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Challenges in the diagnosis of magnesium status

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

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Re: Challenges in the diagnosis of magnesium status

#291

Post by thatcat »

pembrook wrote: post #233
nerdponx wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotally, this has been my personal experience. I have gone through phases of my life where I ate a lot of junk food. I would feel constantly hungry during those phases, until I ate something nutritious, green and easily-digestible, like steamed broccoli or green peas.

This doesn’t make any scientific sense. Study after study has shown that protein and complex carbs are what reduces feelings of hunger, not vegetables. This makes sense when you consider most green vegetables like broccoli are 90% water. A meat like chicken, after cooking is only about 60% water. So if you eat 400g of broccoli vs 400g of chicken, the one that will make you feel more full is obviously the protein. Wha…

Phytochemicals found in some veggies and spices increase immune and other functions. Even if it's 90% water, there are still many functional compounds that aren't found in meat.

Re: Challenges in the diagnosis of magnesium status

#292

Post by prawn »

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?

I grew up swearing off frozen vegetables as a bad thing - saw ads on TV and assumed it was something poor (?!) and time-poor people would buy. We'd grow fresh or buy whole, but almost never had frozen vegetables. Then my brother went through an intensive athletic program that had a nutritionist - that guy put him onto frozen and he passed it on to me. Fresh, there is a risk you'll let it go to crap before using it, you're paying for bits you'll trim off, etc. Frozen, it's there for months as you need it, ready to go, and was snap frozen fresh. So, odds are, there's less waste and less effort. We still grow and buy as before, but I try to have some frozen staples around, especially for quick stir-fries, fried rice for the kids, etc.

Re: Challenges in the diagnosis of magnesium status

#293

Post by lamontcg »

cwp wrote: post #244
lamontcg wrote: post #83

> Magnesium deficiency can be attributed to common dietary practices, medications, and farming techniques, along with estimates that the mineral content of vegetables has declined by as much as 80–90% in the last 100 years. This is why, when people defend GMOs with the argument that we've been genetically modifying plants and animals for hundreds of years by selective breeding, that I don't think that argument leads…

I make that argument, but I would never say "It's all perfectly harmless." The point is that the technique used to produce an organism isn't its self harmful. The question is whether the organism is harmful. Resistance to disease is good. Lower nutrient density is bad. It really doesn't matter whether we got here by selective breeding or modifying genes directly.

We didn't set out to lower nutrient density, though, that was a side effect of ignoring it and focusing on other things which we thought were good.

Re: Challenges in the diagnosis of magnesium status

#294

Post by covidthrow »

Mertax wrote: post #248
version_five wrote: post #27

I understand this seems mostly to be about soil depletion. I'm curious more generally if vegetables are also less nutritious because they are selectively bread for high water content and size. For example, its appeared to me for years that you vegetables you get on a Subway sandwich must have almost no nutritional content. They are all way paler than you'd normally see, and super watery. Thinking about it, I suppose…

Some of the products the company I work for develops are specifically for the Ag seed research industry. We develop instruments like on combine weigh systems used to measure weight, moisture and yield of various grain hybrids as they are harvested. From my limited perspective, it appears that for decades this industry has cared most (almost entirely) about breeding hybrids that increase yield in various climates. The…

Which is kind of silly, because apple varieties demonstrate that people are willing to pay a premium for strains with good taste/texture.

With the exception of selling to industrial food makers, it seems perhaps that marketing—or lack thereof—is the major problem, here.

Re: Challenges in the diagnosis of magnesium status

#295

Post by AlotOfReading »

988747 wrote: post #152
rtkwe wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> humans ate ruminant animals who’s herds they followed around, and almost nothing else. This is the incorrect part. Meat was never the sole part of human or any human ancestors diet, for starters we don't have the teeth for it. The rest of the diet may have been lower carb than what we eat now but it was not meat only.

Some scientists seem to disagree [1] They theory is basically that for the first few millions years of evolution we were eating mostly meat, and switched to more plant-based diet when we ran out of big animals to hunt, which was quite recently. [1] https://www.livescience.com/humans-were-super-predators.html

I'd recommend reading at least the the abstract of the paper linked therein, rather than the popsci summary. The authors are arguing that H. Erectus in particular was highly carnivorous (though not exclusively). That's about 1M years, not plural, and it's ignoring all the Australopithecines and H. habilis besides. The authors explicitly state that middle Pleistocene archaic humans moved back the other way and incorporated far more plants into their diet. By the time anatomically modern humans arrived, we had quite significant plant intake. Besides, the GP comment doesn't make sense archaeologically. We have shell middens from H. erectus and know that many archaic humans lived in near-coastal environments. There was no period in which we were purely pursuing ruminants even when archaic humans were more carnivorous.

