It's not just iron that's lacking in our diets. Magnesium is an extremely important mineral that is lacking in nearly every modern diet across the globe. it's the procressing of food that removes three crucial minerals: magnesium, potassium and iron. Back when white bread/processing was first becoming mainstream, people got all kinds of diseases because the processing removed all the B-vitamins. they actually had to pass laws to force manufacturers to re-add all the B-vitamins back into the food, after the processing. this addressed many of the most common diseases but they did'nt re-add the Magnesium and Iron, hence why everyone is deficient in Magnesium and iron. There's a pretty decent amount of research showing the connection between magnesium and diseases not typically associated with diet (and hence why this has not been addressed).
Eating a whole foods diet (non processed) can definitely address it but that's a tall order for most people.
By trial and error, I am now taking this daily regimen of supplements.
- Magnesium (I have problem with leg cramps while sleeping, the magnesium stopped it).
- D3 (Doctor said I need it).
- B12 Complex (I feel more energetic).
- PreserVision for my eyes. (May be placebo but it seems to help?)
- I am searching for something to reduce the amount of mucus created by allergies. I tried turmeric and other things marketed as healthy inflammation response. But so far no luck.
I've had trouble with mucus and allergies as well as some other issues. I've systematically trying to cut out the vast majority of processed food in my diet as well as diversifying my diet.
It's actually quite a challenge and requires a lot of retraining even for someone well versed in nutrition. It's so easy to fall into the endless number of traps: dairy and fig newton bars, granola bars, etc. the food industry has created an endless array of seemingly healthy items but that are actually all come from the same three ingredients: processed wheat, sugar and oil. and we as consumers tend to vastly overestimate the amount of healthy ingredients in something because we aren't aware of the caloric densities of everything that goes into it (sugar is 4 cals per gram, oil is 9 cals per gram, veggies are 0.3 cals per gram -> this ends up being very misleading when you compare relative amounts by eyeball). For example: did you know that pumpkin pie is barely 3% pumpkin? i was surprised as well. i didn't realize this until I actually calculated the numbers, detailed here: https://kale.world/pumpkin-pie-is-only-3-percent-pumpkin/
Personally, my general rule of thumb is, if the food didn't come directly from nature: (like a tree or bush or ground), then it's most likely a food like substance that has been processed (and thus goodness removed from it). so, i make most of my diet come from the primary 6 food groups: fruits, vegetables, beans, whole grains, tubers, nuts/seeds. If you do this, you'll get all the magnesium and fiber you need because most of the real food groups are quite high in magnesium, fiber, protein and almost every micronutrient (on average).
I would recommend N-acetylcysteine (NAC) to reduce mucus and help with inflammation of the respiratory system among other things.
My mother had chronic bronchitis and asthma for years and was dependent on daily inhaled corticosteroids to be able to breathe normally, after having her on 800-1600mg of NAC for a year now she only has to use her inhaler once every few months.
I use it for my permanently clogged nose (allergies from spring to fall, a persistent low level cold in the winter). It’s so freeing to not be an eternal mouth breather.
But don’t be swayed by my n of 2 sales pitch, do your own research!
(The linked healthline article isn’t of the highest quality but at least it cites it’s sources)
In addition to the sibling comment, the number one suspect in all cases of excuses mucus production is dairy.
A simple trial-avoidance challenge regime of no dairy for two weeks followed by reintroducing dairy on day 15 should give you strong indicators if dairy is a problem for you.
Could be air born allergens too, so may not help at all.
Thanks. I had both a skin test and a blood test for allergens. They said my main problem is dust mites. I have the allergenic/dust mite proof covers for my pillows and mattresses which helped a lot. I am in the process of removing all carpeting etc.
Consider a dust mite hoover (Hoover Ultra Vortex is popular). Also good to have some turnover routine for your mattress as dust usually accumulates underneath in the bed frame.
Black Seed Oil at night also helped me as a mild natural antihistamine. I’m not sure whether it can / should be taken for extended time (my otolaryngologist saw no problem but I’m not sure).
