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Comment by farresito | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

What comprises a "normal healthy diet?"

Soylent released Powder 1.7 a month ago. http://blog.soylent.com/post/154513593367/powder-17-now-ship...

1 for 3 ain't bad.

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

"Don't eat too much" is a tautology, and "mostly plants" has been debunked.

Can you provide sources?

[citation needed]

Pithy quotes require charitable readers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity

But you're right to be skeptical in general. Nutrition research is in such scientific wilderness that it's hard to consider any guidance at all reputable in any way.

So it's tough to filter through a wide variety of literature to find the reputable material. I try to focus on meta-analyses that cover a lot of ground by authors I consider reputable (and aren't selling a diet themselves).

There's a meta-analysis from 2014, examining a wide variety of studies of diets (ranging from fad to institutionally recommended). It concluded:

"A diet of minimally processed foods close to nature, predominantly plants, is decisively associated with health promotion and disease prevention."

http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev-publhe...

Original study:

http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev-publhe...

I take your logical point about how "don't overeat" begs the question, but this is where Davidson's charity is helpful. The best way to read "not too much"--if you follow Davidson's advice and assume Pollan is rational--would be to read it as a shorthand for something like the following recommendation:

Calibrate how much you eat to avoid obesity, because obesity is correlated with significantly lower health outcomes over the long term.

Caveat, some people should shoot for a BMI < 35, some should shoot for a BMI < 27.5, so precise general advice is probably impossible.

Tautology or not, it's actually pretty easy not to eat too much, considering that our bodies are pretty good at telling us when we've had enough.

All you have to do is eat a moderate amount, wait twenty or thirty minutes (for your stomach to start digestion, send signals to your brain, etc), see if you are still hungry, and eat a bit more if you are. If you reach the point where you feel 'full' you've probably overeaten. Not complicated, although many people, myself included, don't always take the time to listen to their bodies or have the self control to stop eating when they are chowing down on something delicious, even though know they've probably had enough.

variety is probably the most important criteria...

Not really when you look at the Maasai or the Inuit...

A normal healthy diet contains all the macronutrients(Protein, Carbohydrates & Fat), Vitamins(A, B, C, D, E, K) and Minerals(Calcium, Copper, Iron, Zinc etc) in the right amount. The right amount depends on your weight, height, age etc. You can use tools like Cron-O-Meter to track your meals and figure out what you are getting enough of and what not. You also need plenty of water along with balanced diet.

It's insane that we can't even be sure. Across my RSS feed, in back to back entries:

- Intermittent fasting a great boost to fat burning and weight maintenance

- Skipping breakfast makes you gain weight

Now, I know the gist of why intermittent fasting can work. And if you read into the skipping breakfast article with a lot of background info they don't provide you can pretty much tell their measure group was people who skipped breakfast and probably had a shitty habits around diet and excercise as well.

But if I'm just casually trying to figure out what normal and healthy are, here are two articles that present research that come to conclusions that (on the surface) are completely opposed, but neither is technically wrong.

Fat was the cause of all problems. Sugar is the new tobacco. Tobacco was recommended by doctors for energy. Sitting is the new smoking. Standing will kill you. Red meat will give you a heart attack. Omega 3 is essential for a million things. Fish oil pills are, well, snake oil. MCT is the new fish oil. Coconut and palm harvesting contribute to global warming. Brown rice is healthier than white. White rice has a lower glycemic index.

What the heck are we supposed to do?

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.

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.

How often are you supposed to take that vitamin?

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/GuidanceDocuments...

[2] http://www.nationalacademies.org/hmd/~/media/Files/Activity%...

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.

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.

My bottle of Bayer mens one a day says 2mg 100%

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.

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".

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.

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.

I would say it's not necessarily the processing, but genral lack of diversity of ingredients in mainstream food outlets and home diets. The mainstream notion of "meat and three veg" as a comprehensive meal means many don't do anything but that. Three meals a day as well, is antiquated advice. I imagine most people simply don't eat enough variety of good foods.