Re: Challenges in the diagnosis of magnesium status

#296

Post by cartoonworld »

wincy wrote: post #26
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…

Interesting. I recently started using Magnesium Glycinate as a supplement and I feel it truly changed my life, not exaggerating. I’ve suffered from chronic general anxiety for most of my teens and adult life. Magnesium has completely cleared this up, things I thought were just part of my personality (being anxious and other associated things) were actually due to a chronic magnesium deficiency. I just have to make su…

Chiming in to second this.

I've had anxiety problems most of my life, and when a death in the family shook everything it got really, really bad.

I tried everything I could think of except prescription meds (maybe should have, but I didn't like the side effects or addictive potential) and one day while lurking I read a random comment on HN about magnesium.

I decided, Why not, its cheap, and it has had a truly profound effect on my life, among the generally healthy choices I started to make. It took a little time, but it worked a LOT and the muscle spasms and cramps subsided too!

I can't believe sometimes how different my life has become.

Re: Challenges in the diagnosis of magnesium status

#297

Post by Dylan16807 »

the_lonely_road wrote: post #58

Matter cannot be created, just reformed. There were 100,000 humans at one point and now there are 7 billion. All that matter came from somewhere. To be fair, we have killed a lot of animals but also created a lot more in the form of farm animals. It seems reasonable to me that this is unlikely to be sustainable even if we found a way to send humans off planet. Maybe that missing magnesium gets pulled out of the soil…

Total living biomass has 550 billion tons of carbon. Of that, 60 million are in human bodies.

Most of it's plants, but plants very much need magnesium and other nutrients too.

Re: Challenges in the diagnosis of magnesium status

#298

Post by pembrook »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #271
pembrook wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fiber is certainly important, but try eating a diet of only broccoli one day vs a diet of only chicken the next. You’ll likely feel normal on the chicken day. On the broccoli day you’ll feel like you’re fasting (because on a calorie basis, you literally will be unless you eat 5-7X as much broccoli as you do chicken).

You’re being disingenuous. The conversation started about nutrient depleted junk food vs whole foods. And now you’re comparing two different types of whole foods.

The comment I directly replied to here suggested fiber was the reason for feeling full.

Fiber can certainly help with feeling full as it takes longer to digest, however fiber alone cannot satiate.

Meanwhile, a diet completely devoid of fiber can still make you feel full.

Re: Challenges in the diagnosis of magnesium status

#299

Post by atom_arranger »

jonnycomputer wrote: post #140
lamontcg wrote: post #83

> Magnesium deficiency can be attributed to common dietary practices, medications, and farming techniques, along with estimates that the mineral content of vegetables has declined by as much as 80–90% in the last 100 years. This is why, when people defend GMOs with the argument that we've been genetically modifying plants and animals for hundreds of years by selective breeding, that I don't think that argument leads…

What does this have to do with GMOs though?

The idea being that maybe our selective breeding has already had a negative affect in terms of nutrient content.

So if we’ve messed things up with selective breeding we could be similarly messing things up with genetic modification.

Re: Challenges in the diagnosis of magnesium status

#300

Post by xyzzyz »

throwawaaarrgh wrote: post #250
xyzzyz wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can it be solved by simply adding more magnesium to the fertilizer?

Fertilizer is actually the problem. The soil is losing magnesium because we don't practice crop rotation anymore, so we load up the soil with fertilizer, 90% of which runs off into our watersheds, wreaking havoc. It can be solved by using less efficient / more complex farming practices which aren't amenable to mass production of monocultures. But that makes a lot less money, so it will never happen. A different solut…

> It can be solved by using less efficient / more complex farming practices which aren't amenable to mass production of monocultures. But that makes a lot less money, so it will never happen.

“Makes less money” is certainly one point of view. Another is “makes the food too expensive to afford for many, and shifts more land usage to farming, to make up for the reduced productivity per acre”. It is not even clear that it would reduce the profits of food producers: it depends on the shapes on supply curves. If every food producer is forced to produce food using expensive methods, and people are forced to buy food anyway (as they ultimately must eat), it is very well possible that the profits could actually increase: if demand for food is inelastic, people will just pay higher prices to get the same amount of food, which would only increase the total profits of agricultural industry.

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