Challenges in the diagnosis of magnesium status
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
The easiest of those references to link to is https://journals.ashs.org/hortsci/view/journals/hortsci/44/1... :
"Three kinds of evidence point toward declines of some nutrients in fruits and vegetables available in the United States and the United Kingdom: 1) early studies of fertilization found inverse relationships between crop yield and mineral concentrations—the widely cited “dilution effect”; 2) three recent studies of historical food composition data found apparent median declines of 5% to 40% or more in some minerals in groups of vegetables and perhaps fruits; one study also evaluated vitamins and protein with similar results; and 3) recent side-by-side plantings of low- and high-yield cultivars of broccoli and grains found consistently negative correlations between yield and concentrations of minerals and protein, a newly recognized genetic dilution effect. "
This seems really, really hard to regulate.
It's simpler to add iodine to salt -- and maybe magnesium to the soil
I call it The Precog. It'll be a hit in SV.
My personal opinion is that the human body may be too complex to say we fully understand a seemingly straightforward solution like just taking a multivitamin. We evolved over an awfully long time before industrialized agriculture and supplements. I’m not trying to demonize them because they have solved the number 1 concern humans had for the last 10,000 years of not getting enough calories, but I think it’s wise to temper the hubris of thinking we understand the human body well enough to expect a simple fix from a pill.
Biodynamic farmed food seems like the best bet if you have access to it. At least you're avoiding the worst of the mega-farming shortcuts.
Distrust is like an immune system - it has costs and can occasionally hurt you but it developed and is ubiquitous for a reason.
And, to be clear— I don't want to be dismissive of the importance of govt regulation! It's just that working out the marketing opportunities can happen much faster than effective regulation.
He argues that the increased CO2 in the atmosphere is making the plants grow faster. This is making the plants produce more carbs wet to other nutrients, making the plant less nutritious compared to the past
It can be solved by using less efficient / more complex farming practices which aren't amenable to mass production of monocultures. But that makes a lot less money, so it will never happen.
A different solution would be to pass legislation specifically to protect the nutritional value of our food. But that would just prompt the ag sector to pump the soil full of so much crap to meet the law's requirements that it'll speed up the collapse of ecological systems (in addition to possibly poisoning us).
“Makes less money” is certainly one point of view. Another is “makes the food too expensive to afford for many, and shifts more land usage to farming, to make up for the reduced productivity per acre”. It is not even clear that it would reduce the profits of food producers: it depends on the shapes on supply curves. If every food producer is forced to produce food using expensive methods, and people are forced to buy food anyway (as they ultimately must eat), it is very well possible that the profits could actually increase: if demand for food is inelastic, people will just pay higher prices to get the same amount of food, which would only increase the total profits of agricultural industry.
Wheat, corn, and soybeans are heavily subsidized by the US gov't and vegetables are not at all. Every little tiny program to subsidize vegetable growers is picked at every year (happening right now in my state legislature) -- it's always a fight to preserve.
The agricultural lending system in the US is fascinating. Look up Farm Credit Administration. We have a weird and unique system of paragovernmental financial institutions in the US that do farm lending, and even though it's not technically government-backed lending, everyone sees it as such, and so there are some interesting distortions in the market (compared to a more "free-market" system). It does seem quite centered around US gov't subsidies and farm/ag policies.
A single bell pepper today costs something between $1 and $2 where I am. Imagine the government subsidizes bell peppers so that they cost $.50. As a single bell pepper has less than 50 calories, you couldn't base your diet on it, you would still need some more calorie-rich food to actually give you required energy. Since vegetables (except root vegetables) are not calorie-dense, you'd need to eat seeds (e.g. grains) or oils anyway.
That's why, if your goal is to enable the nation to feed itself, you should rather subsidize the staples, not luxury consumption.
Feeding the nation isn't hard. We could feed this nation five times over with the amount of food we produce. The problem is, we'd probably shrivel up and die, because wheat, corn and soy aren't enough to keep a population healthy. We could actually produce more nutrition and calories with a fraction of the land just by switching from corn to oats. But then you'd be producing less, and hence selling less. That's not as profitable!
And vegetables are luxuries in the same sense that "nutrition" is a luxury. Just because humanity has historically had a shit diet (since the adoption of agriculture) doesn't mean it's a great idea to stop eating vegetables, or produce less of them. We get plenty of calories already - too many in fact. And most of the ones we do get are more harmful than good.
It would be better to get people to eat more of those low-calorie vegetables as it would help stem the American obesity crisis. And as we've seen in this report, vegetables already contain fewer nutrients than they did before - a reason to consume more of them, not less!
[0] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07ZD7R4RF/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_glt_...
Just like if you take some extra Zinc (30mg-50mg picolinate) for a variety of reasons - you have to take a bit of copper with it, or eventually your copper supplies will be drained and start causing issues.
Unfortunately, I know how people actually operate. It's quite depressing.
Malate and citrate are pretty absorbable too, but I (am not who you were responding to but) use Magnesium bis-glycinate (TRAACS) form. It works well enough.
Keep in mind I am not a doctor or biologist, but many common forms of magnesium, commonly in multivitamins, are absorbed (slowly) via metal channels which require calcium to be taken as well or else the absorption slows and stops. As a result, it will pass through your GI instead of being absorbed into your body.
The L-Threonate compound was developed at MIT specifically for better brain absorption. Source: https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/96066/Slutsky...
I've always been a slow morning person, so 30-60 minutes to start feeling normal is on par for me, so it doesn't really affect my timetable, but you may have a different schedule in mind.
My morning bowel movements when I take magnesium l-threonate are amazing, however, which used to slow me down even more on a typical morning.
The stack: https://www.facebook.com/StrengthSenseiInc/videos/anxiety-so... (sorry for FB link)
Background on Poliquin: https://tim.blog/2015/07/21/charles-poliquin/
Good Support groups are far better for your health. Although it often boils down to cut carbs.
I've noted overall anxiety got noteacible better when I added DHEA, I'd guess due to changes in the cortisol to DHEA ratio.
"Vitamin and Mineral Supplement Fact Sheets" [https://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/list-VitaminsMinerals/]
For example, the Mg page lists RDA's by sex and age: [https://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/Magnesium-Consumer/]
It recommends 400-420mg/d for adult males, 310-320 for women (matches the # on my MVM container)
(I found this quickly by starting at the MedlinePlus front page, recommended to me by an Info specialist at a major medical center. Well laid-out readable access to a lot of vetted info from the U.S. National Library of Medicine.)
Theanine is great with caffeine also. I just spoon it in 200-400mg into my coffee.
Around this time I had a few migraines and was recommend to take magnesium. Not sure if that's what caused the sleep starts but I also noticed my leg started to occasionally twitch inwards when I'm sitting. The sleep starts have kept me up for hours at night. Going to try and add more calcium in my diet to see if that helps the problem.
I've had anxiety problems most of my life, and when a death in the family shook everything it got really, really bad.
I tried everything I could think of except prescription meds (maybe should have, but I didn't like the side effects or addictive potential) and one day while lurking I read a random comment on HN about magnesium.
I decided, Why not, its cheap, and it has had a truly profound effect on my life, among the generally healthy choices I started to make. It took a little time, but it worked a LOT and the muscle spasms and cramps subsided too!
I can't believe sometimes how different my life has become.
Side effect is the high sugar intake, which concerns me somewhat. I can't stand most artificial sweeteners, so drinking light products is no alternative.
It didn't really seem to follow any logic, except I noticed alcohol made them worse. Alcohol also caused an increase in anxiety in the following days. I also experienced symptoms of depression. It was a very dark time.
There was definitely more going on than just magnesium but it wasn't until I tried the magnesium that I had any breakthrough.
Good luck. Another poster in these comments mentioned that you can get non-prescription testing for magnesium and other markers from Walk-In Labs ( https://www.walkinlab.com/ ) if you want to go that route. I also know there are doctors out there that will work with this kind of medicine, but I don't know too much about that. Magnesium is pretty safe, but I understand there is some possibility for problems with taking too much.
I genuinely wish you the greatest success, I'm confident that with careful, thoughtful effort along with your loving support, your spouse can start to feel better.
Maybe consider meditation too? Box breathing[0][1] is an often recommended technique for this sort of thing.
Dr. Andrew Huberman[3] recommends a breathing technique, I cant remember what he calls it, but is easily performed to counteract sympathetic nervous stress: Breath in sharply through the nose, quickly to about half capacity Once, brief pause, followed by a second sharp inhalation through the nose to mostly full capacity, brief pause, and then release the total breath through the mouth. He suggests doing this 2 or 3 times to engage the parasympathetic nervous response.
[0] - https://quietkit.com/box-breathing/
[1] - https://www.webmd.com/balance/what-is-box-breathing
[2] - Huberman Labs podcast available on RSS feeds - "Overcoming Anxiety" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z25f6qy361Y
You need enough calcium to achieve a strong reliable contraction, and enough magnesium to keep the channels "closed" when they should be closed (among very many other physiological uses).
In short, you need a balance of calcium and magnesium for reliable muscle function. A gross excess or lack of either is bad.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2005/may/15/foodand...
Also anecdotally, I haven't found any other fruit or vegetable that exhibits such a drastic contrast. Maybe persimmons, but I haven't had that many supermarket persimmons. For most fruits and veggies, I've found the supermarket ones tend to taste roughly the same as garden grown ones. Indeed, sometimes I prefer the supermarket version, e.g. for apples.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1658077X2...
Those varieties have mostly out competed everything else in farmers markets and supermarkets but if you buy seeds online from specialized stores and grow them yourself, you can unlock an entire universe of flavor. Personally, I've never found a supermarket fruit or vegetable that tastes as good as the ones I have grown or eaten in countries with less industrialized farming, with the exception of designer varieties like cotton candy grapes, cosmic crisp apples, or sumo mandarins (though their quality is rapidly falling as they go from coddled breeding labs to industrial scale). I don't think I've had a "proper" strawberry, blueberry, or raspberry since I moved to the United States.
[1] https://science.sciencemag.org/content/336/6089/1711.full
I suspect this will be more of a trend across the US. Every time I visit back home in KS I see more people at the farmer's market there, more stuff in the supermarkets that's trying to regain some farm to table authenticity.
If I had to quantify it, I'd wager that fruits and vegetables from farmers markets are from 10% to 20% better than what you'd find in a supermarket. Co-ops can be as much as 10-50% better but growing it yourself with proper varieties is easily 200-300% better, especially here in California. Tomatoes with so much flavor that you can taste them through a tablespoon of ranch dressing (not that you'd ever need anything more than a splash of olive oil and a dash of salt with home grown vegetables).
(So are they afraid that if they start selling truly delicious tomatoes in summer, they will no longer be able to sell mediocre tomatoes in winter?)
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/why-do-uk-tomatoes-taste-bad
The tasty plants still exist, you just have to find the right sorts. They won't be found in your local grocery though.
It is probably breeding practices here, to promote attributes other than taste.
