Nutrition: lower calories, fewer nutrients...

Factual Questions
1

Starting from the following “givens”:

Humans living more “primitive” lives that required lots of physical activity of all kinds, also required many more calories. Generally.

Modern humans live far less active lives, even when they are what is considered “active” in modern society, than humans of many generations ago, and therefore require far fewer calories to maintain health and energy needs.

Of course there’s variation, etc. But the above is fundamentally true.

The calorie variance can be enormous, too - look at what Micheal Phelps can consume, indeed - MUST consume when he’s working out constantly. Consider the meals consumed by Amish farm families, who have very little in the way of modern conveniences to ease their labor and so are far more physically active than most other people. They can scarf 4,000, 5,000, 6,000 calories a day without skipping a beat or gaining an ounce.

SO…

Has anyone ever researched whether a the reduced calories that we generally need can, in fact, provide all the necessary vitamins, minerals and other micronutrients the body requires without any kind of supplements?

I ask because I often hear and read that a healthy, well-balanced diet would, should provide all the micronutrients necessary, but that just doesn’t seem possible if all you need to eat in order to maintain a healthy weight is 1800 calories. It seems like you’d have to really work hard at really building your meals for absolute maximum impact in order to get the full allowance of everything the body needs without ever having to supplement.

2

In general, the need for micronutrients does not increase with activity. Just the need for calories and to some extent, protein.

You do need to be aware of what foods provide what nutrients so as to maximize your “bang for the buck” but it can be done.

3

No I didn’t think the micronutrient need increased, my thinking was more that the micronutrient need was already high and remains so, in spite of the lowered calorie needs.

In our natural, unmodernized state, homo sapiens is built to likely require 2 or 3 or 4 times as many calories daily as we now require…therefore we would, in our natural, active, unmodern state, take in enough calories to take in the right amount of micronutrients along with the calories.
In other words, we were built to use and need more food than we need now. Doesn’t that imply that we were built to need and use the greater amount of vitamins and minerals and other stuff that we would naturally consume in a higher calorie diet, and that now that we don’t need the calories, we STILL need the micronutrients that we would get in higher calorie diets?

4000 calories = Xmicrograms of X nutrients, just what we need.

2000 calories = Ymicrograms of X nutrients, half of what we need.
Right? Not?

4

Possibly not.

The RDA for Vit. C is 60 mg, less than the content of one orange.

Three ozs. of beef provides 40% of the RDA of Vit. B12

5

Remember, though, that we are the ultimate omnivores: for tens of thousands of years, humans have thrived on diets of mostly whale blubber, on vegetarian diets, on epic feast/famine cycles, on nearly 100% grain . . . our bodies clearly have a wide range of tolerances for various micronutrients. The vast majority of the chemicals we need, we can synthesize, and the few things we can’t, we use very, very efficiently.

6

Speaking of which… why don’t the Inuit suffer from scurvy? Is there vit C in some meats?? Did they develop the ability to survive without it?

And when Europe was primitive and not much trade was happening, where did the British, for instance, get their vitamin C? No tomatoes, no citrus… I can’t think of what else has fairly high amounts that would be readily available to most people to eat.

7

Never mind, I should known Unca CeCe had been asked this ages ago… (the inuit question)

8

Leafy greens have a fair amount and some animal sources like liver and oysters.

9

I’m not a nutritionist, but learning about and preparing nutritious food is a hobby for me, so I’ll offer a couple of observations on why that proposition seems inaccurate to me:

  1. First, you don’t have to eat exactly the RDA of everything every day. Some vitamins, like C, are water-soluble and you do need to eat them all the time. But others, like Vitamin A, are stored in your body. If you eat a lot of leafy green vegetables, carrots, and sweet potatoes, then don’t eat any vitamin A foods for a while, you’ll be okay. A healthy intake of nutrients can be planned over a longer period than just 24 hours.

  2. Second, the more nutritious a food is, the lower in calories it often is. Fish, lean meat, leafy green vegetables, carrots, tomatoes, strawberries, kiwis … these are all highly nutritious foods, but low in calories. Most extra calories in people’s diets come from sugar, white flour, and fat … all of those can be cut back, losing calories but not nutrients.

Also (and I’m not so sure about this) isn’t the RDA labeling you see on wrappers based on a 2,000 calorie-a-day diet? I think the implication is that the nutrient amounts have been set for a person who needs that many calories to maintain a healthy weight. If you only need 1500 calories to maintain your healthy weight, you’ll also need fewer grams of protein, etc.

10

I find this an interesting conversation, but I have to wonder why you’re opposed to supplementing. With a more modern lifestyle comes easily obtainable vitamin supplements. Take a couple of pills a day then eat as many calories as you need, and you should be fine.

Similarly, it stands to reason that if a cataclysmic event occurred and supplements were no longer available, our activity levels would increase and our caloric intake would increase accordingly. Yes/no?

11

They are called “micronutrients” for a reason. You don’t really need a ton of them. Vitamins are not particularly scarse and a reasonably varied diet is going to generally have more than enough. Problems only really appear when a diet basically has become lopsided to the point that it contains basically none of a particular vitamin.

