For what little it's worth (since I'm not a potential participant here), the deadline struck me as a short one. Participants are going to do this in their spare time, and it's a busy time of year (holiday/family obligations for many people, and end-of-academic-term obligations for students and academics).
DEADLINE CHANGE: We have decided based on feedback to extend the deadline to January 15, 2012, to allow people time to find the contest or take care of finals and holiday obligations, but it will not change again and will be strictly enforced.
Ohh, this is exactly my field of study (currently). I may have to consider a submission. A good excuse to motivate me to consolidate my research anyhow!
You might want to post this over at the Immortality Institute (http://imminst.org/). They recently created a multivitamin using community input, so all of this has been discussed over and over again there already.
For a second there I thought this was you, personally, wanting an answer to this question, which was funny but not really ridiculous or out of character.
Good luck. Hope this gets good results!
The contest asks for "A recommendation list that tells people what they should do based on their situation, without any additional information or explanation. Keep it as short as possible, but no shorter."
Are there limits on the sorts of recommendations that are considered acceptable? For example, could one recommend no mineral supplementation? Alternatively, instead of recommending mineral quantities, could the paper recommend a procedure of personal experimentation saying, "take mineral A and monitor the results with process A', then adjust according to criteria A*, then take mineral B and monitor the results using criteria B'..."
If anyone entering this contest wants help from someone who develops and implements Bayesian statistical models for a living, let me know. I won't be entering the contest myself -- I don't have time for the required literature search -- but I can help out with some modeling and Bayesian analysis. One caveat -- my experience is with models of consumer choice used in marketing research, rather than analysis for medical research.
I plan to submit an entry to this. I hope that I don't get steamrolled by someone amazing.
I don't have much prior knowledge in this area. Do you think that will be a problem?
But I’m just an undergraduate, and I’m not even studying biology. Am I qualified to enter this contest?
Absolutely! What we are looking for is in-depth analysis of the published data, not specialized knowledge of biology.
I imagine that prior knowledge of statistics is what's most helpful here, rather than medicine or biology.
I think the presentation needs to include how to tailor the information for your own personal situation. A person with a mineral deficiency can receive enormous benefits from supplements but a person who does not have such a deficiency may receive no benefit or worse. You don’t need to be a Bayesian to understand that just because a mineral supplement will help a specific individual with a specific individual condition, it does not follow that more of that mineral will provide any benefit for a generic human without that condition or deficiency.
A place...
and what are the costs and benefits of various amounts?
Does cost just refer to price, or does it include risks?
I'd like to see information on how a person can tell if they're deficient or oversupplied in a nutrient and what to expect if the problem is being remedied. For example, a person might have a blood test which shows a deficiency, but if they trouble absorbing the nutrient, just taking more may not help and (faint memory) they might even be deficient while having what seems to be enough in their blood.
To Less Wrong: what are your priors on nutrition? Not necessarily what you do, but what your prior life experience and research has led you to believe is actually correct.
I'll start:
Paleo diet is great, except some carbs and gluten are fine in moderation except in a minority (though possible a high minority, like 40%) of people with outlying genetic mutations that make them process carbs improperly (I admit my prior on this is partially determined by my current unwillingness to stop eating pizza and sandwiches). Intermittent fasting helps prevent cancer.
If...
Pollan's book is horrible. It is actually against science per se in nutrition, continuously bringing up the supposed holistic irreducibility of diets and emphasizing "common sense", "tradition" and "what our grandparents ate" as primary guidelines. Pollan presents several cherry-picked past mistakes of nutrition science, and from that concludes that nutrition science in general is evil.
I am not fundamentally against heuristics derived from tradition and/or evolution, but Pollan seems to use such heuristics whimsically, mostly to push forward a personal agenda of vegetarianism, organic foods and an extremely warm and fuzzy philosophical baggage of food culture and lifestyle. Also, Pollan's arguments are almost exclusively based on affect (nature = good, artificial = evil, people selling artificial food = monstrous, etc.). Actually, looking a bit into the book to refresh my memories, Pollan doesn't even use traditions to make inferences about foods' healthiness; they are merely convenient sources of positive affect.
If I was betting on it, I would have said within 20 minutes and on an empty stomach. You should get nauseous, at least, but the contents of your stomach might be enough to hold it down.
I haven't eaten anything in 4 hours. I had 12 pills in one swallow each of which apparently has two and a half times the RDI of zinc for males. I haven't experienced any nausea. If I head eaten a dozen oysters on the other hand I am almost certain I'd have vomited. But that says a lot more about my aversion to oysters than their zinc content.
More generally I can confirm that taking vitamins on an empty stomach most certainly does produce more acute side effects. For example I tried a pharmacological dose of niacin (1g) on an empty stomach and apart from the intense pain and flushing over my entire body I was extremely nauseous and nearly passed out. The same dose with a meal only gives me a mild, almost pleasant tingling sensation - albeit one that lasted longer.
Now... no more zinc for me for a couple of weeks.
I've posted a critique of the contest's internal assumptions here, along with part of my answer:
I'm actively interested in optimizing my health, and I take a number of supplements to that end. The survey would seem most interesting if its goal was to find how to optimize your health via supplements. As it turns out, none of the ones I take qualify as "minerals". If it turns out in fact that taking Vitamin XYZ is the single best thing you can do to tweak your diet, then this survey's conclusions, whatever they turn out to be (eg. that Calcium is better than Selenium) will be misleading. Maybe that's the next survey.
FYI, I'm taking: vitamin C, green tea extract, acetyl-l carnitine, vitamin D-3, fish oil, ubiquinol, and alpha lipoic acid. I've stopped taking vitamin E and aspirin.
Anyone else giving this a serious shot? I'm curious to trade strategies, wondering if mine is the dominant one and this is a competition of research or a competition of strategies.
My strategy: recommending basically no supplemental minerals, except where indicated by testing.
I've been struggling for some time with the issue of how to know what and whom to believe when it comes to lifestyle medicine (the effects of nutrition, supplements, exercise, etc. on health on longevity)... and it has occurred to me that I'm ignoring the elephant in the living room. As I understand it, the one non-obvious lifestyle change for which there appears to be good evidence of a very strong effect on longevity is caloric restriction.
When I first heard about CR over twenty years ago there were already decades of research demonstrating its apparentl...
Would it be wrong to suppose that the body is more active in metabolism than given credit for? Every chemical induced regularly over a period of time is not guaranteed- but still subject to requiring a higher threshold than was previously necessary. My proposal is not empirical whatsoever, minus the observation of my own habits and metabolism. Given, I am young, and still have a metabolism that acts like ants on a cookie, i still fully support the idea that the body changes over time, and supplements and dietary habits must adapt as well.
Consider that some...
should take the important dietary minerals in
A normal diet provides easily enough calcium to meet most people's needs [EDIT: That is completely wrong, but still works for the purposes of my question]. Is the question asking about how much we should consume in total, or how much of the various minerals we should consume from supplements? In the first case, the answer is "about as much as you are currently consuming", while in the second case, the answer is "probably none."