That's a factor, but also stronger flavor isn't considered a positive thing in chicken in the US.
I raise my own sheep for food, heavily under-stocked so they can pick and choose what they want to eat (makes the meat taste much better than when they are forced to eat bitter stuff they don't want). I don't eat lamb, I let them mature to 2-3 years old first to develop a stronger taste which I prefer, but not so old that they get tough. Beef tastes bland to me now (unless it is charred and/or served with horseradish).
Soil tests show my soil is high in magnesium, low in phosphorus/sulfur, and normal for calcium/potassium, pH is low and I probably need to apply ag lime (nothing has been applied for at least 9 years).
This makes sense when you consider most green vegetables like broccoli are 90% water. A meat like chicken, after cooking is only about 60% water.
So if you eat 400g of broccoli vs 400g of chicken, the one that will make you feel more full is obviously the protein.
What’s more likely, is due to marketing we’ve associated anything that is green in color with being “real, nutritious food” and have convinced ourselves that is what makes us feel full.
It’s like people who claim they “feel better” after eating a salad. The average iceberg lettuce has near zero nutritional value and is 96%+ water.
The only way you’d feel better after eating one is if you were dehydrated.
-- *edit - people seem to be misunderstanding. I'm not saying fast food is healthy. I'm simply refuting the idea that green vegetables are the key to feeling full. If you wanted to feel satiated, green vegetables would be one of the most inefficient ways to do so--due to their 90%+ water content.
You’ll likely feel normal on the chicken day. On the broccoli day you’ll feel like you’re fasting (because on a calorie basis, you literally will be unless you eat 5-7X as much broccoli as you do chicken).
The conversation started about nutrient depleted junk food vs whole foods.
And now you’re comparing two different types of whole foods.
Fiber can certainly help with feeling full as it takes longer to digest, however fiber alone cannot satiate.
Meanwhile, a diet completely devoid of fiber can still make you feel full.
Proteins and fat you mean?
Also, incidentally, water do quench hunger as well. My trick to eat less when i was overweight was to drink a lot during meals.
If I eat at breakfast in the morning 140 g turkey breast + 70 g cashew nuts + 3 sweet potatoes + 1 bell pepper, then I feel perfectly satiated and I feel no hunger until late in the evening, when I have next meal. Deleting either the turkey breast or the cashew nuts from that breakfast menu, makes me hungry much earlier.
On the other hand, if I eat just bread, I have to eat a very large quantity, e.g. 1 kilogram, until I feel satiated due to the full stomach, and then after a few hours I feel hungry again.
There are many kinds of food, like bread, vanilla or cocoa cream and many others, which I like very much, but which do not satiate me unless eaten in huge quantities, so I have given up on eating those kinds of food, because it is much easier to not eat them at all than to stop after eating just a small quantity.
Plain, boiled potatoes cause the most satiety.
Oranges and oatmeal are also good.
Also I think you're being extremely reductionist here. I'm not claiming that I never felt the sensation of fullness in my stomach. Of course I did. Maybe I should rephrase, that I constantly felt like I was craving food even though my stomach was full.
Moreover, to suggest that our brains somehow only understand macronutrients when it comes to regulating our sense of hunger, is ridiculous. You really think that people feeling better after eating broccoli is because they have been brainwashed by the marketing of the vegetable-industrial complex? is it really that outlandish to hypothesize that eating nutritious food makes you feel better?
Of course it would be fallacious to generalize my experience to other people, if only because I myself hardly understand what was going on. But it would be equally fallacious, not to mention arrogant, to dismiss that such an effect might exist, on the grounds that we did some controlled studies and found that hungry people feel more satisfied after eating something substatial.
I can eat one pound of icecream in one go before I feel that I'm done, or 1/3 of that, tell myself I can eat the rest in 15 minutes IF I still feel the need to at that future time, and I usually don't -- sort of like the reverse of telling myself I'll only work 5 minutes on that boring task I don't want to, but usually I work through it all.
My unscientific point being, there's no way the brain can tell I've eaten 1/3 meat and 2/3 salad vs 3/3 meat in the span of 15 minutes; sure, it will digest the salad much faster, but by that time I'm already doing other things that don't involve me stuffing my face with food; I've found that with food, if you can resist the urge to eat more for 15 minutes, and don't have snacks just laying around you, you actually solved 90% of your overeating problem. SO in my experience, eating broccoli/salad, or just drinking water, absolutely do work to make you full/less hungry, for a short while at least, but that short duration should not be underestimated, because a lot of times is all that is required for one to stick to a caloric limit.
Again, I think this is trusting too much in "today's science". Who's to say that your body/brain can't detect whether a food is nutritious? For all we know, some trace nutrients are subconsciously detectable in taste and smell, even if heuristically.
I'm not saying that is what happens, but I don't think we know nearly enough to dismiss such a possibility.
Look in to, at the very least, how chromium and molybdenum help regular homeostasis via insulin sensitivity and macronutrient metabolism.
What’s more likely, is fast food doesn’t make you feel full because its low in protein (the most expensive ingredient typically, so fast food skimps on it) and high in simple carbs.
That's super misleading. The nutrition facts for broccoli here [1] gives 89% water but actually over 1/3rd of broccoli by mass is carbs, fats, proteins or fibers. And comparing raw broccoli to cooked chicken is deceptive - cooking broccoli obviously gets rid of a lot of it's water depending on how you cook. Moreover, comparing gram-to-gram, I'm sure broccoli is less filling, but a lot of people care more about calorie-to-calorie.
[1] https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/foods/broccoli#nutrient...