It’s like perfume. Does a 300 lb person need twice as much perfume as a 100lb person to smell good?

Anyway, I think the “our caveman ancestors did nothing but run at a full spring all day” view is something diet authors made up to sell diet books to men. In reality, they probably spent plenty of time poking leisurely poking around for nuts and berries and shivering under covers in their caves. While certainly they were more active than your average American office worker, it’s not like animals spend all day at 100%. Look at your average house cat and then tell me animals are naturally perfectly in shape.

12

I’m not, that’s an assumption you’ve made. I’m simply interested in the facts.

13

Fair enough. I am having trouble seeing the relevance of the question, I suppose.

14

I am a curious person. I like to understand things. Lots and lots of things.

I worked in a restaurant at one time and a month or two after I started my immediate supervisor told me that the big boss was convinced I was a spy for a rival restaurant because I was asking so many questions about the business.

It’s just my nature.

15

It is an interesting question. What other relevance does it need here?

16

I’ve always been the type who needs to feel that something has a point in order to be considered worthy of discussion or further knowledge. I really don’t see the point in wondering IF we can constrain our diets to meet these needs GIVEN that we don’t want to use supplements. Why not? They’re cheap and available. And if they become not cheap and available (like in the zombie apocalypse), then we’ll just go back to eating more calories (and therefore nutrients) anyway.

It’s, to me, in the same category as wondering IF we could fly a fish tank to the moon GIVEN this bizarre set of constricting circumstances in which it was necessary. When that condition doesn’t exist, won’t ever exist, and we should just take a space shuttle.

I do think the discussion has been interesting but I just don’t see the point of exploring a hypothetical that tells us nothing real =/ Sure, you can probably mold a lower-calorie diet into something that is exactly nutritionally perfect without using supplements. But why would anyone ever want or need to? It’d cost more money to get perfectly nutrient-enriched food and more time to calculate it than it’s worth. Just pop a Centrum multivitamin.

Sorry to drag the thread off-topic.

17

You answered your own question. Knowledge for its own sake is interesting, and interesting is the point.
:slight_smile:

18

I’m obsessed with my nutrition and track it often. I generally eat a relatively high-calorie diet, for someone of my size; however I am fairly to very active, and I have a fast metabolism anyway. And most of the extra calories come from lots of added fats - even though they are essential, they don’t have a ton of micronutrients compared to meat and veg.

No, it is not hard to eat a very nutritious diet even if you want to eat low-calorie. I find quite easy to exceed my DV of most micronutrients every day from animal products, vegetables, and a couple servings of fruit and nuts.

Typical day of food for me, run through my CRON-o-Meter* software:

around 24 oz coffee, with lots of heavy cream

2 cups spinach sauteed in butter
3 eggs scrambled with butter
1 cup yogurt

1/4 cup sprouted pumpkin seeds

1/2 lb beef
about a cup of mashed sweet potato with butter
1 cup broccoli

1 cup raspberries with heavy cream poured over top

Energy | 2566.2 kcal (and 1228 of those were from added cream and butter - so you could get very similar nutrition in 1300 cals)
Protein | 97.4 g
Carbs | 87.1 g
Fiber | 20.2 g
Fat | 209.8 g

Vitamins (95%)

Vitamin A | 50841.5 IU 1695%
Folate | 361.6 µg 90%
B1 (Thiamine) | 0.9 mg 77%
B2 (Riboflavin) | 2.9 mg 226%
B3 (Niacin) | 19.5 mg 122%
B5 (Pantothenic Acid)| 10.5 mg 209%
B6 (Pyridoxine) | 2.1 mg 164%
B12 (Cyanocobalamin) | 7.8 µg 326%
Vitamin C | 172.7 mg 192%
Vitamin D | 177.8 IU 89%
Vitamin E | 11.7 mg 78%
Vitamin K | 422.0 µg 352%

Minerals (96%)

Calcium | 816.1 mg 82%
Copper | 1.3 mg 149%
Iron | 14.9 mg 186%
Magnesium | 475.2 mg 113%
Manganese | 4.3 mg 188%
Phosphorus | 1737.1 mg 248%
Potassium | 3913.7 mg 83%
Selenium | 93.1 µg 169%
Sodium | 1557.9 mg 104%
Zinc | 18.6 mg 169%

Lipids

Saturated | 110.2 g 551%
Omega-3 | 2.3 g 141%
Omega-6 | 14.2 g 84%
Cholesterol | 1251.3 mg 417%

*CRON are the wacky people that think restricting your calories to starvation levels will make you live longer. Since they are all pretty much anorexic, they have to maximize their intake of nutritious foods - this software is designed to track every minute detail.

19

And I don’t supplement much of anything (I use D3 drops in the winter). I haven’t seen very convincing evidence that vitamin supplements are effective. And it’s scary how little regulation and quality control there is in the supplement industry.

20

There are plenty of people who eat low-calorie diets, 1800 and even fewer per day. Are they lacking micronutrients? How do you tell when you’re not getting enough micronutrients? What do they do? If you have plenty of energy for what you want to do and you’re not sick, I would think your diet, whatever it is, is just fine.