Vitamins, Minerals
& Weight Loss

Below is an excerpt from Part Two of

The 2004 Multi-Diet

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

More On… Vitamins & Minerals

A little water can save your life—if you’re in the desert.
A lot of water can kill you—if you’re in the ocean.

Vitamins, Trace Elements, and Ultra-Trace Elements

Vitamins, trace elements, and ultra-trace elements are nutritional substances required in relatively small amounts. Together, they represent a fascinating subject to which this book does a terrible injustice—it mostly ignores them . We don’t do this out of disrespect for them, however. We do it simply because science and technology have created a simple solution to the practical problems of these substances for dieters:

Take a good multi-vitamin/mineral tablet every day and you can assume that you have eliminated 97.5% of your risk that any “subclinical” deficiency of vitamins and trace elements will “wake The Beast”.

“Good” does not mean most expensive or best known. It simply means that the tablet(s) have 100% of the RDI of the most vitamins and microminerals.

This simple technique effectively eliminates about one-half of the total number of nutritional inadequacies that could wake The Beast and destroy your diet. (You’re not “home-free”, of course, because any one of the others can still wake The Beast and destroy your diet all by itself.)

Macrominerals

The above point about “simple solutions” for vitamins and trace elements does not apply to the “macrominerals”—which are the seven minerals required by the body in relatively large amounts (arbitrarily defined by professionals as more than 100 mg per day). Macrominerals require serious attention if you wish to prevent “diet-destroying” problems. The main purpose of this chapter is to provide you with the best knowledge currently available to do the job.

The basic issue with the macrominerals is that either too little of them or too much of them is known to disturb many physiologic functions (particularly cardiac function).

Therefore, getting too little of them can not only wake The Beast but can actually be dangerous if you happen to be able to keep doing it for a long time. Any diet (even the Multi-Diet) on which you either ignore the macrominerals (and become mineral deficient) or on which you “overenthusiastically” supplement minerals (and create a toxic condition), can eventually get you into serious trouble. (Of course, if you do either of these things, you’re no longer on the Multi-Diet at all. Instead, you’ve put yourself on some sort of “Heroic” Diet of your own devising.)

A Special Warning

Macromineral supplementation while dieting is important for everyone. But if you are one of the heavier readers of The Multi-Diet (e.g. a BMI over 30), it is especially important for you. The reason for this is that you will probably find that you have no difficulty staying on the Multi-Diet for as long as you need while steadily losing weight.

Of course, losing weight is a good thing and it’s the reason you’re reading this book. But, if you fail to supplement the macrominerals—or if you supplement them in a haphazard way—you will almost certainly become dangerously deficient in one or more of them over the relatively long time you are dieting. And you may not notice that this is happening. THIS IS NO-KIDDING DANGEROUS! A prolonged drain of any of the seven macrominerals will eventually cause serious and life-threatening cardiac arrhythmias.

Even if you are not very heavy, the same thing could still happen to you if you are in a marginally deficient state with one or more of the macrominerals when you start dieting. Many large and well-funded population surveys have shown that certain marginal mineral deficiencies are quite common even in “advanced industrial societies”. (See below.)

Please take this issue very seriously. I want you to lose that fat, not your health.

The various official organizations that create the RDIs have simplified these issues for us by taking such factors into account as much as currently possible when they set the RDI amounts for each individual mineral. (That’s why scientists get the “big bucks”. )

The part we as dieters must still do for ourselves is to learn to combine the foods we eat and the supplements we take to achieve the approximate RDI amounts of each macromineral without either overshooting or undershooting the proper amounts too much or too often. Fortunately, it’s not difficult to do—with a little knowledge and technique.

What about “undiscovered” nutrients?

There are a number of food factors known to have some of the characteristics of essential nutrients. For various reasons they are not (yet) officially considered essential. I take no position on these factors other than to say that if you know about them and decide to take them as supplements, be sure to count any Calories that may come with them. If you don’t take them, it probably won’t matter because most of them seem to be needed in quantities so small they can almost drift in on the dust you breath.