Under this lockdown for a year, I've been eating a really un-diverse diet, cooking for myself every day basically, not much variation after I figured out the pattern of groceries, meals, things I generally feel like eating and taking the time to prepare.
Sometimes I wonder if I'm being gradually deprived of some nutrient I don't know about when I at least had 1 meal that came from outside and varied somewhat day to day...
Combine it with much higher activity and they would look like superman with regard to fitness to average human these days. At least those who survived those harsh conditions, infancy and various easy-to-cure-now ails like tooth infection or appendicitis.
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.
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.
Hadza ate only 4 non-animal foods, which is much less than what's available at a supermarket.
Hunter gatherers would've had a more diverse diet when it came to meats, eating the entire animal including most organs, but that's more cultural than what's specifically available at the supermarket (it's pretty easy to get organ meat at the supermarket and especially the butcher, but most people don't opt-in).
Other parts of the animal, like the liver, would provide sources for A and B12, etc.
> Because of its content in highly valuable
> nutrients such as iron, zinc, selenium, fatty
> acids, and vitamins, meat is a unique and
> necessary food for the human diet in order
> to secure a long and healthy life, without
> nutritional deficiencies.[2]
[2]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03091...
Humans were obviously hunters for most of our evolutionary history, deriving most of our calories from animal fat.
The increased animal suffering alone is a good reason to not try such a diet, nevermind the small support in the scientific community.
The clinic publishes research, that it's not mainstream doesn't in any way invalidate their results.
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."
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.
But please don't take nutrition advice from an internet message board about software and startups.
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.
And if in doubt, have a side of steamed broccoli.
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/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypervitaminosis
[2] https://examine.com/supplements/l-carnitine/#effect-matrix
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.
(I haven't done it myself yet, so I'm not sure what metrics they can give you)
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.
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. :-)
TBF... that sounds pretty diverse.
for example, I read there is more than one form of vitamin E and just supplementing one might not work as expected.
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).
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.
There’s no government oversight of vitamins and supplements, but at least USP might give the veneer of some verification.
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.
On the other hand the $5 a jar multivits cover all your actual supplement needs.
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.
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.
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.