Boiling or steaming broccoli does basically nothing to its water content. Baking it may reduce by 10%. So still 20% more water than the protein.
Anyways, the water point was brought up to give something intuitive to grasp on to.
As said, the main reason eating one chicken breast makes you feel more full than multiple servings of broccoli, is the 55g of protein.
So adding broccoli to your fast food won't suddenly make you feel full. Dumping the fast food altogether and eating a chicken breast instead might.
But the point is, it doesn't matter how much water there is. No one is wondering whether they'll feel more full on 100g of chicken or 100g of broccoli. Anyone trying to control weight would ask about 100 calories of broccoli versus 100g of chicken. I don't know what the answer there is, but they're probably comparable. A head of broccoli is just 205 calories but still contains 17g protein and 16g of fiber. Equivalent calorie chicken breast would be like 40g protein and no fiber. Both are healthy food choices unless you deep fry them or something. You're making lots of fast-and-loose comparisons here that are simply misleading. (Why is the comparison broccoli + fast food versus just chicken? Why do you suddenly switch to talking about iceberg lettuce? Why pretend that broccoli isn't a healthy food that is substantially more satiating than fast food - as is chicken?)
The idea under discussion is that the thing that will make you feel more full is the food that has what you're deficient in. That makes sense, and evolution tends to do things that make sense.
Anecdotally, If I have a deficiency I'll keep snacking/eating until I've found something that satisfies the deficiency or I'm completely full. Eating to fullness 3x per day or more is a great way to gain a ton of weight.
Does sound like interesting hypothesis though.
You don't have to wonder. Read the inside story of that epidemic in this beautifully researched history by Michael Moss:
Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giats Hooked Us by Michael Moss
From what is starting to be known about hunger drives from animal studies [1] this is essentially correct.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221457451...
This type of food is - coincidentally - always extremely high in calories.
But the relationship is orthogonal. You can make processed non-nutritious food that is low in calories, and you can make healthy food that is high in calories. The former happens rarely.
6 raw eggs lemon juice (1 lemon, squeezed) 378 calories in total, of which 227 are fat and 144 protein. just enough sugar to help you digest it without bloat. awesome anabolic effects from the eggs.
lunch: 6 raw eggs 200ml whole unhomogenised milk (raw if possible) similar effect but even more anabolic
dinner: 200-300g of fresh steak (beef) cooked blue. can be replaced with lamb or other nutritious meats, but certainly not chicken breast which has nearly no nutritional value whatsoever compared to something like sardines
I wish there was a salmonella vaccine for humans and be done with it, because raw-ish eggs can be quite delicious.
salmonella is a problem of industrial farming
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1467-3010...
1) Doesn’t say it has no effect, it has “clinically insignificant especially when compared to saturated fat”. Not the same as no effect.
2) “ However, in the minds of the public, cholesterol in the diet, specifically from eggs, continues to be viewed with suspicion and that view is still reflected in the advice of some professionals.”
Professionals are still telling people to reduce cholesterol intake when your blood results show high cholesterol. How many people do you think spend every waking hour scouring for new health articles?
This is also just one study, maybe let’s not invalidate the many years of people reducing cholesterol intake to reduce cholesterol so quickly?
Most foods found in nature will fill you up long before you can eat enough to gain hundreds of pounds.
If you don’t get enough chromium and molybdenum your body can’t properly regular blood glucose control via insulin sensitivity, protein, carbohydrate, and lipid metabolism.
Another part of the story is that modern food is designed to be super-tasty: http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html
I wonder how long that lasted
I started taking high levels of magnesium. My joints and muscles improved drastically. Migraines cut in half.
I became able to exercise a lot more. I’m still fairly fat because I eat to much. Plus side effects of other medications.
But I’m a lot stronger now since I can work out so much more.
Best trick of all. Stop eating sugar / carbs.
Looking at those foods and daily intake, I'm wondering how many people are not hitting their daily intake.
One thing I've noticed is that vegetables are rather tasteless in the US. Vegetables in Asia are packed with flavor, and maybe they are also packed with nutrients as well?
Thinking about it, I suppose the vegetables may get that way from growing in poor soil, and Subway et al just buy those ones because they're cheaper
This is also why canned tomatoes are generally considered superior for making tomato soups and sauces. Tomatoes harvested with the intention to be conserved are picked much riper since they can be processed and packaged almost immediately after.
Two quotes from an internet page:
"The yolks in my certified organic birds vary in colour. Because the public expect deep yellow/orange yolks in free range eggs I supplement mine with organic vege scraps. You don't need very much to make a difference. Just toss them the odd pumpkin."
"The intensity of yolk colour may be measured against standards such as the DSM Yolk Colour Fan. Most egg marketing authorities require deep-yellow to orange-yellow yolk colours in the range 9 to 12 on the DSM Yolk Colour Fan. Yolks of more intense colour may be required for specific markets. The most important sources of carotenoids in poultry feed are maize (corn), maize gluten, alfalfa (lucerne) and grass meals; these sources contain the pigmenting carotenoids lutein and zeaxanthin, which, together with other oxygen-containing carotenoids, are known by the collective name of xanthophylls."
And an article: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3457452/amp/How-sec...
Home grown tomatoes on the other hand are way better tasting.
I don't know about nutrition value.
Also for mushrooms dried is really good, but obviously the texture is a little bit different when you eat it.
In this case, sour cherries. Sour cherries are great because almost no worms (only in the variety I have that has the highest sugar content and not many either). The bird netting really helps. Last year no crop, today about 7 pints of jam and I can probably get the same again in a few weeks when the rest ripe s. This is from 3 trees that are about 4 years old now. They're the University of Saskatchewan types (Romeo, Juliet, Crimson passion etc.).