A fast food burger is not unhealthy just because it has bad ingredients in it, but because it lacks so much else.

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)

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.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK222312/#ddd00333

http://www.who.int/water_sanitation_health/dwq/chemicals/cop...

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

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

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?

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.

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).

And what actually are the symptoms?

In my case: pretty bad brain fog (especially when trying to bring the copper down), bad mood, sleep and digestive issues, no energy whatsoever, and depression. It depends on whether you are actively trying to bring it down or not (you could call it detox, but this word has gotten a bad press, so I would rather not use it).

Those are the signs of deficiency, not overdose. What made you think you suffered from copper overload?

I do suffer from overload and have been tested. It's common to suffer the same symptoms as someone who has a deficiency when trying to bring those levels down.

That's nonsense. Please get tested by a real doctor.

Nonsense. It only happens after prolonged massive intakes (A man who intentionally took 60mg/day for a year and 30mg for several years before that is one of the few examples found in literature.) and the signs are liver and kidney failure. It's completely unrealistic you could get that much from anything resembling normal food, vegan or otherwise.

It's perfectly realistic and more common than you think. There's plenty of evidence around which you can find with a simple google search.

http://www.westonaprice.org/modern-diseases/copper-zinc-imba...

As far as my knowledge goes, that seems to be completely made up.

My copper went through the roof, and the worst of all is that you barely notice it going up. It slowly builds and you think that you are doing fine, although I had started noticing that I had trouble focusing and had bad temper, which I had never had before (and a million other symptoms). I'm quite confident the source is this diet. Copper overload is actually more common than it seems, but a lot of people that suffer it never get diagnosed, because it doesn't appear in the blood and more often than not people blame their job or the stress for those symptoms. I'm not blaming the diet, because I made that choice and I didn't read enough about the possible downsides, but I think people should be careful when switching to certain diets (keto, vegan, etc.). You get overloaded (pun intended) by information about meat, cancer, GMO, and all that crap going around that tries to convince you that what you are doing is wrong. I should have been more careful, but I learned my lesson.

For a list of symptoms associated with too much copper, just look up Wilson's Disease. These people have dysfunctional copper excretion mechanisms and need to take drugs that chelate the copper so the body can excrete it.[1]

Looks like it's mainly liver toxicity and neurological symptoms.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilson's_disease

There must be something other than the vegetarian diet you've mentioned because that's essentially one entire side of family, and quite a few of them are hale and healthy in their 70s/80s.

Yeah I'm not sure that all those vegans are aware that they should take zinc supplements.

I ate a vegan diet for many years. Zinc was one of the things I was very conscious of (I tracked my diet fairly carefully). One of the things I noticed was that if I ate a traditional (i.e. from a culture that ate that way historically) vegan diet, that getting the nutrients I needed was not nearly as difficult. I think a lot of people simply cut out animal products from a traditional meat based diet and end up with problems. Potato chips are usually vegan, but a diet consisting of only potato chips is not healthy ;-)

My own personal take on this kind of thing is that there traditional diets where people have eaten a certain way for hundreds of years. While we may not have good studies on these diets, there is a kind of evolutionary effect. As people get a lot more choice in how they eat, we're running into problems where people think they can design a healthy diet. Sometimes they get it quite wrong.

I've also spent a good part of my free time over the last 20 years reading papers on nutrition. Another big thing that I notice is that a huge proportion of these papers are terrible - poor sampling techniques, inadequate reporting of conditions, insanely small trial sizes (sometime less than 10 people!!!), statistics that are plain wrong, etc. People with particular agendas often push their point of view, backing up impressive arguments with mountains of really poor research. It is hard/impossible for the average person to adequately judge the validity of the arguments and they end up making poor dietary choices as a result. Even with the amount of time I spend, I have no idea if my current biases are reasonable or not.

Diet is hard :-( Usually I suggest that people pick a traditional diet that appeals to them, study it carefully and try to adopt it. Then they should track their health carefully and make sure to get frequent health checks.

The same thing can happen with copper IUDs.

What comprises "normal diet"?

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