Vitamins, Minerals
& Weight Loss

Below is an excerpt from Part Two of

The 2004 Multi-Diet

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

Background on Macrominerals

As I mentioned in Part One, The Multi-Diet view of vitamin and mineral supplements is that they are the dieter’s second most valuable tool for success (the first is knowledge). When you restrict food in order to lose weight, you are—by definition—restricting nutrients of all sorts, not just Calories. Your body can easily do without the Calories because it has an “ample adipose accretion” of them in reserve.J But it’s likely to get very unhappy about doing without some of the other nutrients—because it probably doesn’t have ample reserves of those. If it gets unhappy, it’s likely to “wake The Beast” to try to make you go get what it needs. But since The Beast is not smart enough to do this without getting lots of Calories besides, you get caught in a vicious circle. The way to break out of this circle is to first restrict food (and the Calories it contains) and then to intelligently use supplements and certain concentrated natural foods to add back the non-energy nutrients that you still need.

The vitamins and trace elements are easy—they can be supplemented in the form of a single “multi-vitamin/mineral” tablet daily. The macrominerals, however, take up too much space to fit in a single tablet, so we have to “supplement the supplement”, and that takes some know-how.

A review of the medical literature (see below) shows that, in general, with the macrominerals:

1. It is possible to poison yourself by supplementing macrominerals at high levels for long periods. Potassium is especially dangerous in this regard, the others less so.
2. It is both easy and common to get marginally too little of several macrominerals—even during “normal” eating. (This is called a primary deficiency). Calcium and magnesium, as well as the trace elements iron and zinc, almost always show up on surveys measuring these sorts of issues.. Simpleminded low-Calorie or low fat dieting can easily make the situation much worse.
3. Getting too much of some macrominerals can probably cause relative deficiencies of others even when you are getting RDI amounts of these others. This happens because of their metabolic effects on each other (see below). The threshold theory suggests that relative deficiencies will “wake The Beast” just as primary deficiencies will.

The following sections give you basic information about what supplements are available, what the food sources are, and other useful information.

Note: I have not provided information on interactions between macrominerals, because interpreting this information is a problem even for researchers.

One of the issues is that different forms of each mineral may interact differently. For example, magnesium carbonate and magnesium oxide are two (among many) different forms of magnesium. Each of them may interact in a completely different way with the various chemical forms of other macrominerals. Therefore when researchers and others say that (e.g.) magnesium may interfere with the absorption of zinc, they are probably correct—for some forms of these minerals. Other forms of them probably won’t interfere with each other at all—and outside of a testing lab there’s probably no way to know for sure. Until more research gives us better information, we just have to accept this uncertainty.

A Medical Safety Net

Blood levels of potassium, calcium, phosphorus, magnesium, sodium, and chloride can all be measured by commonly performed, relatively inexpensive medical tests. For you, these tests are a simple matter of your doctor’s office drawing a blood sample and sending it off to the testing lab they use.

If you ever have reason to believe you are in either a deficient or toxic state with respect to any of these macrominerals, you should not hesitate to suggest such tests to your doctor as a starting point for discussion and diagnosis.

As always, if you know, believe, or even suspect that your health is less than excellent, you should make your doctor aware of your intention to diet and to take mineral supplements before you start doing it.