I would say at least 90% of the crop looks saleable. Of course they're sour cherries and they're much smaller than the sweet cherries everyone knows and buys at the store. Other than the bird netting these are completely hands off. No chemicals, completely organic. All they get is compost from all the leaves (the city trucks will not get mine ever!) and guinea pig poop (basically nicely processed grass/hay).
[1] https://stanfordmag.org/contents/the-trouble-with-tomatoes
Farmer market vegetables are optimized for flavor, because this is what differentiates them from the supermarket vegetables.
This makes the contrast all the more stunning.
This always explains why store bought tomatoes taste tasteless, while home green ones have actual flavor.
With the exception of selling to industrial food makers, it seems perhaps that marketing—or lack thereof—is the major problem, here.
Most of the nutrients in the fruit come from the plant, not the ground. Since we are breeding for a higher ratio of fruit to plant size (dwarf plants, supersized fruits, sometimes both), there is less to put into the fruit.
Also fungi provide most of the nutrients to plants, and tilling slowly destroys the soil life, leaving mineral soils, in which some nutrients may not be bioavailable.
Anyway, from the paper here:
>> with estimates that vegetables have dropped magnesium levels by 80–90% in the U.S. (Figure 2) and the UK [11,12,13,32,33]
Reference 11 doesn’t support this claim.
Ref 12 doesn’t directly mention Mg but does say some nutrients have dropped between 5-40% which is NOT 80-90%
Ref 13 does mention mg specifically on page 3 but states under 20%.
…
I think i’m being fleeced by this paper.
but it does not say how or where this information is taken from.
The TLDR is not every food needs to be lab tested as long as they can take their ingredients and compare them against national databases (e.g. NCCDB) to estimate nutritional info. And yes, some of the data in those databases is old and perhaps overly general - it's totally reasonable to suspect that vegetables grown in one area, as part of a specific breeding line, in a certain manner, have totally different nutritional info compared to the same generic vegetable grown elsewhere in a different manner.
However keep in mind a lot of food does not list all micronutrients as part of their labelling. This actually kinda drives me nuts and I have no idea why e.g. frozen vegetables don't list things like Vitamin K, magnesium, and zinc when they're often actually good sources of many nutrients.
>One comment suggested vitamin D fortification should be viewed as hormone replacement therapy
Found that particularly humorous
From that angle, I can understand how they arrive to that conclusion, while perhaps still disagreeing. The interplay within the human body is almost mind-blowingly complex to me
Now that we've left the Bay Area, I find that I'm even more disappointed by grocery store vegetables than I used to be. The vegetables are dry, wilted, flavorless — repugnant even. No wonder children don't want to eat them. Seriously considering setting up a miniature green house and growing my own stuff at this point.
Hopefully your local ecosystem supports some native farming that you can make use of.
Personally, i feel like something is "unbalanced" or missing in me as i get these flashes of "waking up" not to some euphoria or bliss but just clarity that feels "normal" that sometimes lasts for hours.
I'm pretty sure most people are deficient in various "hard to measure" nutrients - i myself for example have felt completely changed after megadosing B12, but as with most supplements the effects rarely lasts. The culprit i suspect is mostly soil depletion and diet that despite being more varied often is grown from "diluted" soil, and with most calories from incredibly refined and therefore nutrientlesss fats and carbohydrates.
Gut biome is probably another important mirror aspect in this system.
It was very revealing. Everything she gave us had distinct and powerful tastes that were blatantly lacking from their supermarket equivalents (including the ones that say Organic on the label). The garlic blew my mind: I used the usual number of cloves in a recipe and ... well ... we were reeking.
Used to be mostly winter crops that needed that proviso. To wit: one of the two garlics I grow has a 4 month longer shelf life than the other. The one has to be planted in the fall or you risk losing most of your seed cloves by late spring. The other, I just planted a second crop, from garlic harvested last fall. They were not in awesome shape, but about 80% went in the ground.
Some of the first massive deployments of hydrogen electrolyzers are fir making ammonia fertilizer, replacing natural gas with solar-driven processes.
Also, I don't think that Borlaug is super closely associated with the fertilizer, as much as with breeeding hardier strains or shorter stalks, to prevent loss of wheat crops or rice crops, for example. For that matter, manure could ne used as fertilizer for the Green Revolution, there's no dependency on the Haber process, that was an entirely different revolution both in time and geography.
So for a lot of the criticism of the Green Revolution, which comes from a place of wanting a different political structure, but not yet being sure what that structure is, nerds like me see the "alternative" as not a real one. Politics could have saved India, but it did not, it was basic biotech and giving Indian farmers more productivity. If this is a "monster" I'd really like to see a less monstrous alternative proposed, with all the details specified. Because any alternative path sounds too monstrous to be considered by a humane being.
Example of what I mean from Wikipedia: "Borlaug continually advocated increasing crop yields as a means to curb deforestation." This did not happen as the overproduction ended up as cattle feed and biofuel. And it isn't Borlaug's fault.
Quality > quantity.
Its also much easier to transition Western societies to renewable energy and EVs, which wipes out a lot of carbon emissions for example.
Additionally, much of Africa (20%) is reliant on food aid from the West, so its not fair to assign all of the resource use to the people who are feeding them.
Its going then to come as a shock to your world-view to learn that the UK, a nuclear power, with a permanent seat at the UN, and a card-carrying member of the West, had to receive food aid as recently as December 2020 from the UNICEF to feed their children [1].
So go turn your aircon off.
