Vitamins, Minerals
& Weight Loss

Below is an excerpt from Part Two of

The 2004 Multi-Diet

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

Warning: You may notice a tendency over time to begin to stop supplementing this or that macromineral and also to fail to ensure that you get at least the RDI of it in some other way. This can happen with any macromineral, but very often it’s potassium or sodium.

I warn you about this tendency so you can resist it if it begins to happen. Allowing this to happen on a diet is dangerous! If you both restrict food and fail to supplement one (or more) of the macrominerals, there is a good chance that over a period of weeks you will become gradually deficient in it. Then one day you may begin to feel those cardiac arrhythmias that a chronic lack of the macrominerals can produce. (It’s even more dangerous if you develop arrhythmias but don’t feel them.) Please pay attention to this! If you do not consciously ensure that you are getting approximately the RDI of each essential nutrient, then you are on a Heroic Diet of your own devising, not the Multi-Diet. But more importantly, you are hurting yourself! This situation is easy to prevent with supplements and food-nutrient composition tables, but you cannot safely ignore it while you are dieting.

Another Rant

There never seems to be any shortage of “therapists” of one sort or another ready to tell you that some of the supplement amounts discussed in this chapter are “too much”. In my always-humble opinion this represents nothing more than a knee-jerk Jurassic “bias” against supplements that has been widespread in the some portions of the professional nutrition community for several decades.

While I agree that fools and faddists often misuse supplements, it is an equally foolish over-reaction to “throw out the baby along with its bath water”.

Used properly, dietary supplements are one of the dieter’s most powerful tools for staying nutritionally healthy and on track in the otherwise stressful dieting situation. So if you hear such nonsense, smile politely and point out that the Multi-Diet’s nutritional goals are nothing more nor less than the official Recommended Dietary Intake (RDI) amounts.

The RDIs have long been accepted as both safe and reasonable by the American Medical Association, the National Academy of Sciences, the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health, other U.S. government agencies, and equivalent organizations in all other countries. They are even written into the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations (e.g. 21CFR101.9) which is available on the Internet at:

http://www.gpoaccess.gov/cfr/index.html