Have you looked at your diet? I used to have a ton of mucus, and cutting out bad carbs from my diet (processed bread, waffles, store-bought muffins, etc.) pretty much eliminated the issue. Peppers / nightshades can be an issue for some people too.
The purpose of mucus is so that your body can temporarily lock up some kind of inflammatory agent that it is being exposed to and limit the damage.
Usually these types of things are solved by removal rather than addition (of something in your life).
This just keeps getting worse and worse, with no end in sight. I recently looked at the school lunch ingredient lists here in California. The hamburger buns contain both corn syrup and sucralose (splenda). I really wonder what the rationale is.
I guess they need to put the splenda in so that they screw up all the kids' metabolism + gut microbes, but they also need to make sure the food isn't accidentally diabetic safe?
Maybe I shouldn't be surprised. This is the same bureaucracy that defunded science and art education, and attempted to defund calculus (so that only rich districts with educational foundations would have those things). I kind of suspect it's some sort of intentional long-game eugenics program. I wonder if there is some way for rich Californian parents to band together to pay extra for non-malicious school lunches (as with science and art education).
(Or, better, force the state government to stop sucking so much!)
i think a big part of it is people simply don't value good food and don't see it as impacting health. Crazy as it sounds, i've had otherwise intelligent people tell me they don't think the food they eat has any impact on their health. That was a big eye opener for me, in terms of what other people think.
When cookies were removed from schools, some parents even protested (literally protested, as in with signs and petitioning outside of the school marching back and forth -> i saw it on the news) for the cookies to be put back in !!!! My jaw nearly dropped to the floor and rolled out the door. It's just clear, that there's a lot of really really misinformed people in the world.
Also, not all healthy food is expensive. Organic Beans are super low cost and make an excellent staple. Personally, I also love oat meal. both are super high in nutrients, fiber and protein and very low cost.
Most industrially baked breads contain sugar. Typically 2-5g per slice. I haven't really had industrial bread without sugar, but it doesn't surprise me that the sugar is required for taste. "Good" bread has long ferment periods that gives the bread a lot of time to develop flavor. It's probably much faster to cut the long ferment periods and use sugar for flavor instead.
It's a trade-off between food that's entirely healthy and food the majority of kids (who are not accustomed to a healthy diet) will actually eat. There's a huge amount of food waste in schools. If you don't have kids in US public schools, just know it's pretty common for kids to get a full school lunch just to eat the fries or drink the milk/juice, and discard the rest. Similarly for school breakfasts with things like frosted flakes. Absolutely not healthy, but if the alternative is not eating at all, it's understandable that administrators feel obligated to compromise.
Anyone who has kids and have insisted on a healthy diet knows this is false. Kids won’t eat for a while but then, like everyone else, they will eat most anything when hunger is strong enough.
I think magnesium supplementation is important also because of its connection to depression. Zink also a good idea, but iron ?
I think many men have too much of it because there is not enough bleeding (insect bites, etc...) in modern society.
Absolutely. But also, consider some natural sources as well. Cashews and Pumpkin seeds are pretty dense with magnesium, as well as nuts in general. I've calculated the relative mineral density of many many foods: https://kale.world/c
Cool site, the sliders are super intuitive for exploration.
I was pleasantly surprised to see Cauliflower rank high in Choline, it's more readily available from animal sources. Do the portion sizes differ for each item? Eggs have 7.6x times Choline from Cauliflower per 100g based on USDA data:
Well, once you really start learning about lots of healthy natural foods, you'll start to recognize these more. Waxgourd is a large melon that tastes great in smoothies with a bit of pepper and honey. Or you can turn it into a tasty soup, as done in chinese cuisine. Nopales are a bit more present in mexican cooking, you know those big spiky plate like plants. Many of the other plants on there sometimes grow freely in your backyard: like dandelion, dock, purslane. Some people use derogatory references such as "weeds" to refer to them but it's highly innaccurate. these plants are some of the most nutritious things you can eat, you just need to know how to cook them and how to adjust your taste buds to all the great foods humans used to eat on a regular basis. I've been on a journey to understand all the natural foods found in nature, and it's quite a learning process as we've been so conditioned (in the wrong direction) by industry on what food is.
