Below is an excerpt from Part One of

The 2004 Multi-Diet

by Anderson A. Anonymous, M.D., Ph.D.

The Vitamin/Mineral Factor

The Vitamin/Mineral Factor is the first of the Eight Vital Factors that we will discuss. I list it first simply because vitamins and minerals are familiar to most people and therefore make a good introduction to the general technique for handling all the other Multi-Diet Vital Factors. It is not any more important than any of the other vital factors.

Whenever your body runs low on one of the vitamins or minerals it needs in order to keep you healthy, it wakes up The Beast to make you go eat something that might have some of that vitamin or mineral in it.

However, if you leave the choice of what you eat up to The Beast, then whatever you eat is certain to have far too many calories compared to its amount of whatever vitamin or mineral you actually need. (The Beast is completely unconcerned about this "minor detail". )

Naturally, whenever this happens, your body will thriftily store the excess calories for "the next scheduled famine", and wake up The Beast a few hours later when it again runs low on that vitamin or mineral you didn't get very much of. This process, applied to all of the Eight Vital Factors, is the process that made you fat. Obviously, we have to do things a little differently to get rid of that fat.

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Multi-Diet vitamin and mineral management techniques are the way you consciously intervene to make sure you get enough of each vitamin and mineral you need without the Calories you don't need. In the modern world, The Beast is simply not smart enough to do this without your help. In a world of supermarkets and restaurants and fast food, only you are smart enough to learn how to make the choices that must be made.

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Learning to provide all of the vitamins and minerals in the right amounts eliminates a whole bunch of the reasons for your body to wake up The Beast (but not all of them). The vitamins are slightly easier to deal with than the minerals, so we'll discuss them first.

Vitamins

You know that you need various vitamins or you will get sick. The Beast knows this too. That's why whenever it senses that you're "running low" on one or more of them, it wakes up and tries to make you go eat something that might have them in it.

But in our modern world of supermarkets and restaurants and fast food, The Beast is just too primitive to know what type of food has whichever vitamin you're getting low on. In terms of selecting food properly, The Beast is completely lost in this world---and it has very little learning ability. Most of the time it has only the most rudimentary idea of which modern prepared foods might actually have whatever vitamin you may need at any given time. So it goes wild and tries to make you eat everything in sight. Your job is to learn to give it exactly the vitamins it needs with as few calories as possible, so that it will stop bothering you, go back to sleep, and let you lose weight in peace.

[Note: There is very fascinating research that indicates that The Beast does not totally lack the ability to learn about new foods - it's just that left to itself it tends to learn the wrong things - and that becomes part of the problem. (See the discussion of THE VARIETY SENSATION on page 267 in Part Two where this research is discussed and where I indulge in a little (Ok, a lot) of speculation about it.)]

Obviously, since prevention is better than cure, it would be much smarter for you to give The Beast the vitamins that it will want---before starts to bother you. As I've mentioned, this is now much easier than ever before in history.

You simply use vitamin supplements.

There are currently 13 "officially recognized" vitamins. A broad-formula multi-vitamin tablet with 100% of the RDI amounts of each of these will keep The Beast relatively happy about them. So while you are on The Multi-Diet, you will take a multi-vitamin tablet daily.

However, don't make the mistake of overdoing vitamin supplements. One daily "multi" is enough. Multi-Diet supplementing is about ensuring simple sufficiency, not trying to force an effect with "therapeutic" doses of this or that.

For a discussion of the research and references on vitamins, see MORE ON... VITAMINS & MINERALS on page 220 in Part Two.

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The "RDIs"

"RDI" stands for Recommended Dietary Intake. This is the generic term for any official system developed to make nutrition recommendations. (The U.S. RDA system is an example of such a system). On the Multi-Diet we make extensive use of RDIs to give consistent and scientific guidance on the types and amounts of nutrients that you need to keep The Beast asleep. (For further discussion of these systems, see RDIs: THE OFFICIAL MYSTERIES on page 221 in Part Two.)

I have taken most of the specific numeric values for RDIs used in The Multi-Diet from the "Daily Value" System of the U.S. Food & Drug Administration because it has the significant advantage of single-number simplicity---and because I'm most familiar with it.

