Challenges in the diagnosis of magnesium status • Hacker News Board

Re: Challenges in the diagnosis of magnesium status

#181

Post by nate_meurer » Sun, Jun 27, 2021, 10:06 PM UTC

rpmisms wrote: post #141

nate_meurer wrote: post #136

My youngest daughter struggled mightily with constipation for the first six years of her life. Hours on the toilet crying, day after day. At some point when she was six or maybe seven, I read a blurb somewhere about the importance of magnesium for smooth muscle operation. That day I added a teaspoon of epsom salt to some juice and gave it to her. The next day her constipation disappeared. We all now take cheap 400 mg…

> We're all vegetarians and do pretty well on fiber Thank you for not making your kids be vegan. It's extremely hard to get kids proper nutrients on a vegan diet. Related: Milk has good magnesium content, more so if grass-fed. If you can get raw milk from a local small farm, it's worth it.

I've imposed some dietary restrictions on my kids, but they're mostly glycemic in nature.

- No sugary drinks; absolutely no soda pop, ever, and very little fruit juice, which is really no better than pop.

- No sugary breakfasts. Breakfast cereal is fucking poison, especially the sweetened varieties.

- No kids-menu food. When we eat out, they've always ordered off the adult menu. No pizza, chicken nuggets, mac-n-cheese, french fries, PB&J, grilled cheese on white bread, etc.

Everywhere I look I see people who have let their kids turn into kids-menu kids-- kids who tolerate only pizza, deep fried food, breakfast cereal, etc. And everywhere I look now, I see fat kids and teens with the beginnings of diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease. Any pediatrician will gladly talk about the growing crisis of metabolic syndrome in kids.

My kids went vegetarian completely of their own accord, likely copying me, but they've stuck with it. The main thing is that they've always eaten what we eat. It took a little training, but their tastes developed rapidly (as all kids' do) and from a young age they could enjoy a full range of healthy adult food with few very few aversions.

For example, my youngest still doesn't love blue cheese, but she can tolerate it. My older teen eats blue cheese from a bowl like ice cream.

Re: Challenges in the diagnosis of magnesium status

#182

Post by seaorg » Sun, Jun 27, 2021, 10:06 PM UTC

klyrs wrote: post #154

seaorg wrote: post #7

If you put a whole cow into a meat grinder, the resulting paste contains every single micro and macro nutrient required by the human body, in their most bioavailable forms, many of which are completely absent in vegetarian and vegan diets. For millions of years, humans ate ruminant animals who’s herds they followed around, and almost nothing else. People who eat nothing but ruminant meat and organs become slim even i…

> Two doctors have now ate nothing but meat, animal fat and organs for two years and posted their test results I see your n=2 "study" and raise the risk of colorectal cancer; an n=900 study with plausible causative link. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27655186

Your proof that I’m wrong is some garbage epidemiology study about colon cancer?

Re: Challenges in the diagnosis of magnesium status

#183

Post by simplify » Sun, Jun 27, 2021, 10:07 PM UTC

jonplackett wrote: post #49

esquivalience wrote: post #4

From the source: "The high rate of magnesium deficiency now postulated [5,6,7,8] can be attributed in part to a steady decline in general magnesium content in cultivated fruits and vegetables, a reflection of the observed depletion of magnesium in soil over the past 100 years [11,12,13]. A report to Congress was already sounding the alarm as far back as the 1930s, pointing out the paucity of magnesium, and other mine…

It’s not just vegetables either - chickens are a lot less nutritious than they used to be. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2005/may/15/foodand...

This article writes under the assumption that fat is bad for you (high fat = junk food), a false idea that still permeates much of society today.

Re: Challenges in the diagnosis of magnesium status

#184

Post by opportune » Sun, Jun 27, 2021, 10:07 PM UTC

lucb1e wrote: post #171

Waterluvian wrote: post #64

I’m not arguing against these findings but the whole subject of nutrition leaves me frustrated at times. Ever tried to have 100% daily recommended intake of every nutrient? I suspect almost nobody achieves that. And yet, despite this, and magnesium issues among likely many other issues, our species has never lived longer, grown taller, survived infancy, etc. more than we have now. That being said, as we understand an…

> Ever tried to have 100% daily recommended intake of every nutrient? I take soylent (that is, a European fork of it) with some regularity. Mainly out of laziness, but also I hope that it's good for whatever I might have been deficient in when eating other foods. It doesn't reduce how healthy I try to eat, but with a picky partner and semi-picky self, it probably helps. It's also just convenient. Would recommend. The…

The issue I have with soylent and some of their competitors is that they get to their RDA amounts by directly adding vitamins and minerals, some of which have low absorption depending on how they are bound - for example zinc and magnesium oxides have poor absorption compared to other zinc and magnesium salts - and which is not substantially better than just taking a multivitamin as far as I can tell.

