Profitable Revelation! Inhabitants of the Affluent Western Hemisphere Don't Meet "Their" RDAs For Important Nutrients. "Scientists" Call to Action, I Call to Calm Down.

Image 1: Nothing sells like FDA-approved supplements and federally supported fortified foods. And whenever you want to sell more snake oil, just pay for another study on "nutrient deficiencies"

There are two things you can shovel truckloads of money with in the realms of dietary supplements and convenience foods. Those are dreams, such as the dream of a lean and muscular physique and FDA approved but for customers non-verifiable promises of  the absence of future ailments. And while such profane things as wanting to get big and buffed or even simply "looking good naked" is looked down upon by the majority of average Joes and Janes (I don't want to go into the underlying psychological reasons here ;-), the use of the latter is generally regarded as a useful if not necessary means that will not just help us preserve our health, but will also sooth our guilty conscious of not being able to break ourselves of our bad dietary habits. Against that background it's good that we have such great scientists and policy makers who will base their wise decisions on totally unbiased and all-encompassing scientific data from research teams such as as the one from DSM Nutritional Products Limited in Kaiseraugust, Switzerland, and Parsippany, NJ, USA (Troen. 2013).

On average, we are all the same, right!? Our governments obviously don't think so...

Morover, the decisions of those policy makers are not just rooted in science, they also hold another, maybe even more important good in highest esteem: Equality! And though, equality is one of the principles the Western civilization often boasts of, it seems as if when it comes to our dietary "needs", as defined by the individual dietary guidelines, you, my mostly American friends, must be somewhat different.

Figure 1: Reference intakes for selected vitamins in Germany, UK and the Netherlands expressed relative to the US RDA (data based on overview in Troesch. 2013)

This would at least be the logical conclusion you would have to draw based on the in parts pronounced differences between German and US RDAs (see figure 1), which would suggest that my I need ~30% more vitamin D than you do, while our friends in the UK either don't need it at all or cannot agree on a reference intake and my neighbors to the West, must assume that they get more than enough vitamin D from sunbathing at the beaches of the North Sea to get away with only 100IU of vitamin D per day; and their low recommendations for vitamin E are probably based on the rationale that they traditionally use beef fat instead of vegetable oils to fry their fries *rofl*

You are deficient, my friend! Go get your fortified foods ans supplements, NOW!

Now, as funny as that may seem, in the end these discrepancies only underline three fundamental problems that are rarely addressed when scientists analyze data to finally get to the (nutritional) root course of modern disease:

Want to learn about where you stand in terms of the RDA?

I got some help from my friends over at Highbrow Paleo, who felt the following tools are particularly helpful to estimate or calculate your daily micro- and macronutrient intakes:

• Cron-O-Meter
• Fitday
• Nutritiondata

You know that I am not a big believer in logging your food intake and making calories in vs.calories out calculations. So, for your own psychological well-being try not to get addicted to these tools only to end up as yet another food neurotic on certain bulletin-boards ;-)

1. the RDAs are more or less arbitrary - While we do know pretty certain which dosage of a certain nutrient is vitally important, when everything else, i.e. nutrition, exercise, stress, etc. is "normal" (whatever that may be), we have almost no clue how deficiencies, let alone the overabundance of one nutrient affect the need / optimal intake of another. A good example here would be calcium - one of my favorites, by the way: While we are stuffing our elderly (in particular women) with calcium supplements to "protect" their bones with little success, Dawson-Hughes et al. have shown in 2009 already that you can effectively reduce bone resorption, i.e. the leeching of calcium from the bones, by supplemental potassium bicarbonate, while just throwing more calcium and vitamin D at older men and women will at best increase renal calcium excretion, at worst lead to kidney stones and vascular calcification (Dawson-Hughes. 2009)
    
2. the RDAs are light years are usually one or two decades behind contemporary science - Despite being an outspoken critic of the current vitamin D hysteria, the absence of a concrete RDA for vitamin D in the UK is just one of the most obvious examples of how the endless discussions of top-class experts lead to an grossly negligent gap between the latest results from scientific research (which in and out of itself often take months to be published and years or decades to be accepted) and their concrete implementation into the guidelines.
    
