"camelopard" top.act> wrote

I am puzzled by the statements of some dietary supplement advocates,
which I take to be true statements, that certain vitamins, minerals, amino
acids, etc. are not present sufficinetly in foods to meet the daily needs of
the human body, even if we eat an enormous amount of the providing foods,
and thus we have to take supplements.

This doesn't seem to make evolutionary sense. It seems that the human
body should receive ample nutrients from the foods it is able to digest.

How would one answer this? Is the same true for other species, or just
for humans?

Are some foods adapted not just for humans, but for the diet of other
animals? So does the human body just get more or less of what it needs?

Perhaps the human body is adapted to a diet followed by early humans and
monkey-like ancestors, and perhaps for most of its evolutionary history the
human or pre-human body was much smaller, and perhaps more metabolically
adjusted to its food, and did not require supplements.

Or maybe the human diet has always been deficient. Does that mean the
human body is unnatural? Or maybe the original foods have been destroyed,
and we have only nutritionally imperfect substitutes, that fall short of
what is required.

Our diet nowadays is deficient in essential nutrients. This does not
imply that the diet of prehistoric humans was deficient. There is
already enough debate on how junk food is not good for us, this is why.
It just does not provide many of the essential components of our diet.
So the fact that some people may require supplments tody only indicates
that their diet is not capable of providing essential nutrients, not as
you suggest any discrepency in evolution.

"Malcolm" (regniztar@btinternet.com) writes:

On the contrary. Pauling's book "Live Longer and Feel Better"
references many scientific studies, including many showing lower
rates of disease with higher vitamin C intake. I'm most impressed
by the experiment in the chapter on Cancer where patients who
had been classified as terminally ill were given 10 grams a
day of vitamin C and their remaining lifespans
compared with similar
patients in the same hospital who were not given the vitamin supplement.

"camelopard" (camelopard@top.act) writes:

No, no, it doesn't work that way.

Optimal health is not necessarily obtained by duplicating
the circumstances under which the species evolved.

If you take your assumptions further, you could argue
that species should evolve to be healthy when they're
taking in no food at all. That way they could live
through famines, and go further and save time and
energy by not bothering to eat even when there's
food present.

That's obviously impossible.

Catherine Woodgold wrote:

I would think that most of the time it would be so, with obvious
inconveniences like smilodon bites not considered.

Robert J. Kolker wrote:

"Perplexed in Peoria" (jimmenegay@sbcglobal.net) writes:

Yes, some of them are placebo-controlled studies.

"Kermit" (unrestrained_hand@hotmail.com) writes:

You might think that, but you would be wrong.
The circumstances during evolution included presence of parasites,
occasional famine, etc. Better health can be obtained
with better conditions.

Perhaps during evolution there was no time at which
the individuals were obtaining optimal amounts of every
nutrient. Today, given any ordinary person it is almost
certainly possible to find at least one nutrient for which that
person is consuming only suboptimal amounts. That was
probably true throughout evolution. Provide better nutrition,
and health immediately improves.

"Robert J. Kolker" (nowhere@nowhere.com) writes: