Eye opening article in Jy 25 2020 New Scientist about undocumented micronutrients

HeidiCooksSupper

I know we know little about nutrition compared to what there is to know, but a recent article in New Scientist talked about efforts to identify and quantify some of the thousands of undocumented chemicals in what we eat. They describe a database building effort that lists 70,000 nutritional compounds in some foods, more than 400 times what the USDA database analyzes. Example: USDA lists 67 compounds in raw garlic, FooDB has 2306.

Scientists are only beginning to assess what happens to some of these chemicals when we eat them and what effects result. The article suggests that this is why so many of our statements about the benefits of a particular food don't end up being reliable or explicable; there are things going on with chemicals we don't presently pay attention to.

Wow.

cmriverside

Ugh.

The, "Nutrition is wrong in the database," threads would be a nightmare.

My N=1 is always along these lines: eat as many different things in a day as you can fit. If I made sure to hit every micronutrient every day I couldn't do it, but if I get a wide variety of protein sources, nuts, seeds, legumes, many different fruits and vegetables I not only feel better but my weight is much more easily managed and I do eventually hit all the micros.

It can't hurt.

janejellyroll

cmriverside wrote: »

Ugh.

The, "Nutrition is wrong in the database," threads would be a nightmare.

My N=1 is always along these lines: eat as many different things in a day as you can fit. If I made sure to hit every micronutrient every day I couldn't do it, but if I get a wide variety of protein sources, nuts, seeds, legumes, many different fruits and vegetables I not only feel better but my weight is much more easily managed and I do eventually hit all the micros.

It can't hurt.

MFP of the future: This garlic entry only lists 2,103 of the known 2,306 compounds. Someone needs to fix this!

cmriverside

janejellyroll wrote: »

cmriverside wrote: »

Ugh.

The, "Nutrition is wrong in the database," threads would be a nightmare.

My N=1 is always along these lines: eat as many different things in a day as you can fit. If I made sure to hit every micronutrient every day I couldn't do it, but if I get a wide variety of protein sources, nuts, seeds, legumes, many different fruits and vegetables I not only feel better but my weight is much more easily managed and I do eventually hit all the micros.

It can't hurt.

MFP of the future: This garlic entry only lists 2,103 of the known 2,306 compounds. Someone needs to fix this!

AND WHY IS ONE CLOVE 6,000 calories???

cmriverside

Sorry, Heidi...I digress...

It is interesting, your point.

At one time or another I've added all kinds of foods because the Google told me it had _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ nutrient that I could only get in a limited number of foods. Then I forget to eat that food, negating all my Googling and all my shopping lists and probably killing me.

AnnPT77

I've long assumed that food contains essential and beneficial nutrients we don't know about (and possibly some anti-beneficial ones, too 😬).

Over the course of my lifetime, quite a number of essential nutrients have been identified as physiologically active (is that the right term?🤔) and pinned down as essential, still more as beneficial. I assume we haven't discovered all of them yet.

The same thinking makes me mildly skeptical about dramatically new synthesized food products (though I don't fear harm from modest amounts, generally).

As new essential/beneficial nutrients are discovered, they're often put into processed foods and supplements. They were in traditional foods all along. Generally, I figure I can't go too far wrong eating foods that large numbers of humans have eaten for centuries or millennia, and lived (at least long enough to breed 😆). Further, I assume that large scale correlational studies of nutrition and health are implicitly capturing some of these effects, and getting them into mainstream dietary recommendations, in a broad sense (such as "eat more veggies!" 😆 even though we don't have a catalog of what's in every veggie chemically speaking and know what each does alone or in combination).

New scientific knowledge would be fun and interesting to me, though. An organized effort sounds like a good plan - there are certainly other areas (genomics, for example) where overall progress seems to have benefitted from systematization/coordination of the approach.

So: Cool!

zamphir66

I think if these micronutrients have already been in the food for a long time and quietly providing nutrition in the background, they should be allowed to stay.

MikePfirrman

There are things that they are discovering everyday. I take a Vit K2 every day. Scientists figured out over 10 years ago that it was the missing piece in healthy bones/hearts for many years, but most Americans have no idea about it.

I read about ancient yeasts used in brewing a few years ago. One yeast used in old beers had incredible health properties to it. Even the changes in yeast over time have had negative affects on our health.

Much like the seed storage bank (that one where they keep the seeds so plants don't go extinct), they are finding, over time, our microbiomes are getting less and less diverse. Bugs inside of us are going extinct in many people in modern civilization. Who knows why. Maybe it's all the diverse, wild food our ancestors ate. Maybe it was the not so sterile methods of food storage and fermentation.

I know of one company for instance that is identifying all the species in the ocean. Only 10%, up till now, have been identified. And the human gut has like a 78% crossover similarity to the ocean life. All tied together. One big universe that is dependent on everything else. So marvelous and so fragile.