3. the RDAs lack any regard of individuality or specificity - although the different RDA's in the USA, Germany, the UK and the Netherlands would suggest otherwise, you are all identical clones of an imaginary average Joe or Jane for the policy makers; and as if that was not enough, the same applies for the nutrients as well: "Vitamin A? Yeah, that's beta carotene, right?" And vitamin A vs. carotene (even alpha vs. beta caroetene) is only one of the many examples (others are folate vs. folic acid; alpha tocopherol usually equated with "vitamin E" vs. gamma-tocopherol, let alon the tocotrienols, etc.), for which we know by now that lumping them together under common names, can easily lead to imbalances with pathological consequences.

Against that background my rationale for posting the following data on what scientists believe Mr. and Mrs. average US/UK/GER/NL citizen are missing out on and of which nutrients they may in fact get plenty is to create an incentive to take a couple of minutes and plug your own food data into one of the countless free online devices (see red box above for some references) to see where you as an individual are standing - and I bet, the majority of you will see results that are fundamentally different from those Troesch et al. summarize in their paper:

• Vitamin D: Irrespective of whether or not you believe that it does make sense to consume the lion's share of a "vitamin" that is supposed to be produced in your skin and is thus, due to its actions on almost every cell of your body, essentially not a vitamin, but a hormone, it is somewhat alarming that even in the Netherlands, where the RDA is hilarious 100IU 5-25% of the men and 25-50% of the women fail to achieve their recommended daily allowance - 2 1/2 large egg yolks alone would provide them with more than that! With the higher RDA's in Germany and the USA, the percentage of people who do not meet their daily allowances is >75%!
• Vitamin A: I am by no means surprised that vitamin A is not mentioned in the scientists mini-summary in the abstract. After all, it's bad for you! Right? No... freaking, no! And it's certainly likewise not good for way more 75% of the US citizens not to meet their RDAs for vitamin A and that despite the fact that the scientists lumped all "vitamins A" together! In the Netherlands and the UK, ~50% have an adequate intake and over here in Germany only 25-50% of my the average Joes and Janes are below their RDA cut-off, which could, just as the vitamin D problem by the way, readily be solved by eating a piece of liver from time to time. Some fatty fish, eggs and of course vegetables on a daily basis would yet serve the same purpose and would, which may turn out to be of even greater importance deliver a very balanced spectrum of various forms of pre-vitamin A (carotenes) and retinol.

• 

  Figure 2: Changes in reasoning behind supplement use in 2010 (French. 2011)

  Folic Acid and other B-vitamins: An interesting observation can be made for the B-vitamins, where the citizens of the land of both fast food and eager food-intoxi.... ah, I mean "fortification" (obviously the US) appear to be way better off than their poor fellows in Europe. Especially here in Germany, we should really wonder that we are not much sicker than you, after all, not all our products are enriched with high amounts of bio-unavailable folic acid so that we more than 75% of us do not meet our RDAs for this unquestionably important, but in its unnatural supplemental form not very controversial vitamin. In 2006, for example, Troen et al. report reduced immune function from excess folic acid build-up in the blood of post-menopausal women (Troen. 2006) and Halsted reports in a more recent paper that the "widespread use of supplemental multivitamins" in conjunction with the "fortification of the US diet with folic acid has resulted in high serum ... "[...] folate levels in much of the population" (Halsted. 2008)

  high folate levels that have been associated with increased risk of cognitive decline in aging people with low vitamin B12 status, decreased natural killer T-cell immune function and increased risk of recurrent advanced precancerous colorectal adenomas and breast cancer" (Halsted. 2008)

  Against this background it should be allowed to ask, whether the "average American" with his "adequate" (>95%!) folic acid intake really is better off than the "average German" who is unlikely to get his RDA of folic acid (>75%). 

