Tag Archives: supplements

Apparently, Some People Can’t Be Bothered With Food : The Salt : NPR

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by ELIZA BARCLAY

April 07, 201312:40 PM

There are people who don’t like food? Yes. But liquid meal replacements may not be their best bet.We’re accustomed to offbeat food ideas here at The Salt. But even we had to pause over recent headlines about a guy who bragged about finding a way around eating.

Rob Rhinehart’s blog details his two-month experiment consuming mostly Soylent, a concoction he invented to provide all the nutrition and none of the hassle of food. It first attracted the attention of Vice, and then The Washington Post, which said that his plan just might work. Rhinehart, a 24-year-old electrical engineer in San Francisco, soon found himself inundated with queries from people interested in testing Soylent. He’d apparently hit on something that resonated with others.

But wait a minute, we wondered: What exactly is so bothersome about eating food?

“I resented the time, money and effort [that] the purchase, preparation, consumption, and clean-up of food was consuming,” Rhinehart writes on the blog. His liquid solution has left him feeling sated, leaner and more focused, he writes. And in an email to The Salt, he added: “Personally, I’ve found separating the social and cultural enjoyment of food from food as ‘fuel’ has vastly improved my quality of life.”

Strange as it may seem to those of us who adore food, there is a veritable subculture of otherwise healthy people who find eating to be a nuisance. When I did an informal poll of my colleagues and friends, a few said they could relate to Rhinehart and his interest in an alternative to food. (For the record, they were all young men.)

Of course, there are also people who have difficulty with food for much more serious reasons — food allergies or other illnesses (think the late Roger Ebert), as well as people with eating disorders or dreams of weight loss.

Amanda Holliday, an assistant professor of nutrition at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, says she has come across a lot of people who’ve given up on food. “Some feel overwhelmed by all the choices,” she tells The Salt. “Others feel defeated by having to choose something healthy.” Holliday also has patients with dementia, for whom chewing and swallowing is problematic.

But is it really possible to come up with a meal replacement product that’s equivalent to a diverse diet of real food?

Nestle makes a range of products under the Boost brand marketed as liquid nutritional supplements or meal replacements. But nutritionists say they can’t compete with all the benefits of eating real food.

iStockphoto.com

Big food companies have tried with liquid meal-replacement products like Ensure, made by Abbott, or Boost, made by Nestle. Holliday and other nutritionists recommend these products to sick people who really can’t eat — but they have reservations about them for the rest of us.

Even though such meal replacements may be packed with micronutrients, they’re missing the other beneficial components of real food that haven’t yet been isolated, Holliday says. And these products may include processed ingredients like high fructose corn syrup.

“In the hospital nutrition world, we’re still looking for products based on real food,” she says. “We could make them ourselves, but there’s labor involved.”

Rhinehart hasn’t released his Soylent recipe, but he tweeted that it has “ingredients produced by the food processing industry by the megaton.”

But the “food averse” should think twice before turning to Rhinehart, or any other rogue inventor, for a silver bullet meal replacement, warns Sharon Akabas with the Institute of Human Nutrition at Columbia University.

Akabas takes issue with Rhinehart’s scorn for nutrition science. She calls it “hubris” for Rhinehart to assume that he can calculate exactly what his body needs, based on loose proportions of micronutrient recommendations gleaned from biochemistry textbooks.

In fact, says Akabas, nutrition science has learned a lot about what the body needs by studying the effects of certain foods and diets over decades.

“For someone to do something for two months and say they feel better is pretty meaningless,” she says.

She is, however, sympathetic to the anxiety that many people feel about food: “People are exasperated with the complexity of advice they’re getting and the mixed messages from the industry,” she says. “There are ways of simplifying food to the point that wouldn’t take much effort or cost much. But there is no equivalent of manna — a single food with everything we need.”

via Apparently, Some People Can’t Be Bothered With Food : The Salt : NPR.

Most People Can Skip Calcium Supplements, Prevention Panel Says : Shots – Health News : NPR

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Most People Can Skip Calcium Supplements, Prevention Panel Says

by NANCY SHUTE

Women have been told for years that if they don’t take calcium supplements religiously, they’re putting themselves at risk of crippling hip fractures in old age.

Now the word from a major government panel: Why bother?

There’s no evidence that taking calcium supplements reduces the risk of fractures for most people, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force said. The recommendations were published online Monday by the Annals of Internal Medicine.

That applies to postmenopausal women, the target audience for calcium supplements.

“We’re not saying don’t use it,” says Linda Baumann, a member of the task force and a professor emerita of nursing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “But think about it, because we’re not sure it has the benefit you think it has.”

The task force said that taking up to 1,000 milligrams a day of calcium supplements and up to 400 international units of vitamin D daily did nothing to prevent fractures in healthy people, while slightly increasing the risk of kidney stones.