Re: Challenges in the diagnosis of magnesium status

#185

Post by PKop » Sun, Jun 27, 2021, 10:08 PM UTC

Another argument against the senseless, detrimental addition of Fluoride in water supply:

"In addition, fluoride, found in 74% of the American population’s drinking water, with ~50% of drinking water having a concentration of 0.7 mg/L, prevents magnesium absorption through binding and production of insoluble complexes."

Re: Challenges in the diagnosis of magnesium status

#186

Post by monetus » Sun, Jun 27, 2021, 10:08 PM UTC

seaorg wrote: post #69

monetus wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The advice you are giving is interesting but irresponsible considering how different peoples' digestive systems are. I would downvote your original comment for that and for being off topic, but I view the downvote as a way of organizing comments. Again, this is interesting, but you are pitching a foot-gun to people.

It isn’t irresponsible. Nobody is going to hurt themselves with a carnivore diet. I have tested it on myself so how could I be irresponsible for getting the word out about something I have done to my own body?

Thanks for testing it first. Using an analogy, your gut may be an apple and while some other people have oranges.

My hunch is that you could push that analogy further with something more hyperbolic - the gut is fascinating.

Re: Challenges in the diagnosis of magnesium status

#187

Post by Nasrudith » Sun, Jun 27, 2021, 10:08 PM UTC

ullevaal wrote: post #102

DistressedDrone wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect it can be solved in many different ways, but when you sell food by the pound, it's much more advantageous to distribute your limited quantity of nutrients in as much produce as possible. This seems really, really hard to regulate.

When reading comments like this, which are good-natured, and a natural response, do you ever think “wouldn’t be great if we as humans had more trust built into our systems, and people actually making a best-effort attempt at honouring that trust”? Instead of everything being a scam until proven otherwise, and even then the scam is probably just one level deeper in what triggered the interest in that product in the fi…

Terrible as it sounds trust is in computer terms a gaping security vulnerability. If anothet clever actor can take advantage of it they can gain all sorts of things at cost to you.

Distrust is like an immune system - it has costs and can occasionally hurt you but it developed and is ubiquitous for a reason.

Re: Challenges in the diagnosis of magnesium status

#188

Post by Smaug123 » Sun, Jun 27, 2021, 10:08 PM UTC

slipframe wrote: post #60

alisonkisk wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why pour it in your diet when you can put it in a pill to eat directly along with 30 other vitamins?

Because anybody with sense prefers eating food to popping pills.

This is an instance of the orthogonality thesis, by the way. Your assertion is that "increased ability to think" should cause "increased desire to eat Traditional Food (tm)", which is no more true than the assertion "increased ability to think causes increased desire to consume Renaissance art". Desires are, by and large, orthogonal to the generalised ability to achieve desires (the ability which you label "sense"). Some desires are not orthogonal - the desire to survive and be healthy, for example, which is instrumental in achieving many other desires - but to argue your assertion on those grounds, you must prove that Traditional Food is sufficiently dramatically better for achieving some instrumental goal.

Re: Challenges in the diagnosis of magnesium status

#189

Post by caturopath » Sun, Jun 27, 2021, 10:09 PM UTC

briefcomment wrote: post #113

aledalgrande wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why, countrary to common belief, vegetables that are sold frozen are higher quality than fresh ones. My brother works in the industry and says if you can buy whole (with certain exceptions) and frozen, you have the best.

Does it need to be whole?

Generally the finer specimens go to the whole products.

Re: Challenges in the diagnosis of magnesium status

#190

Post by celticninja » Sun, Jun 27, 2021, 10:09 PM UTC

seaorg wrote: post #47

celticninja wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My wife has psoriasis, she has recently (ish) switched to a plant based diet, her psoriasis has cleared up too. She isn't making claims that her change in diet fixed it.

If she is plant based now, she could have only been SAD before? This is the reason why vegans and vegetarians think their diets are good, because literally anything besides the SAD is an improvement. She is a reduction in symptoms because of a reduction of sugar and other things. Put her on carnivore for a month and if she doesn’t experience anything I’ve described then I’ll eat my hat.

SAD? She has always had a good diet with low sugar intake, her change was literally to cut out meat from her existing diet.