For the scientists who (surprise!) happen to work for DSM Nutritional Products Ltd., the observations they present in form of stylized "traffic lights", with all those yellow and red "lights" signifying impeding danger and the need to take action, suffice to conclude that there is not just a gap "between vitamin intakes and requirements for a significant proportion of the population even in the most affluent countries", but that the latter would also be "a call to action 100 years after the term 'vitamine' [sic!] was coined" (Troesch. 2013)

If this post got you interested in an in-depth look at nutrient fortification its uses, abuses, benefits and downsides, I suggest you check Paul Jaminet's article on the issue at his "Perfect Health Diet Blog" (Jaminet. 2013). It would be pointless for me to repeat what Paul has already laid out in his concise and - as us physicists like it - well-referenced summary ;-)

And while Mrs Troesch and her co-authors do not state that explicitly, it should be obvious what this "call to action" will amount to... !? Right! More nutrient "fortified" foods and more randomly assembled multi-vitamin products, instead of less junk and more health (=real) food in everyone's diet.

References:

1. Dawson-Hughes B, Harris SS, Palermo NJ, Castaneda-Sceppa C, Rasmussen HM, Dallal GE. Treatment with potassium bicarbonate lowers calcium excretion and bone resorption in older men and women. J Clin Endocrinol Metab. 2009 Jan;94(1):96-102.
2. Halsted CH. Perspectives on obesity and sweeteners, folic acid fortification and vitamin D requirements. Fam Pract. 2008 Dec;25 Suppl 1:i44-9. Epub 2008 Sep 30. Review. 
3. Jaminet, Paul. Food Fortification: A Risky Experiment? PerfectHealthDiet.com. March 23, 2013 < http://perfecthealthdiet.com/2013/03/food-fortification-a-risky-experiment/ > retrieved on June 18, 2013.
4. French S. Natural Marketing Institute. The US Botanical Market: Latest Consumer Insights. Natural Marketing Institute. March 2011.
5. Troen AM, Mitchell B, Sorensen B, Wener MH, Johnston A, Wood B, Selhub J, McTiernan A, Yasui Y, Oral E, Potter JD, Ulrich CM. Unmetabolized folic acid in plasma is associated with reduced natural killer cell cytotoxicity among postmenopausal women. J Nutr. 2006 Jan;136(1):189-94.
6. Troesch B, Hoeft B, McBurney M, Eggersdorfer M, Weber P. Dietary surveys indicate vitamin intakes below recommendations are common in representative Western countries. Br J Nutr. 2013 Jun 13:1-7.

Selenium & Skin Cancer. ALA, Inflammation & Muscular Adaptations. Eccentric Training & Oxidative Muscle Fibers. Tip of the Day: Have Plenty & Regular Sex For Your Brain

Certain "behaviors" during spring break can give your brain a neuro-anabolic break.

13% and 15% that's the number of Canadian University Students who claim to do what it takes to keep their brain volume at least stable over the spring break. 13% of the female and 15% of the male student and female students, respectively, that's also the SuppVersity Figure of the Week and at the same time the relative number of students who openly declared that they were about / had previously engaged in "casual sexual activity" on the upcoming / past spring break trip to Daytona Beach, Florida (Maticka-Tyndale. 1998)

Who said our youth did not know what's good for them?

Since the pertinent study preceded the Glasper study addressed in the current installment of on short notice by 15 years, these results just go to show you that we know instinctively what's necessary to counter the effects of the alcohol over spring-break ;-)

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Selenium and skin cancer (Cassidy. 2013) -- I guess you will remember the debate that arose after the data from the selenium + vitamin E large scale trial hit the mainstream media news. Hell broke lose and people did (unfortunately) not only start questioning the usefulness, but also the safety of all vitamin supplements - and that quite frantically (cf. "Ask Dr. Andro, Are Vitamin Pills Bad for Me?").