Your humorous implication that suicide would be effective has some merit, but only for individuals who have not reproduced already.
And "culling" (I assume you mean through violent means) isn't necessary. Simply reducing birth rates achieves the same solution.
At some point when she was six or maybe seven, I read a blurb somewhere about the importance of magnesium for smooth muscle operation. That day I added a teaspoon of epsom salt to some juice and gave it to her. The next day her constipation disappeared.
We all now take cheap 400 mg Mg supplement daily, and in the five years since she hasn't been constipated even once. Closest thing to a "miracle cure" I've ever encountered.
We're all vegetarians and do pretty well on fiber, but increasing my daughter's insoluble fiber intake when she was little was difficult, and resulted only in more bloating. But a little magnesium, whatever the mechanism, fixed her right up.
Thank you for not making your kids be vegan. It's extremely hard to get kids proper nutrients on a vegan diet.
Related: Milk has good magnesium content, more so if grass-fed. If you can get raw milk from a local small farm, it's worth it.
- No sugary drinks; absolutely no soda pop, ever, and very little fruit juice, which is really no better than pop.
- No sugary breakfasts. Breakfast cereal is fucking poison, especially the sweetened varieties.
- No kids-menu food. When we eat out, they've always ordered off the adult menu. No pizza, chicken nuggets, mac-n-cheese, french fries, PB&J, grilled cheese on white bread, etc.
Everywhere I look I see people who have let their kids turn into kids-menu kids-- kids who tolerate only pizza, deep fried food, breakfast cereal, etc. And everywhere I look now, I see fat kids and teens with the beginnings of diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease. Any pediatrician will gladly talk about the growing crisis of metabolic syndrome in kids.
My kids went vegetarian completely of their own accord, likely copying me, but they've stuck with it. The main thing is that they've always eaten what we eat. It took a little training, but their tastes developed rapidly (as all kids' do) and from a young age they could enjoy a full range of healthy adult food with few very few aversions.
For example, my youngest still doesn't love blue cheese, but she can tolerate it. My older teen eats blue cheese from a bowl like ice cream.
I have a friend who was raised on a kids-menu diet, and the poor guy still doesn't like burgers or steak. I'm working on introducing him to the good stuff, but the damage has been done.
been there, done that
The sugary soda pop rule is fucking law-- completely set in stone. Believe it or not, neither of my kids has ever consumed a significant amount of sugary soda pop in their entire lives. However, they're allowed to drink diet soda, and my younger kid does so fairly regularly. My older kid doesn't really like sweet drinks.
The sugary breakfast rule is never broken at home, but I've always allowed sugary breakfasts as a treat when on vacation or when the grandparents take us to breakfast, which happens once or twice a month. The only requirement on these mornings is that they eat their protein first-- usually eggs. This ordering is an important life skill.
The kid's menu is strictly forbidden, whether or not the grandparents are buying. This was a bit of a fight with my younger kid, but we figured out how to negotiate using desert. This made desert a treat that could be earned, which seems to have bred some discipline in her.
At home, I keep the kitchen stocked with sugar substitutes. For years we used Truvia-type erythritol/stevia sweetener, but we've recently started using erythritol and monk fruit (Lakanto brand), which is nearly indistinguishable from sugar in taste. I also keep a jar of the stuff mixed with cinnamon, which we cryptically call cinnamon-sugar.
We make a lot of sweet stuff at home using the sugar subs, and I encourage the kids to cook. Mostly what they make is toast with butter and cinnamon-sugar, but sometimes we get into some crepes, pies, brownies, etc.
We still eat quite a bit of starchy and fruity stuff. Lots of pasta in particular. But I really treat sugar as poison, especially "naked" sugars like sodas. There's research coming out continually about the the deadly effects of the high glycemic load and high glycemic "velocity" of the Standard American Diet.
I know there's debate about the health of sugar substitutes, but it's a tool that I've chosen to use to keep our diet less sugary to the extent possible, while hopefully minimizing the possibility of the rebellion you speak of.
We'll see if it works.
EDIT:
Fuck pizza. If I had my way we'd never eat pizza, but my wife allows it occasionally. I complain about it, and make a big show of refusing to eat it, and the wife and kids all side-eye me while they talk about how good it is. Fucking traitors.
But, to your point, maybe my wife is smarter than me.
This is why, when people defend GMOs with the argument that we've been genetically modifying plants and animals for hundreds of years by selective breeding, that I don't think that argument leads to the conclusions they're looking for which is that its all perfectly harmless.
There might be other arguments against GMOs, like the one you put forth, that require different responses.
So if we’ve messed things up with selective breeding we could be similarly messing things up with genetic modification.
I've long taken the stance that the bigger issues are agricultural monoculture and proprietary genetics. We should require all to have copyleft genomes and use our large agricultural subsidies to promote genetic diversity in our food supply.
So five servings every day of nuts and/or leafy greens would do it, but that doesn't sound like anybody's typical diet.
I don't know if such regenerative agriculture can scale up enough to feed everyone, but it can become a lot more affordable and accessible than it is now.
And yes, it is very expensive (more so in NZ than AU)
1 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periodic_limb_movement_disor...
PS full TMI story here: https://www.reddit.com/r/PelvicFloor/comments/kq089v/my_25_c...
I’m starting to feel like the USA is doomed in the long run because there’s too many corrupt influences in politics and science.
We’re constantly told x is good for us. Until we all find out it really wasn’t and now we're in trouble.
Scientific information about how magnesium works is hard to come by. Here's what I have been able to gather from various sources: The cells in your body need calcium to go into "on state". To go into "off state" magnesium has to go in and displace calcium.
