Getting your 5-a-day, do you have to get your micronutrients every day, or is weekly enough?

hamlet1222

Here in the UK we have a government health 5-a-day campaign to get people eating 5 portions of fresh fruit and vegetables a day (although now people are saying it should be 7-a-day). I think the goal is to ensure people get all the micronutrients they need - and also has the bonus of people having less capacity to eat junk food.

What I'm wondering though, from a micronutrient standpoint, is it really necessary to get everything EVERY day? What if you had blackcurrents one day (vitamin c), carrots the next, and so on?

I was reading about Magellan's sea explorations, and most of his crew got scurvy due to lack of vitamin C, but he didn't because he had some jam occasionally.

Do people see where I'm coming from? I've gone a day without eating any major vitamin c source, and not felt the worse for it.

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hamlet1222

but I've read in more than a few places that vitamin pills are useless

Sabine_Stroehm

hamlet1222 wrote: »

but I've read in more than a few places that vitamin pills are useless

There's mixed opinions about whether vitamins are helpful or not.

Eat a nutrient dense diet of foods you enjoy. If you're eating plenty of nutrient dense foods you're probably doing quite well. Even while limiting calories.

lemurcat12

I've recently started playing with Cron-O-Meter just for fun, but my assumption has always been that generally getting everything over the course of a few days or so (or likely longer than that) is going to be fine. Human beings are resilient and could withstand periods of not being particularly available throughout much of our history and of course seasons in which certain foods were harder to come by. So I think it's enough to get a broad selection of foods that are nutrient dense and not fret beyond that (I only am since it gets me motivated to care about calories again and I want to lose a few more lbs). It will shake out.

(My doctor said that if you eat a generally healthy diet the one thing she'd generally recommend maybe supplementing even without doing tests and seeing a deficiency is Vit D in the winter--at least in the climate I happen to live in.)

AnvilHead

The body's processes are open-ended and continuous, they don't work on a closed 24-hour loop. Being a little short on any macro or micronutrient for a day isn't going to hurt anything. Deficiencies become problematic when they're chronic.