So basically once your body has all the nutrients it needs to grow or make the things it needs to make, it makes them. Even more extra stuff it doesn’t need, it doesn’t use. Makes sense.
This also appears to apply to the immune system. There’s zero evidence that supplements that are supposed to “boost your immune system” do any such thing. Yes your immune system functions best if you have good nutrition, but that’s it. Even better nutrition just isn’t a thing.
Side rant, sorry, but I had this conversation with a relative during covid, she was touting supplements to ‘boost her immune system’. There’s one way we have found that really does actually boost your immune system, that works with your natural defences by training them specifically to fight a particular disease. Vaccination.
I guess the argument would be that you don't know for sure whether your diet does provide all the nutrients your body needs, so supplements could be used to fill in any gaps. The assumption being that your body will just dispose of any excess safely.
That's the sales pitch for multivitamins and the like; they talk you into a problem but they provide the solution.
Certain vitamins your body will dispose of safely (like vitamin C), but there's others that just build up until they kill you; there's the case of Xavier Mertz [0] who was theorized to have died from an excess of vitamin A after eating his sled dogs' livers.
But the basic rule is: just eat normally / "a balanced diet"; you likely don't need supplements unless you have absorption issues or stick to a specific diet (e.g. vegetarianism / veganism, soylent / diet shakes, or the same thing every day, like the 14 year old who only ate chips and ended up (partially) blind due to a vitamin deficiency [1])
The question is one of optimization. There are arguably optimal doses of particular nutrients (i.e. Vitamin D) that would be extremely hard to achieve through "a balanced diet". Also most people do not and many can not eat a "balanced diet", as that requires a ton of effort to maintain.
To put it another way, if the benefits of exercise were available in pill form on grocery store shelves, everyone would be taking that pill. Saying "you could save some money by just exercising normally!" is making a lot of assumptions about what people are willing and able to do, and frankly you'd be a fool to waste time exercising if the benefits were achievable through a magic pill.
Supplements aren't quite that magical, but they make optimal, hard-to-achieve doses achievable, even on a bad diet. Granted they can also be misused, or doses can be so low/ingredients not bio-available such that they have no impact. They're a tool like anything else, and can be used correctly or incorrectly. Part of what bugs me about the meta-analysis saying "supplements don't reduce all-cause mortality!" is that they lump wildly different supplements with different make-ups, taken in different doses on different schedules from different starting diets with different amounts of discipline/regularity. Of course at a population level the number of people using them wrong probably outnumber the people who do their research and maintain a disciplined approach. Your average person has issues getting their car's oil changed and understanding the difference between synthetic and conventional oil. A skilled individual could properly apply and see benefits from supplements, just as a skilled individual could successfully change their own oil.
No, I'd say there's high consensus it's one that satisfies all of your vitamin and mineral RDA's. Also very high consensus it at least includes vegetable staples like broccoli, cucumbers, onions, tomatoes, and green salads with some way of obtaining proteins like meats or beans.
Even that balanced diet will consist of less and less minerals and vitamins as time goes on and growers optimize for vegetable, fruit VOLUME instead of vitamin/mineral contents.
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The level of decline varied depending on the specific nutrients and the type of fruit or vegetable, but it generally ranged from 6 percent for protein to 38 percent for riboflavin. In particular, calcium dropped most dramatically in broccoli, kale, and mustard greens, while the iron content took a substantial hit in chard, cucumbers, and turnip greens. Asparagus, collard greens, mustard greens, and turnip greens lost considerable amounts of vitamin C.
Further studies since then have backed up the case that nutrient levels are dissipating. Research in the January 2022 issue of the journal Foods found that while most vegetables grown in Australia had relatively similar iron content between 1980 and 2010, there were noteworthy drops in certain veggies. Declines in iron content, ranging from 30 to 50 percent, occurred for sweet corn, red-skinned potatoes, cauliflower, green beans, green peas, and chickpeas. By contrast, Hass avocados, mushrooms, and silverbeet (another name for chard) actually gained in iron.
Grains have also experienced declines, experts say. A study in a 2020 issue of Scientific Reports found that protein content in wheat decreased by 23 percent from 1955 to 2016, and there were notable reductions in manganese, iron, zinc, and magnesium, as well.
Food storage and preservation also has a lot to do with it as well. Oxidation makes a lot of nutrients mostly unavailable, and degradation can happen quickly. Minerals in vegetables aren’t chelated, so while they sit in refrigerated storage, they are still rapidly losing nutrition.
If you spend enough time looking into what micronutrients you need, you eventually figure out that it is actually pretty hard to get them all through diet. But there is essentially no end to the scientifically backed list of beneficial supplements you might choose to take, so if you want to start, there’s not really a rational place to stop, and it can spiral out of control quite quickly. I think the better approach is just to eat a varied diet.
The assumption being that your body will just dispose of any excess safely.
Well worded. From my personal experience, this assumption is dangerous.
