Challenges in the diagnosis of magnesium status • Hacker News Board

Re: Challenges in the diagnosis of magnesium status

#311

Post by andredz » Mon, Jun 28, 2021, 1:48 AM UTC

akiselev wrote: post #229

C-x_C-f wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotally (though studies like [1] seem to confirm this), I've found that tomatoes are quite sensitive to transportation and storage. To me, garden tomatoes taste fantastic; the ones at the local farmers' market taste pretty good too; supermarket tomatoes are only good for making tomato sauce. I wonder whether the tomatoes you ate as a kid had been transported over long distances. Also anecdotally, I haven't found…

The varieties you see in a supermarket are optimized for industrial farming and yes, transportation is one of the things they optimize for. The tomato specifically, though, lost most of it's flavor purely for aesthetic reasons [1]. Consumers have an image of the perfectly round red tomato so all the farmers optimized for it, losing at least one critical gene that contributed significantly to flavor and sugar producti…

Something similar happened to the Red Delicious apple: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Delicious#Selective_breedi...

Re: Challenges in the diagnosis of magnesium status

#312

Post by phkahler » Mon, Jun 28, 2021, 1:53 AM UTC

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…

>> So if you eat 400g of broccoli vs 400g of chicken, the one that will make you feel more full is obviously the protein.

The idea under discussion is that the thing that will make you feel more full is the food that has what you're deficient in. That makes sense, and evolution tends to do things that make sense.

Re: Challenges in the diagnosis of magnesium status

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Post by brandonmenc » Mon, Jun 28, 2021, 1:53 AM UTC

stuaxo wrote: post #238

alaffere wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What if we're compelled to eat more calories when we're not getting enough nutrients in our diets? From what is starting to be known about hunger drives from animal studies [1] this is essentially correct. [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221457451...

Completely unscientific - but when you see programs on TV about people that eat a lot, the food tends to be highly processed and low in nutrients, I've been wondering the same thing.

> the food tends to be highly processed and low in nutrients

This type of food is - coincidentally - always extremely high in calories.

But the relationship is orthogonal. You can make processed non-nutritious food that is low in calories, and you can make healthy food that is high in calories. The former happens rarely.

Re: Challenges in the diagnosis of magnesium status

#314

Post by rblatz » Mon, Jun 28, 2021, 1:54 AM UTC

ikr678 wrote: post #255

rblatz wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weird I take magnesium to prevent muscle cramps. I don’t supplement calcium at all.

I was under the impression that cramps are from an imbalance of potassium, calcium and magnesium. Supplementing the one you are lacking generally resolves the problem, but its hard to know for an individual without trial and error unless you are 100% sure of your diet.

I mentioned in passing to a nurse at my gym that I get calf cramps from running. She told me to get a supplement from Amazon called Calm. It eliminated the cramps, and after an especially rough squat workout I used to get cramps, it also took care of that. Although you need to be very careful with the dosage, it is basically a laxative.

Re: Challenges in the diagnosis of magnesium status

#315

Post by kaitai » Mon, Jun 28, 2021, 1:55 AM UTC

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…

Volume is important for feeling full. For sure protein really helps, that's well-studied. But low-calorie-density high-nutrient density foods (like veggies) can really hit the spot and help satiety. And yes, people do get a lot of water from veggie intake, actually!

Re: Challenges in the diagnosis of magnesium status

#316

Post by kortex » Mon, Jun 28, 2021, 1:55 AM UTC

lk0nga wrote: post #137

wincy wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The RDA on Magnesium is almost never there on multivitamin formulas and so should be added separatedly, I can't really feel that (significantly) it helps for anxiety or jittery though, same goes for theanine, in fact theanine makes my jittery/anxiety worse. Best for jittery/anxiety is taurine, at around 2 grams per each 100mg of caffeine, YMMV. I've noted overall anxiety got noteacible better when I added DHEA, I'd g…

Thanks for the taurine tip. I've always enjoyed the red bull sensation more than coffee. Never thought taurine would be neuro-active enough, but I'm revisiting that idea.

Theanine is great with caffeine also. I just spoon it in 200-400mg into my coffee.

Re: Challenges in the diagnosis of magnesium status

#317

Post by kortex » Mon, Jun 28, 2021, 2:06 AM UTC

zepto wrote: post #134

slipframe wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Why do we need to drink water anyway? Why can't we all get our fluids from an IV?"

Why stop there? If you are getting fluids via IV, may as well add in nutrients.

I'm down. Add a glucostat for optimal blood sugar level too. Just get a waterproof Ergodox, wrap around 8k monitor, and a sensory dep tank (with optional high-tech minimal techno piped in).

I call it The Precog. It'll be a hit in SV.

Re: Challenges in the diagnosis of magnesium status

#318

Post by kaitai » Mon, Jun 28, 2021, 2:07 AM UTC

xyzzyz wrote: post #300

throwawaaarrgh wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Agricultural policy in the US shapes a lot of this, though, via subsidies. The financial system also shapes this through its lending policies. The implements of industrialized farming are what the ag lending sector is designed around; try to step out of that mainstream and you will have trouble accessing capital.

Wheat, corn, and soybeans are heavily subsidized by the US gov't and vegetables are not at all. Every little tiny program to subsidize vegetable growers is picked at every year (happening right now in my state legislature) -- it's always a fight to preserve.

The agricultural lending system in the US is fascinating. Look up Farm Credit Administration. We have a weird and unique system of paragovernmental financial institutions in the US that do farm lending, and even though it's not technically government-backed lending, everyone sees it as such, and so there are some interesting distortions in the market (compared to a more "free-market" system). It does seem quite centered around US gov't subsidies and farm/ag policies.

Re: Challenges in the diagnosis of magnesium status

#319

Post by kaitai » Mon, Jun 28, 2021, 2:20 AM UTC

I see a lot of discussion of nutrient content of farmed vegetables here. A cheap and easy alternative to farmed greens lies in foraging wild weeds. Reports from scientists at UC Berkeley have found that toxins like heavy metals, PCBs, etc don't bioaccumulate in these wild greens, so that's great. They rival kale and spinach in their nutritive value. And they're free! Learn to reliably identify the weeds around you and you'll find tons of joy in weeding your backyard or foraging at a park and getting a dinner salad (or bathua ka saag, or quelites, or horta, or minestrella soup) out of it. And it's incredibly unlikely someone's going to be pissed at you for picking their dandelions/purslane/cat's ear/goosefoot/plantain. (Do avoid areas that have had pesticide applied.)

https://cosmosmagazine.com/biology/weeds-growing-in-poor-cit...

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/385864v1

Re: Challenges in the diagnosis of magnesium status

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Post by epistasis » Mon, Jun 28, 2021, 2:24 AM UTC

rini17 wrote: post #88

lainga wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Put another way, one might say he borrowed from the future to save the present.

I wouldn't put all the blame on him. Wouldn't be first or last time the narrowly efficiency-minded nerds and businessmen took a good idea and optimized it into a monster.

The supposed alternative, changing distribution of food rather than production of food, was a political decision that was fraught with problems. Any nation without food security soon finds that it can lose all of its other security too.

So for a lot of the criticism of the Green Revolution, which comes from a place of wanting a different political structure, but not yet being sure what that structure is, nerds like me see the "alternative" as not a real one. Politics could have saved India, but it did not, it was basic biotech and giving Indian farmers more productivity. If this is a "monster" I'd really like to see a less monstrous alternative proposed, with all the details specified. Because any alternative path sounds too monstrous to be considered by a humane being.