When your body is low on magnesium your muscles can't go into "off state" and your muscles become stiff. To relax you need an Epsom salt bath (it contains magnesium) or just take magnesium supplements.
When your brain cells can't go to "off state" you can't sleep. You need magnesium to help your brain cells go into off state. However the "blood brain barrier" (look it up) prevents magnesium from easily entering the brain. Magnesium l-threonate (that's a compound of magnesium, not a brand name) can pass through this barrier and help you sleep.
I have had sleep issues for many years. I saw many doctors including sleep specialists but all they wanted to do is put me on prescription meds. But these meds are addictive and you have to take it for the rest of your life. I didn't want that. These are "quick fixes". As a software developer I was interested in finding the underlying problem and fix that, as opposed to the quick fixes that the medical community was offering me.
A breakthrough came when I saw a naturopathic doctor for my stiff muscles and she advised me to take Epsom salt baths. That seemed to help. I investigated more and found out that the ingredient in Epsom salt that helped me is magnesium. Then I found out that you can actually get magnesium pills and tried that. That worked remarkably well. But the big surprise was that I slept better the night I tried the magnesium pill. Since then I have been researching how it is that magnesium helped me sleep.
Stress depletes magnesium in your body. If you are a software developer you are stressing your brain all day when you do your job and you are depleting magnesium. Low magnesium levels causes muscle issues as well as sleep issues. Magnesium supplements solve the problem.
It is very unfortunate that medical doctors don't seem to be very knowledgeable about this topic. When I see doctors I mention that I am taking magnesium for muscle and sleep issues and they seem surprised, but no doctor has yet told me that I am wrong.
Note that magnesium is a natural mineral, not a drug, essential for your body, and found in many foods. Excess amounts of magnesium can cause a laxative effect, but this is very temporary.
I actually have magnesium in my supplement drawer : "Magnesium Carbonate from natural sources" - it says take 2 grams, max 4 grams and let it "sit in cold water for 10 minutes, or warmer water for 10 seconds" before drinking.
Is that the range you are taking and is the l-threonate form much better, ie. is carbonate useless?
Interested in trying this out later this night..
A few years ago I read about magnesium deficiency and migraines, figured it was worth a shot to try supplementing it, and now I rarely get those ocular migraines. The only time I get them now is when I run out of magnesium supplements, forget to buy more, and end up going a few weeks without them.
I really can’t say that it’s the magnesium, but as long as I’m not getting the ocular migraines anymore I’ll continue to supplement it. A bit of a warning though, it can act as a laxative for some people and cause digestive issues. Liquid based forms are gentler. Mineral water tends to have high magnesium content as well (e.g. Gerolsteiner brand).
Ever tried to have 100% daily recommended intake of every nutrient? I suspect almost nobody achieves that.
And yet, despite this, and magnesium issues among likely many other issues, our species has never lived longer, grown taller, survived infancy, etc. more than we have now.
That being said, as we understand and overcome specific issues, I imagine we can become even healthier.
If I had to guess, I would say that life expectancy in USA would start climbing again if all the obese people managed to shave, say, 5 points off their BMI. Morbid and supermorbid obesity is horribly widespread there.
Of course, it is more likely that the rest of the world catches up than that the US slims down.
Average height in Central America quite a bit lower than the US, which is where most migrants to the US come from.
First you need to learn how to get complete nutritional info. A lot of packaged food does not have a full nutritional profile on its packaging, and will omit many vitamins and minerals that could even be abundant in that particular food. To work around this you should use software like Cronometer [1] that allows you to look up nutritional info against various databases. In my experience the most comprehensive data source is the NCCDB, which has all important vitamins and minerals plus amino acid profiles. You can then estimate full nutritional info for most whole foods you buy in a store by converting the store-bought brand's nutritional info to the NCCDB info. For example if you buy oatmeal that says it has 150kcal per 0.5 cup, and the NCCDB info says 100kcal per X grams, you track your store-bought oatmeal as 1.5X grams per 0.5cup you eat. Note this only works for whole/single-ingredient foods, for processed foods with multiple ingredients the ratios of ingredients will vary too much from product to product for the NCCDB to be useful.
You should also get a food scale so that you can properly measure food that has its nutritional info based on mass rather than by volume. They're pretty cheap, and you can do before/after measurements to make it less tedious to measure small things.
Now that you can get full nutritional info for each whole food, the rest is an optimization problem across macros, micros, amino acids (important if you get a lot of protein from plant-bases sources), price/availability, and your personal preferences.
Here is an example of a set of foods I eat almost every day which gives you a very strong macro/micro base: 80g (1 cup) rolled oats, 1 cup unsweetened soy milk, 1 tbsp chia seeds, 1 container Oikos Triple Zero yogurt, 0.5 oz pumpkin seeds, 0.5 oz sunflower seeds, 2 mandarin oranges. Try entering that to Cronometer, you'll see it's about 800kcal and makes good progress in a lot of vitamins and minerals - relevant to the article, it already has 84% of the RDA of magnesium. You can easily max all other micros by eating a dinner consisting of fish, rice and beans, 1 carrot, and some broccoli - and still have room left over for additional macros (which will of course themselves contain extra micros) if you exercise.
Of course, this is much more cognitive work than the majority of people want to put in, and because it only works when you buy most of your food in the form of single-ingredients that you then prepare yourself, it's not compatible with a lifestyle of eating lots of prepared foods or dining out. However once you invest the up front time in learning how to do all this, it's not very hard to do, especially if you eat a consistent diet or combine things into set meals you can mix and match [2].