About 20 years ago I was having elevated AST/ALT liver enzymes three tests in a row indicating liver damage. Doctor ordered every test to see what was going on but everything came up negative. She asked me if I took a multivitamin which I did. She told me to stop.
There is also the triage theory of aging where the idea is that when micronutrient levels are low (not low enough to cause acute symptoms but below the recommended daily allowance), they are triaged and used where needed (such as ATP production) at the expense of being used normally. The theory is that this can cause long-term problems such as neural decay, cancer, and other signs of aging.
I wish him being alive at 94 was proof of something but afaik my smoking grandmother with no exercise doing nothing particularly healthy lived that long...
However, she also wasn't doing novel research at age 86. Wow.
That’s a perfectly fair point, I took Vitamin D during lockdown because I wasn’t getting enough sunlight. I’m just saying that it makes sense that beyond satisfying your body’s needs there’s no higher plane of health that supplements will take you to.
It may also be worth noting that people with excess body fat will absorb fat soluble vitamins into the excess fat and it will not be available for the thousands of functions in the body that need them until the person is fat adapted. Ideally the high priority goal should be to remove the excess fat but until they do they will need more than the RDI of each component. How much more gets complicated as there are not yet any good tests for testing how much was absorbed into the fat.
You would have to take a lot of vitamin D supplements to cause clinical symptoms. Some people have done it, but as a practical matter the risk of hypervitaminosis D from regular multivitamin pills is virtually zero.
Whether those pills actually have any health benefit is a separate issue.
Or, in my case, I am 100% certain that my diet is missing many nutrients as I rarely eat fruits or vegetables. I take various supplements and so far things seems to be okay (based on yearly physical and blood work).
I think the "boost your immune system" things are just common deficiencies in modern people.
If most people don't get enough vitamin C or D in regular life, then the advice to boost their immune system with a sufficient does to be non-deficient would function to boost their immune system to a normally healthy level.
I recently got a broad panel of tests done, and found out I was Vitamin D deficient. This was a big surprise to me because I live in the high desert of central oregon, which gets lots of sun even in the winter. I am very active and outside everyday. It is cold however, so my arms are always covered. We are 45 degrees north of the equator.
I was at 20 ng/mL which is considered deficient. 3 weeks of 5,000 IU a day supplementation (162lbs, fit, active male) brought me up to 31 ng/mL, which is just barely up from deficient. I upped to 10,000 IU a day for 1 week, dropped back to 5,000 IU a day, and will test again in two weeks. Everyone is different, but hopefully this gives some helpful numbers for anyone considering supplementing, and whether or not the paltry 1,000 IU commonly advised is adequate for people living at a higher latitude in the winter.
White bread and processed grain products in the UK always have things like iron, calcium, vitamins, riboflavin added. I think it's to replace the loss of the nutrient-rich germ from milling.
Never known what riboflavin is, still don't today, but I saw it on the side of a cereal box every day as a child and the word is etched in my mind
Riboflavin is one of the vitamin B complex. I remember it because deficiencies are extremely rare, and there appears to be no practical upper limit on how much you can take, it is virtually impossible to overdose on. I mean, obviously, there is some limit, but it's sky high.
Which makes the supplementation of it a particular joke, in my opinion.
That it was discovered as a "vitamin" at all is probably more to do with it being easy to spot (very brightly colored) and easy to chemically handle and a few other accidents of history more than anything else: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riboflavin#History (I am editorializing that a bit and I freely admit that.) It certainly doesn't stick out like, say, iron, which has recognizable deficiency symptoms and plenty of people in the real world with them.
I don’t think that’s what a lot of people think boosting means. Certainly the family member I’m talking about, and the circle of people she associates with and sends breathlessly excited emails about, think these supplements will protect them from pretty much everything. That they don’t just have healthy immune systems, but boosted ones that literally will protect them from coronavirus, flu, even cancer. That’s why I don’t like that term, it’s become a cult byword.
FWIW, your gut already synthesizes K2 from K1. K1 is easy to get from green leafy vegetables from spinach to broccoli, though I suppose easy to avoid if you don't eat well.
K2 from dietary doses of meat (MK-4) doesn't change circulating levels of MK-4 — it's basically not bioavailable. Though K2 from fermented products like cheeses and natto (MK-7) is bioavailable.
Doesn't seem like something worth worrying about if you have a varied diet that includes green veggies.
Unfortunately Dr Berg seems not to consider the concept of biological half-time. I am sure he know the concept, just forgot to put it into his calculation formula.
He basically assumes that if his patient consumes 2000 IU vitamin D today, then tomorrow his patient has depleted all 2000 IU and has zero vitamin D in patient's blood.
Yes. Had tons of random problems. Ended up being autoimmune Sjogrens and a clotting disorder.
Diet changes and supplements are how I got thing under control for most issues.
Blood thinners for Clotting since That’s way to dangerous, and no combination of anything else helped.
LDN covers symptoms when I’m not strict about diet.