There's over 80,000 edible plant species in the world. I only know a few of them. But, I hope to get to know more of them over time.
True but this is due to selection of faster growing varietals by farms. If you buy old-school vegetables you get old-school vitamins and minerals. Buy direct, buy fresh, buy local.
It's also, the actual air. There's more CO2 in the air these days. this super charges the growth of plants: vegetables and cereal crops. But, the amount of minerals in the plant remains the same but the plants grow larger with more sugar content. and so the amount nutrients per calories drops. this has been proven and documented.
That's only part of the issue. Soil composition is another part. Those "old-school" vegetables also need to be grown in old-school soil, using natural fertilizer (or at least fertilizers with additional minerals beyond the typical stuff).
Eat stuff that grows in winter? Hardy vegetables have their season now in many latitudes, it's not that tricky. If you live in the tundra I am sorry for you and please move to Costa Rica if your skin can tolerate it.
Are you serious? I live at 39.75 latitude in the USA with strong winters with snow and ice. There’s no way you’re growing vegetables in winter here without a greenhouse. You have no idea what you’re talking about. Do you live in California?
This is true of the Midwest, and anything in the Northeast north of say, Wilmington Delaware or even Baltimore depending on the year.
Only for the local part, not as it pertains to the vitamins. Notwithstanding, year-round most of the produce in large grocery stores isn't local and will never be.
"Up to" doesn't paint a realistic picture, but it's a moot point. Nutritional deficits in the West are a result of poor consumption choices, not the lack of nutrition in produce.
why is it that any time i read about a nutrient (iron, magnesium, etc) i check my multi-vitamin and find that it's not even there? if these are so important, why I am taking 12,000% of my daily vitamin B and C and 0% of some other ones?
It's estimated that 200,000 Americans a year suffer from an iron overload which can cause all sorts of problems including damaging your heart. So it's not considered to be a good thing for a "one a day" supplement to habitually contain iron.
Many Americans are deficient in potassium and you might think, "cap up some KCl and take one a day". KCl can slow down your heart rate and reduce your blood pressure which is good to some extent but if you could buy KCl supplement that gave 100% of your daily potassium need some people would be dropping dead from an overdose of potassium (a potassium is part of the usual lethal injection cocktail), not necessarily because 1 pill is dangerous but because some people are going to take 10. Also some people take pharmaceuticals that either raise or lower potassium levels so what is too small of a dose for some people would be dangerous for others.
The 12,000% of your daily dose for most things is a scam with the possible exception of vitamin B₁₂ for which many people have bio-availability problems.
Oral potassium is dramatically less toxic than IV potassium, because the body has to actively transport the ions and it's not terribly interested in killing itself. It could still be dangerous in very high doses, but that's unlikely to happen by accident.
However, oral potassium does have other effects. The proton pump in the stomach works by exchanging K+ for H+. Excess potassium may affect its functioning. There are several reports of nausea and pain with potassium supplements [1], although I've been adding KCl/NaCl "lite salt" to my work lunches for a long time with no problems.
The oral ld50 of potassium is measured in grams (Wikipedia is listing at 2.5g/kg). An overdose would be fairly intentional and there are more poisonous things you are likely consuming daily.
You would also burn a hole in your stomach if you took a 2-3g potassium pill(s).
For what it's worth: I've used "losalt" drinks for potassium-replenishment (especially during carbless diets), and it works well. Hard to overdose, because it will induce vomiting if you get reckless with the ratio of water to losalt.
The weird thing is that potassium salt is really cheap and available. I use it with some Mio to make water drinks that have an actual appreciable amount of potassium in them.
PaulHoule is correct; potassium and iron are dangerous in excess. Magnesium you can just take in a separate supplement since you really want more of it than easily fits in a multivitamin.
