Vitamins, Minerals And Optimal Health: Recommendations To Prevent Diseases Based On Science, Not Marketing

By María I. Tapia

To maintain good health you need to provide your body with more than 30 vitamins, minerals and other compounds that it cannot manufacture. Do you consume enough of all of them?
Many experts do not think so. Their theory is that the typical diet of modern societies, deficient in certain vitamins and minerals, could be related to the current high prevalence of some current chronic diseases. But is that true?
• Can deficiencies in these nutrients make us sick?
• When should we turn to multivitamin supplements?

The author addresses these issues, based on the novelties provided by science.
She will give you the keys to get the right amounts of vitamins and minerals and optimize your health.

“A small oasis in the arid territory of so many miracle and/or fashionable diets, false promises and 'rigorous' studies”.

To maintain good health, you must provide your body with more than 30 vitamins, minerals and other compounds that it cannot manufacture. Do you consume enough of all of them?

Many experts do not think so. Their theory is that the typical diet of modern societies, deficient in certain minerals and vitamins, could be related to the high prevalence of some current chronic diseases. But is that true?

• Can the deficiencies or shortages of these nutrients make us sick?
• When should we resort to multivitamin supplements?

The author addresses these issues, based on the novelties provided by science. She will give you the keys to get the right amounts of vitamins and minerals and optimize your health.
You will learn how vitamins and minerals differ, which vitamins should be replaced every few days and which ones your body can store and release as you need them.
You will understand why there is a debate about the recommended amounts and why more is not always better.

Includes specialized sections

• How can I improve my diet
• What other factors of my lifestyle can I improve?
• Foods rich in the scarcest minerals and vitamins in the diet

Written in a very intimate tone, it is useful for any reader who seeks to improve his or her health, prevent diseases, and get away from myths and pseudoscience.

Index:
VITAMINS AND MINERALS
• A discovery that changed human health
• Vitamins: those almost magical substances
• The latest discoveries
• What are vitamins useful for?
• Minerals: our inalterable body component
• What are minerals useful for?

SOURCES OF VITAMINS AND MINERALS
• Surprising data: where we get vitamins and minerals
• We are not what we eat, but rather what we make use of
• The purpose of a plant is not our survival, but rather its own
• The micronutrient content of plants varies greatly
• How vitamins are lost from foods

IS IT NORMAL TO HAVE DEFICIENCIES IN VITAMINS AND MINERALS?
• How do we know if we are consuming enough vitamins and minerals
• A super-productive agriculture does not provide us with more micronutrients
• Do we consume enough vitamins and minerals in developed countries?
• What are the scarcest vitamins and minerals amongst the population of developed countries?
• Conclusions

HOW TO GET THE VITAMINS AND MINERALS THAT WE NEED FROM OUR DIET
• To get the nutrients that we need, let's eat real food
• Strategies to consume more vitamins and minerals without turning to supplements
• How to increase consumption of the scarcest micronutrients in our diet

HOW TO LIVE A HEALTHIER LIFE
• Let's not blame our genes for our bad health
• How can we improve our diet
• What other aspects of our lifestyle can we improve

__________________________
About the author
María I. Tapia has a PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. She has developed her professional career for almost twenty years in the pharmaceutical and agri-food sector (regulation of metabolism, development of new vaccines, functional foods, improvement of fruit quality, detection and control of chemical and microbiological contaminants in food products,

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tektime
• Release date: Jun 11, 2018
• ISBN: 9788893980548

Book preview

VITAMINS, MINERALS

AND OPTIMAL HEALTH

________________________________________________

RECOMMENDATIONS TO PREVENT DISEASES

BASED ON SCIENCE, NOT MARKETING

MARÍA I. TAPIA

ENGLISH TRANSLATOR:

DELYCIA ROMANY

ORIGINAL TITLE:

Vitaminas, minerales y salud óptima

© María I. Tapia 2018

All rights reserved

Cover: Finder Design

E-mail: [e-mail]

To my mother, wherever she is

To you, for reading this book, my first book

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

PART 1

VITAMINS AND MINERALS

1. A discovery that changed human health

2. Vitamins: those almost magical substances

3. The latest discoveries

4. What are vitamins useful for?

5. Minerals: our inalterable body component

6. What are minerals useful for?

PART 2

SOURCES OF VITAMINS AND MINERALS

7. Surprising data: where we get vitamins and minerals

8. We are not what we eat, but rather what we make use of

9. A plant’s goal is not our survival, but rather its own

10. The micronutrient content of plants varies greatly

11. How vitamins are lost from foods

PART 3

IS IT NORMAL TO HAVE DEFICIENCIES IN VITAMINS AND MINERALS?