Interesting. I had similar symptoms like migraine/brain fog, stiff neck and muscle tension as soon as October (winter in Central Europe) came. Tested for Vitamin D deficiency and had super low levels. Since taking supplements I feel good in winter for the first time in probably 5 years. I'm also a very outdoorsy person, so getting enough sun is not always a sure way wo have high levels of Vitamin D.
"Sun" is definitely not sufficient. Vitamin D synthesis requires UVB exposure [1] and that plummets to effectively zero in the higher latitudes in the winter: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5037520/#sec3-n... By "higher latitudes" I mean considered on a global scale; continental Europe is effectively all at these "higher latitudes".
I’ve often said that when discussing vitamins, in particular, the general public thinks of them incorrectly like stackable video game power ups. In reality, they are more analogous to essential pieces of the game’s code.
You don’t get super powers by taking a whole bunch, and things start malfunctioning if you lack them.
Well, that and high quality, sufficient sleep. That is way harder as you age, and a worthwhile aim of lifestyle modification or supplementation to support it.
There's not, though. There's a ton of evidence that vitamin d _correlates_ with COVID outcomes, but this is vitamin d's superpower: it correlates with good outcomes for just about everything, but nearly every time there's a good high quality study, it turns out to not be causative. A bunch of those vitamin d and COVID studies were fraudulent.
Vitamin d levels are an excellent marker of good health and they can help predict outcomes but supplementing vitamin d doesn't improve those outcomes. Regretfully. (Except rickets, of course.)
Yes. There's a ton. Most of it is horribly tainted by correlation effects. Let's consider one of the studies you cited above, which is an observational study from the VA hospitals:
"In the population of US veterans, we show that Vitamin D2 and D3 fills were associated with reductions in COVID-19 infection of 28% and 20%, respectively"
This sounds really awesome, right? Except -- you could also interpret this as "People who are following their doctor's recommendations, going to the pharmacy to fill their prescriptions, and taking them, do better". No kidding - they're probably also taking their other medications and being more generally medically careful!
This is completely consistent with the 99% of vitamin d-related results that show that it correlates with all sorts of positive outcomes.
The high quality interventional studies -- which are actually potentially able to demonstrate causality -- are generally negative. And the larger and better they are, the more likely they are to be negative. One of the largest was the CORONAVIT trial; it was, unfortunately, open-label, but it was large and randomized. (Note that you'd expect the open-label aspect to result in a stronger placebo effect, which .. well, given that they found no benefits, did not occur). https://www.bmj.com/content/378/bmj-2022-071230
The vitamin d & covid horse is pretty dead at this point, which is basically the same as the "vitamin d & x" horse for most values of X other than diseases known to be directly caused by vitamin D deficiency. Which are serious and worthy of treatment. Just don't expect vitamin D to be a miracle cure on the basis of its correlation with everything positive.
There are multiple clinical studies showing that vitamin D supplements can be effective in fighting COVID-19. Some other studies have shown no effect, but overall there seems to be some benefit.
This is why omega-3s are effective. Your body depends on them to function optimally, and they are found in only a very few food sources, pretty much only fish. The omega-3s found in nuts and plants can convert to the most critical fatty acids, but about ten times less efficiently.
>> So basically once your body has all the nutrients it needs to grow or make the things it needs to make, it makes them. Even more extra stuff it doesn’t need, it doesn’t use. Makes sense.
I find it really common when researching the benefits of X to run across articles citing research that "X does nothing in healthy people" seemingly to discredit the idea that taking X is a good idea. But if you have a deficiency that research isn't really relevant. Gotta read the qualifiers.
Lot of issues can be autoimmune related. Goal is to calm down the immune system. Not boost it. This is where basics like getting away from sugar are so important.
Your sort of correct. Lots of drugs like plaquninal are immune modifiers not suppressant.
However shoving large amounts of sugar and basically everything in the American diet is a great way to get the immune system to decide that everything in body is the enemy.
Sugar is pro-inflammatory, and so is omega-6 fatty acids, the consumption of both of which has increased massively within the last 60-70 years. Omega-6 fats have gone from less than 5% of human diet to up to 30% today, thanks to the commercial success of 'vegetable' oils. These two alone probably represent the most conspicuous diet changes that have happened in our societies in recent history and should be obvious suspects when looking at disease factors, imho.
The biggest change in the human diet is the explosion of cheap calories on the food market, especially hyper palatable ones.
If canola oil or even just linoleic acid were so bad for us, we could cause worse health outcomes by intervening them into diets, but that’s not what happens in RCTs.
This also appears to apply to the immune system. There’s zero evidence that supplements that are supposed to “boost your immune system” do any such thing. Yes your immune system functions best if you have good nutrition, but that’s it. Even better nutrition just isn’t a thing.
Side rant, sorry, but I had this conversation with a relative during covid, she was touting supplements to ‘boost her immune system’. There’s one way we have found that really does actually boost your immune system, that works with your natural defences by training them specifically to fight a particular disease. Vaccination.