[0] The major exception is I usually don't hit 100% of the RDA for dietary Vitamin D. Dietary vitamin D in non-supplemental form (as found in milk and milk substitutes) is only present in very few foods - oily fish and sun-exposed mushrooms. I do eat these somewhat regularly but not enough to hit 100%. But I think as long as you get adequate sun exposure it's not a big deal.
[1] cronometer.com
[2] For example, in the example set of foods I provided, the rolled oats + soy milk + chia seeds are eaten together in the form of overnight oats almost every morning.
I take soylent (that is, a European fork of it) with some regularity. Mainly out of laziness, but also I hope that it's good for whatever I might have been deficient in when eating other foods. It doesn't reduce how healthy I try to eat, but with a picky partner and semi-picky self, it probably helps. It's also just convenient. Would recommend. The flavored versions, that is, not the cardboard variant.
In case anyone wants to get started and isn't sure what to try first, some of the variants I tried or know people that tried it:
- Jimmy Joy (previously: Joylent), their Plenny Shake powder: I like all flavors that I tried (that is chocolate, vanilla, strawberry, and banana).
- Nano: not a big fan of it, and neither is friend A that gave it to me iirc.
- Huel: friends B and C liked it a lot better than JJ, but the Huel Black (B,C didn't try that one) is absolutely disgusting to me as well as to friend D. I and friends A,D never tried the regular Huel.
Not sure how close each is to the original Soylent, but Joylent as a name probably says enough. If you read their blog, the updates to the powder seem to be about things like "uptake was found not to be great for X so we increased that" and some such. I also liked SoylentLife which iirc was closer to Soylent than Joylent was at the time, but they went out of business.
One interesting data point is that I am much less vitamin D deficient than my girlfriend who doesn't eat any soylent variants (she doesn't like any). We eat many meals together / the same stuff, and if anything she sees more sunlight than I do, so that might say something or nothing. There have also been a lot of people that do Jimmy Joy only (eating nothing else) for months and then have their blood checked and it comes back clean. From what I've been able to find, it's quite fine as a food replacement, but of course you don't have to (and I don't) use it that way. Other brands probably have similar tests done on them but I didn't look into those as I only ever ate them experimentally.
Do read the blogs from these companies. This is taken into account, and updated when new studies come out. From what I know, the reference intake was a starting point and they're definitely reading the research on real uptake from supplements. (Like, even you and I know about uptake issues, and it's these people's jobs to know about it. They're not stupid.)
Not sure if you saw, since I've been editing the post a bit, but also people that eat only this for months still have normal blood values, so either they're not measuring what they're deficient on or uptake is good. Last I checked was a while ago, probably they were on Jimmy Joy powder version 1 or maybe 2.
> not substantially better than just taking a multivitamin
I wasn't arguing that eating healthily can't be done via other ways. Waterluvian was asking about matching the reference intake, this would just be one way to do it. If you already do it with supplements or even just a lot of vegetables, power to you!
>Even you and I know about uptake issues, and it's these people's jobs to know about it. They're not stupid.
Sure, but their primary goal is to get people to buy their product, not necessarily to be as nutritious as possible. You could apply this same argument to the myriad vitamin and supplement companies which use the cheapest possible mineral salts even if the absorption is trash.
https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2017/09/13/food-nutrie...
This is just another sign that climate change is making this planet uninhabitable for us.
"Vitamin D is currently the only Essential Vitamin or Mineral which appears to have deficiency rates at a similar level to Magnesium"
https://examine.com/supplements/magnesium/research/#nutrient...
Dai (2018): Magnesium status and supplementation influence vitamin D status and metabolism: results from a randomized trial https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30541089/ "Our findings suggest that optimal magnesium status may be important for optimizing 25(OH)D status. "
So it might well be that general deficiency in Vitamin D is caused by the deficiency in magnesium status. This would also be an explanation why we see Vitamin D deficiency in sunny Africa: https://theconversation.com/think-vitamin-d-deficiency-is-no...
https://cosmosmagazine.com/biology/weeds-growing-in-poor-cit...
Seriously though a handful of Doritos has as much magnesium as a raw carrot. Vegetables just aren't a concentrated source of metals. Nuts are more reliable.
These are some of the same claims I hear from the marijuana enthusiasts on Reddit frequently.
I don’t have any points to make about the observation, just noticed it and felt compelled to share.
https://www.grassrootshealth.net/document/grassrootshealth-p...
One hypothesis I have is that my body is craving magnesium, which is one of the “minerals added for taste”.
Once I started supplementing magnesium by other means, I can go without Magnesia for weeks.
As I watch the edges of the woods get overtaken with garlic mustard and tearthumb, I'm thinking why not eat them? I realize this isn't going to work for those in a city but I do wonder about the nutrition of things growing wild on land that isn't typically farmed.
In present day Western society if you don't get everything you need, which will be from disease, alcoholism, age, lack of sun or specific diets like Vegan, food cannot accurately help.
"In addition, fluoride, found in 74% of the American population’s drinking water, with ~50% of drinking water having a concentration of 0.7 mg/L, prevents magnesium absorption through binding and production of insoluble complexes."
It seems reasonable to me that this is unlikely to be sustainable even if we found a way to send humans off planet. Maybe that missing magnesium gets pulled out of the soil into crops, then into our bellies, and then into a wooden box that sits as far away from our arable land as we can get it.
I of course have no scientific background or idea what I’m taking about, just a fun pop science theory that came to mind when reading this.
Most of it's plants, but plants very much need magnesium and other nutrients too.