12. How to know if we are consuming enough vitamins and minerals

13. A super-productive agriculture does not provide us with more micronutrients

14. Do we consume enough vitamins and minerals in developed countries?

15. What are the scarcest vitamins and minerals amongst the population of developed countries?

16. Conclusions

PART 4

HOW TO GET THE VITAMINS AND MINERALS THAT WE NEED FROM OUR DIET

17. To get the nutrients we need, let’s it eat real food

18. Strategies to consume more vitamins and minerals without turning to supplements

19. How to increase consumption of the scarcest micronutrients in our diet

PART 5

HOW TO LIVE A HEALTHIER LIFE

20. Let’s not blame our genes for our bad health

21. How we can improve our diets

22. What other aspects of our lifestyles we can improve

Epilogue

About the author

Your opinion matters

Another book by the author

Copyright

INTRODUCTION

If I had a T-shirt slogan for this whole book it would be: I think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that.

—BEN GOLDACRE, Bad science

WHAT WILL YOU DISCOVER IN THIS BOOK?

I would bet that you would like someone to answer the following questions:

• What are the real values of vitamins and minerals?

• Do we have deficiencies in any of them?

• What are the long-term effects of moderate deficiencies in these substances?

• Can we be overweight or obese and at the same time be undernourished?

• Would we have better health if we provide our bodies with more vitamins and minerals?

• How can we get sufficient vitamins and minerals from our diets?

• How can we live a healthier life?

If I hit the mark and you want to know the answer to one of these questions, or to all, this book will help you.

WHY DID I WRITE THIS BOOK?

Because I believe that everyone has the right to have access to the best information available (explained in a simple and summarized way), despite never having read a scientific article nor ever having specific training in science. My goal is for you to access that information, which is emerging almost daily, and that you can apply it in your day to day.

WHY CAN YOU TRUST ME?

I must confess something: as I am writing these lines (with the book already written) I still doubt if I should include this sentence: I became a Doctor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at 26 years old. Over time I have learned that titles alone are not enough to show the professional value of a person. What really matters is experience.

For that reason I think it’s important for you to know that throughout the years I have worked in a pharmaceutical company and in various research centres (The Institut Pasteur, amongst others), on quite different subjects such as: metabolism regulation, development of new vaccines, functional foods, improvement of the quality of fruit, detection of chemical and microbiological contaminants in processed food, water quality... All those have a common base: biochemistry and molecular biology. The science of the small. The study of our most basic nature, that of chemicals¹ and the molecules² of life.

In 2016 I made a turn in my professional career path: I decided to be a spectator and narrator of science (without straying far from the path I already knew from the inside). Since then I have thrown myself into writing books based in science. You are about to read the first of them, this one that you have in your hands.

If there’s something I have practice in it is searching for and managing the best information; a quality that is quite needed today as we are bombarded constantly with scientific news about nutrition. Scientific? Nowadays, a lot of people talk about science. They critique investigations despite never having conducted an experiment. This does not invalidate those comments, of course; but analysing scientific information from a theoretical point of view is not the same as having the knowledge and background from working for almost twenty years in the field, since the credibility of the studies lies in the details. Modestly, I believe that I can help bring scientific advances to anyone with enough interest in improving their health.

There is something else that we cannot overlook. Most frequently, authors of books related to nutrition and health (supplements, diets, detox products, etc.) have a very defined prior opinion; and in their book or articles they promote these opinions with the scientific literature that is the most favourable to them, avoiding the studies that contradict them. (Like Ben Goldacre said, There is so much information available on any topic related to nutrition in relation to health, that it will always be possible to find a wide selection of studies that will prove you right. The quality of those studies is another question.)

If I wanted to know the answer to the questions posed at the beginning, and maybe wanted to make a decision about them, I would choose authors who try to approach the topic without already having taken a position. I think that impartiality is one of my best values.

THIS BOOK IS FOR YOU IF:

• You turn to science, and not to dogmas or advertising, for the answers to many questions related to nutrition and health.

• You accept that, sometimes, It is not known is the only reasonable response.

• When choosing between what is simple and what is true, you always prefer what is true.

Do not expect personalized diets or medical advice from this book. That is not my objective. I am not a nutritionist, nor a dietitian, nor a doctor. I am inviting you to see the world of vitamins and minerals through the lens of biology and biochemistry. You will discover what is currently known about vitamins and minerals as it related to health, and the cutting-edge research that is ongoing in this domain. You will also know the important questions that researchers are trying to answer.