You can get sufficient potassium by eating 2-3 meals with plenty of vegetables or leafy greens every day, and you can get sufficient iron by eating animal meat (unless you have a diagnosed iron deficiency and need to supplement with it directly).
there's a big difference between minerals and vitamins. Potassium and magnesium are minerals and they are a bit harder to stuff into a pill. Also, vitamins (especially vitamin C) can be found in much higher abundance in a particular food.
It's standard for western countries to add iron and other nutrients to white flour. It's referred to as "enriched flour" in ingredient lists and it's in basically all processed foods that contain wheat.
That said, whole grain wheat is naturally high in iron, magnesium, folic acid, and other nutrients. If we would just use the whole grain (the bran, the germ, and the endosperm) rather than just the starchy endosperm, we would gain all of those nutrients without the need to enrich them.
I bake a lot of sourdough bread, always with some percent of 100% extraction (non-sifted) stone-ground whole wheat flour. We all should be eating far more whole grains.
Note: "whole wheat" products you see in the grocery store are often not produced by traditional 100% extraction whole grains. They often use roller mills to mill just the endosperm, and then add back in a certain portion of finely ground bran to give it color + flavor...but it's certainly not true whole grain.
The never-ending word games with food packaging/marketing is frustrating (infuriating?). Sometimes it's manufacturers complying with the letter of packaging regulations while (IMHO in bad faith) violating them in spirit, some is with the food industry corrupting the regulations themselves.
> stone-ground whole wheat flour
This is just one in a sea of examples. A small % of consumers get wise to the fact that hyperprocessed flour that's industrially ground into a fine powder isn't as healthy as stone ground. Food industry responds by labeling bread "stone ground" that has none of the properties that make that make stone-ground bread superior:
> In the USA flour only has to 'pass between stones' once during its manufacture to be regarded as stoneground, and it has been claimed that a significant proportion of flour sold as stoneground in the USA has not been processed in this way, being ordinary roller-ground wholemeal.
So not only is the food industry going to produce a bunch of poisonous/unhealthy crap for the sake of profits that's making our entire country sick, the small % of people who do some research and go out of their way to find needle-in-a-haystack healthier selections are going to be duped as well.
The solution I have found is to buy from smaller, local, often family-run mills that literally only have a traditional stone mill and don't even have roller mills. Buy from companies/people you trust.
This doesn't really scale though, at least not at the costs people expect to pay for flour, and I don't have a solution for that. I'm often paying $2-3/lb when purchased in bulk from my co-op, but in the end I consider it cheap for what I am getting and bread baking is a cheap hobby overall. Meanwhile, you can get white flour from a big national brand in grocery stores for far less than a dollar a pound.
I'm lucky enough to be able to work remotely most of the week, so that's given me a ton of flexibility. Bread baking, especially sourdough, takes a lot of passive time, not active time. It's very easy to prep and bake a loaf while working from home since 95% of the time you're just waiting for it to rise.
Before that, I usually baked on the weekends. There is a time (and kitchen space!) investment required for bread, but I enjoy it because it's one of the few ways I get to work with my hands and create something. Otherwise I spend all day working on the computer. Creating physically, even baked goods, is a form of meditation to me. So for that reason I do find it a worthwhile use of my time.
Like another poster has said, even when making bread in the traditional way, only a small part of the time is active and most of the time you can do in parallel other activities.
This year I have transitioned to a simplified way of making bread, by baking it into a microwave oven. This is fast enough to allow me to make at home a bread every morning when I wake up, for breakfast.
The active part, i.e. adding the ingredients, kneading the dough, transferring to the oven and washing the vessels at the end takes only around a quarter of an hour. The baking time is perfectly reproducible. It depends on the oven and on the quantity of dough. In my oven I bake a bread made of 500 g of wheat floor for 13 minutes @ 1000 W, in a glass vessel covered by a lid.
It is possible to use a leavening agent for a softer bread, but when baked in a microwave oven even the unleavened bread grows enough for my taste (especially if, instead of being put in the baking vessel as a flat disc, the dough is first rolled into a cylinder and then bent into a torus that fills the baking vessel).