The results of a recently published study by scientists from the Huntsmen Cancer Institute (no that's not "Paleo" ;-) in Salt Lake city could shed at least some new insights into the very mixed results we are seeing in the studies on vitamins and/or minerals with anti-oxidant prowess:

"Taking A Multivitamin is a Question of Faith", above all (read more)

"We studied the effects of Se in vitro on UV-induced oxidative stress in melanocytes, and on apoptosis and cell cycle progression in melanoma cells. In vivo, we used the HGF transgenic mouse model of UV-induced melanoma to demonstrate that topical treatment with l-selenomethionine results in a significant delay in the time required for UV-induced melanoma development, but also increases the rate of growth of those tumors once they appear. In a second mouse model, we found that oral administration of high dose methylseleninic acid significantly decreases the size of human melanoma xenografts." (Cassidy. 2013)

In other words, in as much as they are able to postpone / prevent the occurrence of cancer by protecting the healthy cells, their protective effect is not tissue specific and will - once the bad guys have appeared on the scene protect the cancer from your bodies own, as well as the pharmacological inflammatory anti-cancer machinery.

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Alpha lipoic acid does not hamper exercise induced intramuscular ROS production & DNA damage (Fogarty. 2013) -- I know this does not really sound like good news to some of you, but you will be surprised that even the authors of the study at hand feel that it is.

While this is not directly related to the intramitochondrial ROS production, I still reccomend, you read my previous article on the purported "nutrient partitioning effects" of ALA before you go and buy a year's supply. (learn more)

The scientists from the University of Ulster recruited 12 of this in the world of scientific paper "rare specimen" of healthy male study participants (age 28 + 10 years, stature 177 +/-12 cm and body mass 81 +/-15 kg) and had them take either 2x1,000mg of regular alpha lipoic acid twice a day or placebo.

Wouldn't it be better to use R-ALA? I am telling you this now for the 1124th time: There is no reliable evidence for the superiority of R-ALA over regular ALA, the majority of the studies showing benefits of ALA supplementation has been conducted with the 50% r-enantiomer and 50% s-enantiomer version and if you have ever heard of the hormesis hypothesis (=low (eu-)stress induces beneficial adaptation) you would rather ask, "isn't it likely that taking R-ALA would not have yielded the same beneficial effects?"

The caps were to be taken in addition to the regular diet, the young men were following and were supposed to build up a protective anti-oxidant belt against the exercise induced oxidative assault of 100 isolated and continuous maximal knee extensions in the non-dominant leg after 14 days of supplementation.

"[The ALA preload] increase[d] plasma antioxidant status and attenuates lipid peroxidation and DNA damage following maximal, eccentric muscle contractions[, but] had no protective effect on muscle mitochondrial DNA damage."

Now this is actually awesome news, because it shows that ALA blunts the systemic oxidative damage only, while leaving the local intra-muscular oxidative damage of which the researchers rightly point out that "a substantial body of literature documents" the beneficial effects of ROS on "cell adaptation associated with exercise training" (Fogarty. 2013). In other words: It's unlikely ALA will hamper your gains.

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Eccentric training for bigger stronger muscles? (Hody. 2013) -- At first sight the conclusion of a soon-to-be-published study from the University of Liège in Belgium, which says:

"Our data suggest that the eccentrically biased contractions in mice induced specific adaptations in protein expression and muscle fiber composition which may reflect a more oxidative muscle phenotype." (Hody. 2013)

appears to suggest that the longstanding wisdom that eccentric reps are (given you get adequate rest) profoundly anabolic was inaccurate. If you use your knowledge about the enormous degree of type I fiber hypertrophy in bodybuilders (cf. fig.1 here), however, the information that eccentric training causes a shift in the muscular phenotype towards a predominantly oxidative slow-twitch fiber make-up, would at least the part about the muscles becoming "bigger" will remain intact.

Figure 1: Effect of five training sessions of variable duration (75-135 min / increasing from session to session) with 48h breaks between sessions on the muscle fiber make-up of mice (Hody. 2013)

Now, don't be afraid that your eccentric biceps curls could eventually make you weak. There are some "on the other hands" attached to the study results. The first and most important one of these is the mere fact that the largest increase occurred in type IIa fibers which are also often referred to as "oxidative" muscle fibers, but are actually more of an "jack-of-all-traits" fiber type, which happen to do most of the work in the BB-relevant 6-15 rep range. Secondly, the training downhill-running protocol the adult C57BL6 mice were exposed to. Downhill-running, may be eccentric, but it is also an endurance and no strength training regimen, and will thus have a tendency to promote the

No pain inflammatory signaling, no gain? In the long(er) run this could in fact be true (learn more). And what would be more fitting to induce the former if not eccentric training?

