Notes on Vitamins and Minerals
Notes on Vitamins and Minerals
The first step is to try to get adequate dietary intake of the essential
vitamins and minerals through judicious food choice.
There are lists of
symptoms of
vitamin and mineral deficiencies all over the internet and they are mostly
useless--your subclinical deficiency symptoms will probably be
completely different.
95% of the time that I was able to connect a nutrient to a symptom it was
through trial and error and not from any of these symptom lists.
For example, these sites always declare white spots on the fingernails to
be a zinc deficiency, while I found the
white spots to be a Vitamin C deficiency.
But look at these accounts anyway, and try to form an idea of the amounts of
the nutrients that might be beneficial, and where toxicity begins.
After you correct your diet you must then use your
judgment whether any experimental supplementation is necessary. For
example, in the cases of Vitamin A (retinol), Manganese, and Selenium (in some parts of the world),
it is easy
with food alone
to get to levels
of these nutrients which, in supplements, would be considered dangerously high.
Always use caution with minerals and the fat-soluble vitamins (A, D, E, K),
because the
body pools of these substances change only very slowly, and
you may be unable to recognize any difference until toxicity begins.
Although I watch that the Vitamin A (retinol) number doesn't get out of hand,
I am not
particularly concerned about the Daily Value for Vitamin D--it equals about
20 seconds of sun exposure,
which is a pittance if you live in a sunny place and spend time outside.
The Vitamin E Daily Value seems entirely correct to me, and will only seem
too high to the low-fat crowd who deny themselves the benefit and enjoyment of
nuts and seeds--but supplementation of Vitamin E
always made me feel worse,
and there is at
present no scientific basis for taking Vitamin E on faith that it will
offer some hidden benefit.
The Daily Value for Sodium is a suggested upper limit with
little scientific basis
and is not a minimum daily requirement.
With the water-soluble vitamins, the "B"s and C, the
experiments are much easier
because these nutrients are in a constant daily flux, and a single substantial
dose can frequently tell you within a day whether anything beneficial is
happening. Vitamin B-6 is reported to cause irreparable nerve damage in
large doses, but usually you need only a few times
the Daily Value to make an informed judgment whether supplementation is
useful.
And yes, you will end up with a zillion bottles of vitamins where you took
two or three pills and decided you didn't need it.
I do not believe I am the only one who will have found multiple B vitamin
deficiencies as a consequence of eating too much carbohydrate.
But when you are not deficient, B vitamin supplementation can cause unwanted
effects, such as headaches or jumpy feelings, or the weirdest effect that I
saw
in my experiments:
Vitamin B-6 supplementation always made me dream of feces, apparently
because B-6 is the characteristic intestinal signature of
voluminous bacteria.
Although most
of the vitamin and mineral Daily Values seem right to me, the value for Vitamin
C is way too low.
The following are my experiences and opinions on those vitamins and
minerals for which I decided the nutrient's Daily Value was
meaningless, i.e., you can eat well and yet still be deficient.
If I give a symptom of deficiency or excess,
remember that your personal symptoms would undoubtedly be different.
Don't take vitamin and mineral supplements unless you can see they are
doing something and you can see what they are doing--then find the minimum
amount of the supplement that accomplishes the task.
The idea that you cannot know in the present that you are deficient in a
vitamin or mineral is just a marketing ploy
and guarantees that almost everything you take will be a placebo.
Taking supplements as "insurance" doesn't insure you against anything because
you don't know what you need, and if they left the nutrient out of the
pill, you wouldn't be able to tell.
But precise supplementation of exactly what you need makes a huge
difference.
And get a pill splitter--sometimes the whole tablet is just too much!
-
Thiamin:
After I have adjusted the chromium level for the maximum mood effect,
I have simultaneously adjusted chromium for the most efficient carb
metabolism--and that is just when some odd symptom (often digestive)
will appear that is
solved with additional Thiamin.
I take 25 mg.
three times
a day.
When I experimented with foregoing my usual coffee intake, I could not
discern any Thiamin deficiency,
so I am convinced that the inactivation of Thiamin by
coffee is a real effect.
The frequency of an effective dose of Thiamin seems more important than the
exact size of the dose.
-
Folic Acid:
I get the Daily Value for folate from food. Food folate is a large
polymer, the units of which are absorbed with difficulty, as opposed
to the synthetic Folic Acid, which is absorbed easily. After I started
supplementing Vitamin-B12, I noticed I would get various symptoms,
the worst of which were muscle injuries that took forever to heal.
Folic
Acid supplementation at 400 mcg. per day solves the problem.
-
Vitamin B-12:
I believe that everyone should try a 1 mg. sublingual tablet of the
cyanocobalamin form of Vitamin B-12. If you don't need it, nothing much of
anything will happen, but if you have not been absorbing B-12 properly,
the world seems to come alive in a striking way. In the old days, the
well-to-do would go to the doctor to get B-12 injections for
added pep, but this became obsolete when it was discovered oral doses work
just as well if they are at least a milligram.
I take 1 milligram twice a day.
The highly-touted
methylcobalamin form never did anything for me, and it did not provide even the
basic benefits of the cyanocobalamin form,
plus it made my vision blurry and made me uncoordinated at the piano
after only a few days of use,
so I do not think it can
be considered a superior substitute.
-
Vitamin C: I heard Linus Pauling on the radio, wondering why everyone would
not at least try 18 grams of Vitamin C a day. 18 grams a day is way too much
but I immediately noticed I was no longer susceptible to paper cuts
at the office. I found that when I didn't supplement Vitamin C, the first
symptom to show up was sebaceous cysts, and I determined that 1 gram, three
times a day, was the minimum to prevent them altogether.
Eventually, I cut the carbs and realized that the Vitamin C was just
ameliorating a problem caused by excessive carbohydrate. When I retested,
I was eating a very low carbohydrate diet that I later decided was not
optimal, and my Vitamin C requirement was much less.
When I later raised my carb level to the optimum, I again needed more
Vitamin C or
else I was not sufficiently invincible to physical stress, so I settled on the
original 1 gram, three times a day of a "sustained release" Vitamin C
horse pill.
-
Chromium:
Chromium can improve
mood considerably and make a contribution towards increased insulin
sensitivity--the feeling you are getting more energy and well-being
out of your food.
Think of chromium mood effects as a measure of brain insulin sensitivity;
the neuronal response to insulin is stimulation of neurotransmitter release.
I take up to 400 mcg.
three times
a day of chromium picolinate,
and 100 mcg.
once
a day of yeast-derived "GTF" chromium.
I found there are really two separate chromium mood effects and thus both
forms of chromium are required, although the yeast-derived form
does almost nothing that I can detect to improve
insulin sensitivity.
Too much chromium in any form will cause anxiety.
Both milk fat and too much Omega-3, especially alpha-linolenic acid from
flax oil, seem to cause chromium side-effects, especially
headaches.
Chromium histidine is well-absorbed, and like
a stronger version of the yeast-derived "GTF" form,
provides the second chromium mood effect,
which I can only lamely describe as making the world seem more intrinsically
meaningful and involving, but chromium histidine
does nothing for insulin sensitivity.
Only chromium picolinate seems to actually increase insulin sensitivity
and to effect the peculiar mood improvement that is obviously closely related
to insulin sensitivity.
The most common pattern I have noticed over the years is this: insulin
sensitivity will increase for some unknown reason; I feel more energetic and
physical, but at the same time, mood abruptly deteriorates, and the best
I can describe it, the world seems slightly hostile, or at least unconcerned
about my welfare. That mood perception is the signal to increase the
dosage of chromium picolinate.
If I get the bad mood effect at the maximum effective dose
of chromium picolinate,
that means I have overfilled my glycogen reserves, and I need to have
high-carb meals less often.
Sometimes, again for an unknown reason,
insulin sensitivity will decrease, and then I begin to get some annoying
side-effect from chromium picolinate, and I will decrease the dose.
As this pattern has continued for four or five years, the amount of
carbohydrate I can eat without experiencing fatigue or inflammation has
spiralled upward. I do not understand what the physiological process is,
but its discontinuity does not hide that insulin resistance
really is, in some sense, a chromium deficiency.
My hypothesis is that as children, we absorb what is supposed to be a lifetime
reserve of chromium,
but we are without any means to absorb chromium efficiently as adults.
Because we are unsuited to our modern ecology, chromium reserves are used
up prematurely, and there is no natural remedy.
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