This is the first study I've seen which shows a health benefit from vitamin supplementation. This is a complex subject, as it seems more and more obvious that many neolithic foods (grains and legumes for example) irritate the gut so much that the gut does not absorb what it should (nutrients), but allows things to enter the blood stream that activate the body's immune response - leading the systemic inflammation and in some cases, the autoimmune disorders.
I like Stephen's summary:
"This result, once again, kills the simplistic notion that body fat is determined exclusively by voluntary food consumption and exercise behaviors (sometimes called the "calories in, calories out" idea, or "gluttony and sloth"). In this case, a multivitamin was able to increase resting energy expenditure and cause fat loss without any voluntary changes in food intake or exercise, suggesting metabolic effects and a possible downward shift of the body fat "setpoint" due to improved nutrient status.
Practical Implications
Does this mean we should all take multivitamins to stay or become thin? No. There is no multivitamin that can match the completeness and balance of a nutrient-dense, whole food, omnivorous diet. Beef liver, leafy greens and sunlight are nature's vitamin pills. Avoiding refined foods instantly doubles the micronutrient content of the typical diet. Properly preparing whole grains by soaking and fermentation is equivalent to taking a multi-mineral along with conventionally prepared grains, as absorption of key minerals is increased by 50-300% (10). Or you can eat root vegetables instead of grains, and enjoy their naturally high mineral availability. Or both."
http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2010/06/low-micronutrient-intake-may-contribute.html
Interestingly, when we were in Yellowstone recently, we passed an area that looked like a big mud puddle where all the bison and deer-type animals would congregate. Turned out, it wasn't a mud puddle, but some kind of mineral bog and the mineral was key to those animals. I guess they were supplementing? Similar observations about the moose in Glacier - if I remember correctly, they seek out the bark of a particular tree because they need that specific mineral. Wonder if our Paleo ancestors had specific, weird things they sought out for that kind of periodic "supplementation" that we don't know about now?
ReplyDeleteDonna, they did. All the tribes that thrived had uncovered the 'secrets.' Nutrition and Physical Degeneration describes the six tribes which had the 'super health' that Dr. Weston Price found in his world travels in the 1930s, which he undertook just for that purpose.
ReplyDeleteOne theory about why vitamin supplementation has proved so useless is that grains and legumes (and dairy to a degree) have generate a high level of gut irritation, with the perverse result that the gut becomes porous to things it shouldn't be porous to, while not capturing the vit/min it should. There are other interesting 'complexifiers' too - for example, sugar uses the same transportation pathway in the body that vitamin C does - if your sugar intake is low, even when taking in very little vitamin C, the levels that are available to tissues go up. So if you eat the standard western diet, you can supplement c all you like but it may not be getting delivered to the tissues.