To begin, let’s go through the history of the discovery of vitamins.

PART 1

VITAMINS AND MINERALS

1

A DISCOVERY THAT CHANGED HUMAN HEALTH

Finding a needle in a haystack is much easier than isolating a vitamin. The one who seeks the needle knows what haystack to look in, but the one looking for the vitamin must first find the haystack.

—WALDEMAR KAEMPFFERT, What we know about vitamins (adapted), 1942

HOW DID WE GET HERE?

Eating has historically been a matter of survival. The main problem was getting the food. For many years, the meals of the majority of the population consisted mostly of cereals, legumes and a bit of meat at parties and other special moments. Sometimes some garden produce were added, whichever ones were in season.

Now we eat how only a few did back then: like the rich and the powerful. However, despite the abundance of food that crowds the colourful aisles of supermarkets, we feed ourselves with a limited variety of plant species, and a lot of them are becoming extinct.

It has only been a few years since we started relating food to health. And, since then, the concern about food has been ever-increasing. As well as the sometimes contradictory information. People are confused. And, in certain aspects, the researchers too.

Imagine that we are going to send astronauts into space with the food they need for several months in the form of pills. We can make pills with a mixture of carbohydrates, proteins and fats (the macronutrients), in the proportion that we want, and in enough quantity so that they have all the energy they need. But no more than that. What would happen? They would get sick and end up dying. Why, if they have plenty of energy? Because they need a few dozen more compounds to survive, and their bodies cannot make them. We are talking about vitamins, some minerals and other nutrients: the essential nutrients. What we now find so obvious we have only known for a short time. A flicker in the history of human beings.

Until the discovery of vitamins, about a hundred years ago, it was thought that foods contained only fats, carbohydrates and proteins (all three were known since 1827), in addition to minerals and water. And they were unaware of the nutritional importance of minerals. Technology had been sufficiently developed to break down foods into their major parts and analyse them separately. They separated fats, carbohydrates (or sugars, as they were called), proteins and minerals. When they analysed them and calculated what they all weighed together (with the scales they used at that time) they obtained one hundred percent of the original weight of the food, which is why for a long time nobody thought that there could be anything else in food. In fact, formulas of these three compounds were used to feed the babies, thinking that they could supply everything that was in the breast milk. How naïve. Or how arrogant, depending on how you look at it.

Practically since then we have been thinking about what proportion of each of the three macronutrients is necessary for optimal health. A question not yet resolved, given the intense debate that exists today on diets low in carbohydrates or low in fat, or on the ideal proportion of proteins that we should consume; or considering the endless number of food pyramids (or the modern version, the nutritional plate) that have been recommended for decades. And a question that perhaps is not so important if we take into consideration that the human metabolism is incredibly flexible, and that diets as different as that of an Eskimo (who consumes large amounts of fats) and those of some tribes that practically only eat plants, could be equally as healthy.

In addition, this debate on nutrients causes us to divert our attention from something more important: the quality of food.

But let’s get back to the vitamins. It is worth making a stop along the way and diving for a moment into the history of their discovery.

For a while everything was going relatively well, outside of the periods of famine. Wheat was the staple food in Europe and North America, and rice in Asia. But when they started deconstructing the foods and stripping them of some of their parts, for example the skin and the germ of the rice or the wheat, the problems started.

The seed of wheat (whole) has a lot of micronutrients, much more than that of rice or corn; it has vitamin A (that gives the flour a yellowish colour, before bleaching it), group B vitamins (niacin, folate) and vitamin E (alpha, beta and gamma tocopherols). Different molecules that perform different functions in our bodies. But these nutrients are not distributed homogeneously. Most of them are in the germ. When breaking the seed, these vitamins are exposed to the air, and the majority of them are destroyed, especially if bleaching or heating treatments are added to the system. What remains in the refined flour is not the living part of the plant (the germ, the embryo), but the food reserve of the seed, the endosperm, formed essentially by dead cells packed full of carbohydrates (starch).

Brown rice is not particularly poor in vitamins either; however, the husked grain consists in little more than the endosperm, rich in carbohydrates and almost devoid of vitamins and other essential micronutrients.

And why is the shell removed? Because the polyunsaturated fats in the outer layer of the cereal grain become rancid when rice (or wheat flour) is stored at high temperatures. The better the milling, the less vitamins will remain in the rice (or in the wheat). Around 1870, European colonists introduced steel roller mills in Asia; these machines were much more effective at removing the shell and producing the desired white rice. If the diet is varied, as it is