I apologize to my international readers for this limitation. My evil-cyborg editors just wouldn't approve expenses for my planned five-year, round-the-world vacat... uh, I mean "research trip", to make The Multi-Diet compatible with all other important global systems.:) (However, you will find an English-to-Metric conversion chart on page 367 in Part Two.)

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Minerals

Of course both you and The Beast also know that vitamins alone are not enough to keep you healthy. There are about 50 nutrients known to be essential for humans. The 13 vitamins therefore represent only about one-quarter of them. So while a simple multi-vitamin tablet is a very good start on handling them properly---it's still only a start.

A major premise of the threshold theory is that an insufficiency of even one of the essential 50 will cause your body to "wake The Beast" to make you eat to get its reserves of that one back up above the threshold. This converts the Multi-Diet into a "Heroic Diet".

Fortunately, we have other nutritional tools similar to multi-vitamin tablets that help us handle the other nutrients.

Minerals are just as important to health as vitamins. However, most people know much less about them. There are currently 15 officially recognized essential minerals.

Modern food processing techniques tend to move minerals around. That is, they remove some amounts of some minerals in some foods and add other amounts of other minerals to other foods. (Just adding ordinary table salt to food is one common example of this.) With highly processed foods forming higher and higher percentages of the food available in modern societies, it is likely that many people are constantly "running low" on one or another of the minerals without really knowing it. The Beast knows it though, and it just stimulates them to eat more food to make up any "insufficiencies".

This means that you cannot simply assume you're getting enough of each vital mineral from your "normal" food each day. On the Multi-Diet, we don't make such assumptions. Instead, we use Multi-Diet techniques to consciously ensure we're getting enough of these minerals---without a lot of Calories. In practice, this is almost as easy as handling the vitamins---but not quite.

Minerals: "Microminerals" or "Trace Elements"

The easy part of handling the fifteen minerals is that eight of them are what nutritionists term "microminerals" or "trace elements". Either of these two terms refers to those minerals that humans need in relatively small daily amounts in order to remain healthy. For minerals, "small" is arbitrarily defined as being less than one hundred milligrams (100-mg) per day.

[Note: There is also a category of "ultra-trace" elements (arsenic is a member) that appear to be essential to life and health but in such small amounts that it's almost impossible to eliminate them from the diet. This means we can probably ignore them until research gives us a better understanding of any relevant issues.]

Since these minerals are needed in such small quantities, vitamin supplement manufacturers routinely include them in the multi-vitamin supplement tablets we just talked about. This means that a good multi-vitamin/mineral supplement tablet probably contains almost one-half of the 50 essential nutrients required to keep The Beast asleep. So using such supplements properly takes us about halfway to our goal of taming The Beast. (Very convenient!J)

Minerals: "Macrominerals"

However, besides the microminerals (trace elements), there are some other minerals---the macrominerals---that require special attention. There are seven macrominerals (see below). They are arbitrarily called "macrominerals" because adults need them in amounts greater than 100-mg per day---in most cases over 1,000-mg per day.

[Note: Macrominerals tend to have so many important and diverse functions in the body that failure to have enough "on hand" makes The Beast very unhappy especially quickly.]

Even when you are on a diet and not eating much food, your body still needs these relatively large daily amounts of macrominerals.

But since you are not eating much food on a diet, it is very easy for you to routinely not get enough of them. This can let you gradually become seriously deficient in some of them. Naturally, The Beast reacts to this very common dieting occurrence with its usual combination of intense food cravings, low energy levels, and other unpleasant sensations as it tries to both conserve your limited supplies and force you to get it some more.

None of the single-tablet multi-vitamin/mineral supplements can supply 100% of the recommended amounts of all the macrominerals. (If they did, the pill would probably be the size of a golf ball!J) Therefore, we Multi-Dieters have to use other means to make sure we get enough of each macromineral each day. And again, in the modern world it's not hard to do. You simply "supplement the supplement" (strange concept, isn't it?).

Macromineral supplements are readily available in supermarkets and healthfood stores, but they require some special knowledge to use properly, because like most other valuable tools (for example, electricity, automobiles, or kitchen knives), they can be dangerous if used improperly. We discuss the proper methods for using them properly both below and also in Part Two: MORE ON... VITAMINS & MINERALS on page 220.

The following table lists the seven critical macrominerals and gives the official RDIs for each of them.