That’s just a bit less than the 1,200 milligrams of calcium a day recommended for postmenopausal women by a 2011 Institute of Medicine report. More might be better, the USPSTF panel concluded, but there’s no evidence that’s true. The panel gives independent recommendations to the federal government on the risks and benefits of treatments.

Reports like this always come with caveats, so here goes: The recommendations don’t apply to people who already have osteoporosis or vitamin D deficiency. And the advice doesn’t apply to people over 65 who are at risk of falls.

The task force members would have loved to review data on whether taking calcium and vitamin D supplements earlier in life would be useful, Baumann tells Shots. Teenagers’ calcium intake is pathetically low, even though they’re still growing.

“The other thing that’s really unclear is the appropriate dose and dosing regimen,” Baumann says. The studies the panel relied on were all over the map on how much people took — and when. And because most studies have looked at calcium and bone health in white women, there’s no good data on men or minority groups.

Vitamin D supplements have become trendy of late, promoted as preventing cancer, heart disease, and diabetes. Some doctors recommending up to 50,000 IU in a week.The USPSTF is looking at whether D influences cancer, so stay tuned for that.

An accompanying editorial concludes, “While we wait for the results of further research, the USPSTF’s cautious, evidence-based advice should encourage clinicians to think carefully before advising calcium and vitamin D supplementation for healthy individuals.”

Calcium supplements aren’t as trendy, but some women are “taking three, four, five calcium pills a day,” says Cliff Rosen, an author of the 2011 IOM report, and an osteoporosis researcher at the Maine Medical Center Research Institute. Taking that much can up the risk of kidney stones by 17 percent, he says. And there’s also evidence that calcium supplements may contribute to heart disease.

The calcium in food doesn’t seem to cause those problems, Rosen says. So the best advice for everyone, from teens to their grandmas, is get calcium from food. “A glass of milk is 300 milligrams. Three glasses of milk a day, and you get there without a problem.”

And if that doesn’t grab you, there’s another option, Rosen says: “Of course, ice cream has calcium in it.”

via Most People Can Skip Calcium Supplements, Prevention Panel Says : Shots – Health News : NPR.

NPR.org » Too Much Calcium Could Cause Kidney, Heart Problems, Researchers Say

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Federal health officials recommend people under 50 consume 1,000 milligrams of calcium per day, but some are overdoing it.

by Patti Neighmond

When it comes to a healthy diet — especially for women, and especially after menopause — nutritionists, doctors, everybody it seems, will tell you: calcium, calcium, calcium.

Federal health officials recommend women and men under age of 50 consume 1,000 milligrams of calcium per day. The recommendation goes up to 1,200 mg after the age of 70 for men and after menopause for women when a major drop in estrogen causes bone loss.

So, in a culture which often considers “more” to be “better,” one might ask, if 1,200 milligrams of calcium is good, is 2,000 mg of calcium better?

No, says Dr. Ethel C. Siris, director of the Tony Stabile Center for the Prevention and Treatment of Osteoporosis at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York. “You need enough; you don’t need extra,” she says.

“Extra calcium does you no good and there is a small risk that if you take too much you might get a kidney stone,” says Dr. Siris. That’s because the body can only handle 600 milligrams of calcium at once. Extra calcium can build up in the bloodstream and, when excreted through kidneys in urine, it can cause a kidney stone.

That’s been known for a while. But recently, a few studies raised concern that excess calcium may also calcify coronary arteries in susceptible individuals and even precipitate heart attack.

Robert Eckel, a cardiologist and endocrinologist at the University of Colorado, is past president of the American Heart Association. While these studies are far from conclusive and far more research needs to be done, he says they do raise the question about whether there’s potentially some danger in over-the-counter calcium supplements which go beyond our usual dietary intake of calcium.

“So, at this point in time, there’s a bit of a signal” that should raise caution, but remains highly controversial. “I don’t think anyone has stepped up to say calcium supplements should be abandoned,” says Eckel.

Particularly since calcium is so critical for bone health. The best plan of action, says Siris: Eat more calcium rich foods.

“If you’re somebody who has a glass of milk with breakfast, that’s 300 milligrams of calcium; a container of yogurt will give you another 200 to 300 milligrams; a couple of ounces of cheese will give you 200 to 300 milligrams,” she says. For most healthy adults under age 50, that’s about all you need for bone health.

And, if you don’t eat dairy, Siris says there are plenty of other foods that also contain calcium. These include vegetables like broccoli, bok choy, and turnip greens; oranges, figs, salmon and sardines. Cereals and soy milk often have added calcium, along with added Vitamin D, which is essential to help the body absorb calcium.

So, estimate your daily intake of calcium from food, says Siris, and then calculate whether you need to take an extra supplement. You may just need 300 or 600 milligrams of calcium extra and you may not even need that every day. [Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]

via NPR.org » Too Much Calcium Could Cause Kidney, Heart Problems, Researchers Say.

