whatever.
What I specifically was addressing was the claim that “many people in the First World do get vitamin deficiencies without noticing” and the suggestion by various “authorities” that we must consume multivitamins or other supplements to avoid health problems associated with the supposed deficiencies.
While you are assuring us that your opinions are “scientific”, I don’t see any science cited to back them up.
As I noted, there is conflicting evidence about whether levels of certain vitamins are too low in people who do get the recommended daily allowance or more. One of these is vitamin D, the subject of debate in the medical literature and alarmist reports in the popular press (and alt med websites) about high percentages of Americans supposedly being vitamin D deficient and risking bone disease, cancer etc. Less attention has been given to a recent Institute of Medicine report setting out recommended standards for vitamin D intake.
“The IOM was asked by the US and Canadian governments to assess the current data on health outcomes associated with calcium and vitamin D. They formed a committee of experts who did an exhaustive review of over 1000 studies and listened to testimony from scientists and stakeholders. Their report, issued on 11/30/2010, concluded that the evidence supported a role for these nutrients in bone health but not in other health conditions, that the majority of the American and Canadian population is getting enough of both vitamin D and calcium, and that there is emerging evidence that an excess of these nutrients may be harmful.”
There were also preliminary reports awhile back suggesting that vitamin E supplementation would be useful for cancer treatment/prevention, but those hopes have been dashed by later work showing a lack of positive effect, and that excess vitamin E can be detrimental to health.
When preliminary research comes out regarding possible beneficial effects of vitamin supplementation in disease prevention (or even if there is no such research), it is common for it to be exploited by quacks who want to scare people into buying supplements they do not need (and which, again, can cause harm).
Feel free to document this claim, as well as your earlier assertion about vitamin deficiency being commonplace in developed nations.
It’s well documented that most Americans are nutrient deficient, which is hardly surprising once you consider that most people here are eating a bunch of processed crap.
Magnesium deficiency, yeah. And it can contribute to higher rates of CVD, diabetes, mood disorders, etc.
Another thing many in the west are deficient in is omega 3 fatty acids. Most people don’t get enough soluble or insoluble fiber either. Potassium intake tends to be low while sodium intake is high etc. The things people in the west tend to be deficient in (fiber, magnesium, omega 3s, potassium) all tend to increase the risk of diseases of affluence like CVD and diabetes, as well as mood disorders.
Then there is the fact that as you age certain products manufactured in the body tend to decrease (DHEA, coenzyme Q10, phosphatidylserine, etc) even with a healthy diet.
So someone in their 50s could easily be deficient in a dozen or more nutrients
I am always suspicious about the many claims that we have to eat such a wide range of food groups to stay healthy.
During ww2 the whole of the British population was on food rationing, many people never even saw fruit from 1939 to 1945, let alone had five a day.
I have no cite but if pushed could probably dig a few up if demanded, but the British population was the healthiest it had ever been in history.
Of course the down side was that so many male adults died in the six years of fighting, and so many civilians died in the Blitz, but poor health from not consuming food supplements was definitely not a problem.
“Even though dietary surveys suggest that many Americans do not get recommended amounts of magnesium, symptoms of magnesium deficiency are rarely seen in the US. However, there is concern that many people may not have enough body stores of magnesium because dietary intake may not be high enough. Having enough body stores of magnesium may be protective against disorders such as cardiovascular disease and immune dysfunction.” (bolding added)
Apart from rare symptomatic magnesium deficiency, assuring adequate body stores is chiefly of importance in certain medical settings (i.e. diseases causing malabsorption, those taking certain medications like diuretics etc.).
Going from this to “most Americans are nutrient deficient” and blaming it on processed foods is not warranted.
Questions that need to be asked are 1) do people actually consume less than the recommended daily allowance of a particular vitamin/mineral? 2) if so, does that translate into actual disease or proven increased risk of disease? and 3) will artificial supplementation improve health or pose an increased risk of disease itself?
By the way, in addition to the examples of vitamins D and E cited earlier, there are other dietary elements whose benefits have been overhyped on the basis of insufficient evidence, among them both fiber and omega-3 fatty acids.
Sometimes we in developed nations are overeager (or helped by overeager marketers) to jump on a bandwagon that says we are undernourished and our poor bodies cannot possibly function properly without one or more magical supplements. And the emphasis on fast food/processed foods being evil (apart from the fact that we consume too many calories) is reminiscent of the hype that attends various products intended to “cleanse” us of “toxins”. People just know that our unhealthy modern lifestyles predispose us to “toxin” buildup, and our livers, kidneys and lungs cannot possibly detoxify us unless we use “cleansing” products. Except that’s another example of accepted wisdom that lacks an evidentiary basis.