How Avoiding Nutritionally-Induced Mineral and Vitamin Deficiencies Can Help You Live Optimally
This is one of the least understood areas that hold people back in their health and life.
Have you ever stopped to wonder if there might be a consequence to taking a large dose of a single vitamin or mineral, say 100 mg of the vitamin B6 every day or 5000 mg of Vitamin C, or 1000 mg of the mineral magnesium, or even taking the RDA of calcium every day, but not getting enough of other minerals that balance calcium such as the electrolytes potassium, magnesium, and sodium?
Well, your intuition was correct. But what to do about it, and both how to identify what needs doing, and how to actually correct it escapes nearly everyone, so if you want an edge, or just want to get your health back, this is an incredibly valuable read.
To understand and apply what I am teaching you here is nothing short of creating magic in the body. To do so you would be wise to remember to test (your hair, not blood which is less accurate, more expensive, and frankly hurts) and not guess what to take.
The Big Picture: Some minerals block the absorption, read: effectiveness, of other minerals. What about vitamins? Yes, you guessed it. Vitamins also block the absorption, or at the very least increase the requirements of other vitamins.
EXAMPLE 1: Too much vitamin E produces symptoms that correlate with a vitamin A deficiency. BUT taking too much vitamin A blocks the effects of vitamin E.
ALSO: Taking too much vitamin A with consistency will result at some point in vitamin D deficiency.
EXAMPLE 2: Calcium is elevated in many of the people that order our hair analysis, also called HTMA analysis.
Too much calcium, from either foods that are OTHERWISE GOOD FOR YOU, or from over-supplementation side effects, which are very real.
Over-supplementation or over-eating of foods high in calcium for example, leads to calcium dropping out of the blood and being stored in the muscle, fat, and joints which leads to stiffness and low energy very quickly if not corrected – again, test, don’t guess, and then make the changes based on your test results (I highly recommend purchasing a consultation with us on the hair test kit page to fully understand the results and develop the best plan of action) and then testing again in 90 days to see what has shifted and now needs correcting.
Okay, now that you have those concepts in mind, let’s go back to Mineral-Vitamin Synergies, which is a way of saying which of these work well together.
Antagonism or synergy, the opposite of antagonism can happen with these nutrients at the intestinal level and the cell level, and therefore, at the metabolic level. For example, many people are iron deficient and many people are copper deficient but testing for your ratio of Fe/Cu, that is iron to copper is essential since they disrupt each other on a metabolic level. How?
Well, they both negatively affect one another’s function within the cell. This is one reason why you will not see these put together in a formula accept in many multivitamins which are ineffective, and possibly even harmful because of these reasons. Iron in general, does not play nice with other minerals and yet we see it all the time in many supplements alongside other ingredients – in such case, I highly recommend you stop taking the product and switch brands since the brand as a whole is apparently unaware of much of importance.
There are many other synergies we will discuss in posts to come.
Barton Scott
Nutritionist, ChemE, Founder of Upgraded Formulas and Chief Skeptic