The home-made bread, if it is pure, should be eaten immediately after cooling, because unlike the commercial bread with additives, it has a poor shelf life.
Obviously, the bread baked in a microwave oven lacks the crust, but this is healthier and I prefer it that way. Many microwave ovens include a heating lamp that could be used to make a crust, but I have not attempted to make such a bread.
It does take quite a bit of "wall time" to produce a loaf of bread, but very little of that is "active" work: 15-20 minutes mixing/kneading, 10 minutes shaping, plus baking. The rest is inactive time while you're waiting for the dough to rise.
If your schedule lines up, then it's not bad at all. For a while, I made a sourdough that perfectly lined up with my weekend routine. I'd mix it on Saturday night and put it in the cool part of the fridge. On Sunday morning, I pulled it out before leaving to play in a pick-up league in the park. A few hours later, I'd be tired and the dough would be risen. I'd shower, shape it, and run some errands during the second rise. When I got home, I'd pop it in the oven while I put away the groceries.
Timewise, this was perfect. The bigger downside was that my (small) kitchen was always a bit of a mess: flour gets everywhere and cleaning the bowls gunks up your sponge. Still, the bread was delicious!
If you have a stand-mixer with a dough hook, making bread is quite low effort. Even if you hand-knead, it's not terrible. It takes a long time for the bread to rise and bake, but you can do other stuff while that is going on.
If all you want is a loaf of bread the timing goes like this:
- Before going to bed mix to a rough dough 500 g flour, 400 g water, 8 g salt (50% KCl works fine), 2 g dried yeast. Takes les than five minutes.
- Leave it in a bowl covered overnight, takes the worker no time at all
- In the morning heat put a cast iron pot and lid in the oven and heat to 250°C, takes the worker one minute
- while the oven is heating take the dough and shape it into a reasonably smooth ball, takes about two minutes.
- Drop the ball into the pot, put on the lid, put it back in the oven. One minute
- After half an hour take off the lid. One minute
- After another fifteen minutes the bread is ready. Take it out of the oven and leave on a rack to cool for half an hour. One minute of work
About 11 minutes, certainly less than fifteen minutes of actual work.
If you get some kind of machine to knead the dough you can do it with an elapsed time of about three hours and about the same amount of work. If you devote another ten minutes you can make a batch of twenty good sized bread rolls.
I make bread rolls three or four times a week for a family of four. It's not a large fraction of my day and on Sunday when I am cooking dinner anyway it hardly adds any time at all.
I believe that whole wheat spoils much faster due to the addition of proteins, moisture and other things and is much less shelf stable than white flour.
> It's standard for western countries to add iron and other nutrients to white flour.
Not sure I would generalize that to western countries. In Germany for example the opposite is true; it's actually illegal to enrich staple foods like flour or milk etc.
maybe to keep nutrient content of natural products high?
If you start to fortify everthing, food producers will just put the cheapest stuff inside. Moreover they will not care if their processing method destroys micronutrients.
I think this type of intervention recognises that an element of pragmatism can have a significant impact on population scale healthcare for a very modest cost and with low risk. People who get to worry about how long their wheat has spent touching stone aren't generally the ones who the intervention is targeting. They're different issues at different scales.
For another example, see the impressive work of Iodine Global Network - https://ign.org
Probably the same idea as the one that is often claimed to be behind the Reinheitsgebot from 16th century Germany (Bavaria?) that regulated the making of beer, that is, to ensure purity.
I know some people who've gotten it. Last year I turned up with hemocrit just below the normal level on the scale and my doctor did some investigation and a bit of watchful waiting before I started supplementation (with the fear that supplementation could lead to too much iron.) My hemocrit is normal now but my ferritin is a little low. The Red Cross called the other day asking if I could donate and I told them I'd love to but I'm going to wait until my ferritin is up and do it when my doc says it is OK.
I have hereditary hemochromatosis, as a result my body doesn't correctly metabolize iron. The above is legitimately kind of terrifying for me. I have to manage my iron intake and iron levels, as well as routinely draw blood/give blood in order to prevent going into Iron Overload.
