So RJ Douglas says, "I've read through your Vitamins and Minerals 101 course,
and it is a great resource. Since there are so many vitamins and minerals to keep track of,
I try to eat a well-rounded diet. But for meal planning purposes, it is not feasible to make
sure I'm getting the recommended amount of all vitamins and minerals each day.
My question is, are there any vitamins and minerals that you recommend getting
on a daily basis to help ensure the body functions optimally? Stated in another way,
are there any vitamins and minerals that the body is particularly poor at storing
and as such will effectively deplete itself of its reserves within a relatively short time period?"
RJ, I would say that the top ones to be concerned about from a have-to-get-it-today perspective
would be zinc and B12. And both of those have absorption caps that are fairly tight, but B12 is
the number one concern. And so generally speaking, you can absorb a day's worth of B12 per meal.
And that means that if you want to stock up on B12 and not get it at every meal,
the most you can stock up, the tightest you can distribute your B12 across your meals,
is to get a day's worth of B12 at at least one third of your meals through the year.
So you can get a day's worth of B12 at all three meals. Now I'm assuming you eat three meals a day.
You have to adjust it otherwise. So you can get a day's worth of B12 at all three meals in January,
February, March, and April, and then you can forget about B12 for the rest of the year.
Alternatively, you can get all your B12 for the day at one meal every day of the year.
And then if you want to break that down into more permutations, you can. It's just all based on the
fact that you can only absorb a day's worth of B12 in each meal. For zinc, I think it's less
rigidly defined as that, but it's generally true that
you're probably not going to get more than five to seven milligrams of zinc per
meal. And so you want to... I mean, I guess it's similar. But the thing is, zinc absorption is
very regulated by zinc status. And so I don't think you would be able to stock up on zinc
in the first four months of the year, like I just described for B12. Because I think in those four
months, your zinc absorption is going to go down a lot. Then it's going to go up during the rest of
the year when you're not eating zinc, but you're not going to be able to take advantage of it.
So zinc is I think something where you really want to make sure that you're getting a day's
worth on most days. And then, most of the B vitamins, most of the other B vitamins, they
don't have strict absorption caps, but they are limited by the amount of ATP and magnesium that,
they're limited by magnesium status in general. But then on a short-term basis, they're limited by
your ATP supply. So when you eat a meal, your ATP levels are going to go up because you're well fed
and the ATP is going to help trap and retain the B vitamins. And they don't have absorption caps,
but they're limited by that. And generally that's higher than what you would get
in food. And so it's less likely to matter. But if you were to try to put all your B
vitamins into liver on certain days or B complex supplements, then at some point you're going
to hit a problem with taking more than you... ...can absorb at once and not being able to
distribute it. So I would say the B vitamins I think you generally want to make sure they are
somewhat well distributed, but nothing has to be exactly perfectly distributed evenly. So, and then
the fat-soluble vitamins are generally going to be more limited by meal size and fat content.
And so if your fat content of your meals or the size of your meals varies a lot,
take that into account and bias them towards the higher-size, higher-fat meals,
but then otherwise, you don't need to worry too much about how they're distributed. So
on the whole, I think that it's better to use a micronutrient tracking app,
not so much to make sure that all your meals are hitting the requirements and not even so
much to make sure that all your days are. But more to make sure that on a week-to-week basis,
you are on average hitting the daily targets. And of course, one of the things I recommend
doing for people who don't like tracking is take three representative days and track those. But
what I hear you saying, RJ, is, that your day, three days isn't representative for you because
you're too up and down. And so if you want representative days and you don't like tracking,
you do have to track enough days to actually be representative. The more variable your diet is
the more days that will be to make sure it's representative. But if you love tracking, and it
sounds like you're a tracker. If you love tracking and you track every day, then you really shouldn't
be focusing on each day. You really should be just printing out a weekly report or a monthly report.
I say, printing out, exporting out, reporting it however you want. But look at the weekly
averages and the monthly averages. And if on a weekly average basis, on a monthly average basis,
you are hitting on average the daily targets, then I think that's generally good for most things.
I feel like the only people who would care about getting B12 in the way that I described are
people who have cyclically vegan or cyclically plant-based diets. And so I think that B12,
those B12 rules come into play there. Or people who could get fooled into thinking that they eat
200 grams of clams once a month. And so they're all set for B12 for the month, they're wrong.
But as long as you're not deliberately trying to stock up in a particular way like that,
as a strategy, you probably don't need to worry about those rules.
But if you are trying to deliberately stock up as a strategy, then you do especially want to
pay attention to that B12 rule. You want to pay decent attention to the zinc rule,
and you do want to make sure that your B vitamins are getting in on a,
most of those other B vitamins you could probably,
as long as you're hitting the daily average on the weekly basis, that's good. But I wouldn't go
to the monthly basis for looking at the B vitamins like that. Okay. Thank you for your question, RJ.