Daily Vitamins – don’t over do it – Women’s Health Magazine

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Daily Vitamins: Don’t Overload Your System

Dietary supplements are easy to overdo, make sure you know the proper dosage

At the rate vitamins and minerals are being added to food, it won’t be long until fortified Jelly Bellys hit the market—oh wait, they already have. The National Institutes of Health warns of the dangers of too many vitamins. “Quite a few people who take a multivitamin and eat a healthy diet are getting twice what they need,” says Diane Birt, Ph.D., director of the Center for Research on Botanical Dietary Supplements at Iowa State University. And that can be dangerous.

Here are five nutrients people often get too much of. Check out the dosage you’re getting from the fortified foods you eat and the vitamins you take and make sure your intake falls within the recommended range for dietary supplements<.

Calcium

RDA 1,000 mg

Top Limit 2,500 mg

The risk Watch out for calcium-fortified Tums or calcium-fortified chocolates. Too much calcium can lead to kidney stones, calcium deposits in your arteries, and, ironically, weakened bones. That’s because an excess of calcium prevents absorption of other nutrients necessary for bone health, such as magnesium, says Mark Woodin, Sc.D., professor of epidemiology and environmental health at Tufts University in Boston.

Beta-Carotene

Recommended daily amount (RDA) not established

Top Limit not established

The risk Smokers (and inhalers of secondhand smoke) beware: When beta-carotene taken in supplement form mixes with cigarette smoke, it changes from an antioxidant that wards off cancer to a harmful pro-oxidant that ups the risk of lung cancer. Get the nutrient through foods like carrots and sweet potatoes rather than pills.

Iron

RDA 18 mg

Top Limit 45 mg

The risk Studies show that high blood levels of iron (found in meats, spinach, lentils, and soybeans) may be a risk factor for heart disease. Iron also competes with important minerals like copper for absorption in the body, says Roberta Anding, R.D., a spokesperson for the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.

Vitamin A

RDA 700 mcg

Top Limit 3,000 mcg

The risk Too much vitamin A can cause liver problems, diminished bone density, and birth defects, says Martha Belury, Ph.D., a professor of nutrition at The Ohio State University. Since you get the vitamin A you need through foods like milk, eggs, carrots, and peppers, a supplement isn’t necessary.

Zinc

RDA 8 mg

Top Limit 40 mg

The risk An overdose of zinc can lead to upset stomach, vomiting, diarrhea, and muscle spasms. It isn’t hard to max out when some lozenges for cold relief deliver between 46 and 50 milligrams a day, according to ConsumerLab, an independent firm that verifies commercial claims.

via Nutritional Supplements: Dietary Supplement Guidelines | Women’s Health Magazine.

To supplement or not to supplement?

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I just had a really great question. Here’s my answer:

So far all of my classes have emphasized the importance of getting your vitamins and minerals from foods. Some of the effects of overdose from vitamins are just as bad as not getting enough. When you juggle various supplements it’s much easier to risk toxicity, which is virtually impossible with real food.

Also the vitamins and minerals from foods are much more bioavailable. Have you ever looked at your pee after a vitamin B or multivitamin supplement? That’s a lot of the cost of your vitamin being flushed down the drain! Also there’s a lot of other goodness that comes from eating, for example, a peach than just the vitamin C. Eating a whole food like that gives you also fiber and phytonutrients – and potentially fills you up so you don’t reach for something more naughty.

All that being said though I do take a multivitamin and calcium everyday. A healthy diet is supposed to have a regular variety of all of the macronutrients. That’s all well and good but I think many of us have some easy go to foods we enjoy and we may not always be mixing it up or eating the most nutritious things. (I like to buy in bulk to save some $$, and that kind of hinders variability!)

One thing I learned recently, though, is that we can only absorb a certain amount of some nutrients at a time. One way that vitamin marketers make their products stick out is by offering the vitamin with more of a certain nutrient so you think you’re getting a better deal. For example, your body can only absorb about 500 mg of calcium at once, but a lot of supplements come in 1000 mg. It’s best to either cut those in half or buy the smaller dosage. I do that with my calcium and multis.

For vitamins that we tend to have a deficiency in, like vitamin D, I think it’s important to get your levels checked yearly during your annual physical. I used to take a vitamin D supplement but have since found out my levels are perfectly normal with the foods I eat and the amount of sun exposure I get. My husband though takes the same supplement I used to and his levels are still too low, so he knows he can potentially go over the usual daily dose.

I guess the final answer is – there are pros and cons to both. If you’re the type of person that only eats fast food everyday, by all means – take a multi vitamin! Just try not to overdo it or mix too many supplements at once. (Also be very careful when supplementing the fat-soluble vitamins. Those don’t flush out like water soluble ones do and have a higher likelihood of toxicity.)

Thanks for the awesome question @joyonmyjourney! You can find some really awesome, healthy recipes on their page here – http://joyonmyjourney.com/