That being said, it is only logical that whatever growth / genera adaptation mechanism a given exercise regimen may be triggering, the trained muscle group and in this case also the trained fiber-type will benefit the most. Moreover, scientists and laymen tend have a very different understanding of a "shift in fiber type composition" by which the former don't imply loss of any fibers, while the latter misunderstand the ratios for absolute values and fool themselves to believe that results like the ones of the study at hand were about "losing precious type II" (=fast twitch, glycolytic, "lift heavy, but short") muscle fibers. What they are really about, is yet the accentuated ability of the highly stressing eccentric reps to induce more than just a "balooning up" of the muscles and induce profound structural adaptations, the importance of which I have highlighted only a couple of days ago in the context of my post on satellite cells (read up on that one).

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Only regular sexual intercourse keeps your brain healthy and in shape (Glasper. 2013) -- No, I am not going to start this comment with a reference to certain old men who met a couple of days ago in Rome. I will rather stick to the relevant facts and inform you that you better make sure you get laid this weekend. Why? Easy, a recent study by scientists from the University of Maryland and Princton University shows quite impressively that our body notices that we are useless once we give up reproducing. So useless, in fact, that he even does not bother to repair our brains any longer:

In a past installment of On Short Notice you have already learned what the female orgasm could be for, remember? Which brings up the question will the women benefit, as well? Likely.

"Sexual experience enhanced the number of newly generated neurons in the dentate gyrus with both single and repeated exposures in middle-aged rats. Following continuous long-term exposure to sexual experience, cognitive function was improved. How-ever, when a prolonged withdrawal period was introduced between the final mating experience and behavioral testing, the improvements in cognitive function were lost despite the presence of more new neurons." (Glasper. 2013)

You want a bottom line? Well, let's make it fast, I feel I got to do something for my brain, now! Have sex, have it regular and have plenty of it (the rodents did it at least once a day) and when the new pope calls, tell him it's just for your brain health ;-)

Note: Although I deliberately wrote this part of On Short Notice, I hope that you are all old enough to know that getting drunk and having unprotected sexual intercourse with the next best person you can find "spring break style" is an absolute no-go. Not just for Catholics, but for any sane human being who has not already drowned his last neuron in alcohol.

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That's it for today, and I guess with the Glasper study in the back of your head, I don't have to tell you that there are other things than hanging out in front of the computer, TV or even the gym that can be done on the weekend, right? Enjoy!


References:

• Cassidy PB, Fain HD, Cassidy JP, Tran SM, Moos PJ, Boucher KM, Gerads R, Florell SR, Grossman D, Leachman SA. Selenium for the prevention of cutaneous melanoma. Nutrients. 2013 Mar 7;5(3):725-49.
• Fogarty MC, Devito G, Hughes CM, Burke G, Brown JC, McEneny J, Brown D, McClean C, Davison GW. Effects of α-Lipoic Acid on mtDNA Damage following Isolated Muscle Contractions. Med Sci Sports Exerc. 2013 Mar 6.
• Gasper ER, Gould E. Sexual Experience Restores Age-Related Decline in Adult Neurogenesis
  and Hippocampal Function. Hippocampus. 2013 [Epub ahead of print]
• Hody S, Lacrosse Z, Leprince P, Collodoro M, Croisier JL, Rogister B. Effects of Eccentrically and Concentrically Biased Training on Mouse Muscle Phenotype. Med Sci Sports Exerc. 2013 Feb 22. 
• Maticka-Tyndale E, Herold ES, Mewhinney D. Casual sex on spring break: Intentions and behaviors of canadian students. Journal of Sex Research. 1998; 35:3.