- Re: Magnesium (and Vit D) -

[Guest guest]

> Yo !!!.. sometimes I wish we could just sit down and have a beer

> together- you're sense of huumore just jives with mine (but you all

> should know I could be 's mother- or GRAND mother I guess..)

Um my grandmother is like 90... as for beer, /absolutement/, I

probably owe you a beer for answering the zillion questions I sent you

in 2004...

> Most people don't even know tanning lotion keeps Vit D synthesis from

> happening..

>

> It takes 20 minutes in the sun with a large percentage of skin

> exposed to make enough Vit D.

Yeah there is a big guilt-etc-charged polemic going on between the new

hi-D crew and the dermatologists, who have been recommending gonzo

SPFs for a long time. I have to say, wearing mega sun lotion like all

the time sounds pretty wacko to me.

> Plus it's my theroy.. that we've scrwed up our food sources and soil

> so much that we're killing ourselves slowing anyway with out

> deficient diets.. I'm SOoooooooooooooooooooooo not positive about

> that stuff.

I've heard this claimed before. There does seem to be some research on

it. Here's an interesting news article:

http://www.organicauthority.com/organic-food/organic-food-articles/declining-nut\

ritional-value-of-produce-due-to-high-yield-selective-seed-breeding..html

It sounds like the decreases are something that could be accomodated:

" 'The median declines we found from data published in 1950 to 1999

ranged [depending on the nutrient in question] from 6% to 38%, with an

average around 15%. So 15% more vegetables and fruits would

theoretically make up the difference, with very little increase in

calories. But to reach 5 to 9 servings per day, most Americans would

need to make much larger increases,' said. "

Still, this could /perhaps/ help explain marginal status for some

people in certain nutrients (I haven't actually handled the data, so I

don't know; I also haven't looked for dissenting research).

A whole lot of our food is (and long has been) pretty dang far from

being " wild type " according to Steve , who is usually right

about almost everything.

One potential problem - and I believe this basically is often stated

by advocates of organic food and/or bio-ancestral diets - is

unidentified nutrients. I can just supplement magnesium, but if

there's some thing that was in the food during my whole Homo sappy

ancestry, I might not know about it, so perhaps I could only get it by

buying various kinds of $18 food at Fresh Fields or whatever. For the

/most/ part, nutrition is not all that mystifying, and hasn't even

changed very much over billions of years - our biochemistry is much

like that of bacteria. What's /not/ easy to detect is whether adequacy

of some nutrient makes a very subtle difference; ring up 14 such

nutrients and you might have a real effect on your vigor. Of course

this could be studied very clearly by simply changing people over to a

complete ancestral diet and measuring the effects; probably this has

been tried? It's not like you need to understand in advance what the

nutrients are; first you just find the effects. That's how all the

vitamins were discovered - it was just like, if you raise rats on a

diet of 100% pickled bat skins, they get sores that go away when you

give them lettuce... viola, it's vitamin Q... and then they'd just

separate out the chemicals in lettuce to figure out which one of them

actually is vitamin Q.