I got lucky and caught it early but Hemochromatosis is the most common genetic disorder among whites effecting roughly 1:300 people. Fortifying iron levels in food staples will likely cause severe damage to people who don't know they have the disorder.
Yeah, I just switched to a multivitamin with iron in it from one without because my iron has been dropping in my middle-years. I donate blood multiple times a year, or I probably wouldn't need it.
Besides Iron and Zinc - keep an eye on daily intake for Magnesium, Potassium and Calcium. I wasn't happy with the increasing number of supplements in my diet, so I set out to hit daily RDIs on macro and micro-nutrients without any supplements. See the evolution of my meal planner tech stack here: https://www.umangsh.com/blog/the-right-tool-for-the-job/
Most repeated food suggestions by the planner:
1. Almonds (Vitamin E), Chia, Pumpkin seeds are micro-nutrient dense.
2. Liver is nature's multivitamin, Chicken/Beef/Turkey liver all good choices (Vitamin A, Iron, Zinc).
3. Eat your greens - mix and match Arugula, Spinach, Kale, Collards, Chard, etc (Magnesium, Potassium).
It's extremely rare for healthy adults to have iron deficiencies in developed countries. Blood iron levels are linked to cancer, diabetes, heart disease and Alzheimer's.[1] Particularly among populations of European descent, where 5-10% of the population carries at least one allele for hemochromatosis.
Generally the ideal iron level for adults is as close to clinical anemia as possible. Randomized control trials have shown that regular phlebotomies (i.e. donating blood) significantly cuts the chance of developing diabetes and cancer in European populations.
So this professor wants to encapsulate an enzyme in such a way that it can withstand cooking and stomach acid to then break down a component of grassy foods that isn't good for us.... What could possibly go wrong?
Why not just breed the grassy food to have less of the component that isn't good for us?
That kind of enzyme (phytase) is produced by all herbivores and seed- or nut-eating animals.
Humans also produce it, but in very small quantities (e.g. one study has measured a 30-times less quantity than in rats), which are also variable from human to human, so some people are more susceptible than others to the deficiencies caused by the phytic acid from seeds and nuts.
An alternative to adding phytase to any food with seeds (this includes all cereals and legumes) or nuts is to soak them for some hours in water, before cooking, as it was already done in the traditional methods of cooking for many of them. Then they can be washed and the phytic acid can be eliminated with the water.
The soaking is much more effective if the water is acidulated, e.g. with lemon juice or vinegar.
The white flour has much less phytic acid than whole grain floor, therefore it is healthier to eat white flour for starch and proteins and eat other kinds of vegetables to get minerals and vitamins.
In my opinion all the propaganda about whole grains is very wrong. Whole grains are better than eating only white floor or white rice, but they are much worse than eating white floor or white rice together with a large number of different vegetables, or even than eating white floor or rice together with one multivitamin/multimineral pill (because in the latter case the minerals will be better absorbed than when eating whole grain floor or whole grains that have not been soaked).
The phytic acid is used in all seeds and nuts as a storage means for phosphorus, so a plant that would be modified to not make it would not have viable seeds, so it could be reproduced only by cloning. That works for many fruit trees, but it would not work for cereals and legumes.
"Results: Blood iron levels were higher in women in the iron fish plus follow-up at 3 months compared with controls, but this was not maintained. At 6 months, haemoglobin and serum iron had fallen in all groups and the proportion of anaemic women had increased.
Conclusions: This study shows that the iron ingot was effective in the short but not longer-term against IDA. Though a novel treatment option, further research is warranted to determine bioavailability of leached iron and whether or not the surface area is large enough for sufficient iron leaching. "
> The other grant will examine how the protein lactoferrin – a novel protein found in human and cow’s milk – may help improve the intestinal absorption of iron
That's interesting that a milk ingredient boosts iron absorption.
A dietitian recently suggested I serve iron-rich and calcium-rich foods at separate meals. They said that calcium in milk can inhibit iron absorption.
Eating a whole foods diet (non processed) can definitely address it but that's a tall order for most people.