Four Things in My Cabinet

On Wednesday I said there is no reference condition and no instrument to measure against it. Here is what I did about that anyway, including the part that contradicts me.

Wednesday’s piece ended somewhere uncomfortable. The condition our bodies were selected against is gone and was never recorded. Everything a laboratory calls normal is measured against a population already living inside the modern food supply. And a change nobody can measure is a change nobody has to answer for.

Which leaves the practical question I had been putting off, and which I said at the start of the magnesium series this investigation was partly meant to settle. If you cannot measure it, what do you actually do?

What I did about it, which is not a recommendation

You cannot measure your way out of a problem like this, so some years ago I stopped trying to.

What I did instead was an engineering move rather than a nutritional one. When you cannot instrument a system, you reduce the number of inputs until you can at least reason about it. So I eat a narrow diet. Carbohydrate near zero, almost nothing from the middle of a grocery store, most nights the same thing cooked the same way.

I am not claiming that is optimal. I have no way to know that and neither does anyone telling you otherwise. The claim is much smaller: whatever is wrong with eating that way is probably wrong in ways that have been wrong for a very long time, rather than in ways invented in the last hundred years. I traded a large number of unmeasured modern variables for a small number of old ones.

That is not health. It is variable reduction. They are not the same thing and I try not to confuse them.

And then I went and did the exact opposite

I take magnesium. I take a B complex. I take a multivitamin. I put a potassium-blended salt in what I drink.

That sits badly against everything in the paragraph above, and when this series started I said that settling exactly this question was one of the things it was for. That was a stated outcome, not an afterthought. So here is the accounting.

Every one of them traces back to the same thing this piece is about — something that was in the input our regulatory systems were naturally selected against, and is not in the input now. I will take them in order of how well I can name the removal.

The potassium-blended salt. The ancestral input was high in potassium and low in sodium. Plants are potassium-rich; it is the dominant cation inside every leaf and tuber. Sodium was genuinely scarce inland — scarce enough that salt functioned as currency and trade routes were built to carry it. So the kidney was selected to hoard sodium and dump potassium, and it is very good at both.

We have inverted both inputs inside a century. Sodium is in everything manufactured. Potassium is in the foods people stopped eating. I am not adding something novel to my body — I am putting the ratio back toward the one the organ was built around. That is also the only one of the four carrying a real downside: potassium is not something to take casually, the kidney’s ability to clear it declines with age, and anyone with reduced renal function has no business doing this without a physician.

Magnesium. It is the central ion of chlorophyll. For several million years it arrived continuously, inside every green thing anybody ate, with no gaps to design around — which is precisely why the body never evolved a reserve for it.

Then it was removed twice over. Breeding for yield diluted what was in the grain. Milling took out roughly eighty percent of what remained, with the bran and the germ. The 1941 standard put five things back and this was not among them. And then I removed the rest myself: I took the plant foods out of my own diet and did not replace them with anything that carries it, because almost nothing else does.

The B complex, and really only part of it. Meat covers most of this group well — B12 abundantly, along with niacin, riboflavin and B6. I am not short of those and I will not pretend otherwise.

The ones that worry me are the ones that came from greens and organ meats in the ancestral input. Folate is named for foliage. It was first isolated from spinach. The modern delivery route for it is enriched flour, which I do not eat, and the ancestral route was leaves, which I also do not eat. Both channels closed, for different reasons, and I closed the second one myself.

The multivitamin, where the removal is real but cannot be itemized. This is the one I could not justify before and I think I had the reasoning backwards.

The ancestral input was not a list of named nutrients. It was a very large number of compounds arriving from a wide variety of plants and animals eaten whole, most of which nobody has catalogued, because the catalogue was never made. Modern food delivers a narrower set of them. My own diet is narrower still, deliberately.

So I cannot tell you which trace element I am missing. Not because there is no removal behind it, but because the thing that was removed was never written down — which is the entire subject of this piece, arriving at my own plate. The multivitamin is a hedge against a subtraction I can demonstrate in general and cannot enumerate in particular.

I will say what that costs, honestly. It is a weaker kind of justification than the other three — a decision made on the shape of the risks rather than on a named mechanism, with no harm I can find at ordinary amounts and an expense too small to weigh. That is a legitimate way to decide under uncertainty and it is not the same thing as evidence. It is also, almost word for word, how the entire supplement trade sells. The only things separating me from the aisle are that I will tell you which kind of reasoning I am using, and that I drew the line at anything with a genuine downside — which is why the potassium gets treated differently from the rest.

And the part of it I watch: the fat-soluble vitamins, and any iron, are the components that accumulate rather than clear. The body has no regulated route for getting rid of iron at all — that was the point of the third post in this series. No harm at ordinary amounts is a statement about ordinary amounts, and it stops being true somewhere I will not locate by feel.

Which is where careful reasoning actually runs out

Here is the part that matters, and it is not that I was sloppy.

Reasoning your way to a plausible deficit is not the same as having evidence that filling it does anything. I can give you a mechanism for three of those four. I cannot give you a single measurement showing that taking them has changed anything in my body — because the measurement does not exist. That is the subject of this entire piece.

So the honest position is this. Careful reasoning got me to a defensible guess and then stopped, because there was nothing left to check it against. I am not improvising. I am reasoning as well as the available information permits, and the available information runs out well before the decision does.

That is worse than carelessness, not better. A careless person can be corrected by evidence. I have done the work and arrived at the same unverifiable place, and so will you, and so will your doctor, because the instrument that would settle it was never built.

The one thing I can say for my four is that nobody sold them to me and I am not selling them to you. But that is a statement about my motives, not about my evidence. On the evidence I am in the same position as everybody else in the supplement aisle — better reasons, identical certainty, which is to say none.

So here is the verdict, since I said I would give one

The question I put to myself at the start of this was whether to keep taking any of it. The answer is that I am continuing all four, and I am putting the reasoning on the record so it can be held against me later.

The potassium salt and the magnesium I will defend in front of anybody. The B complex follows from a gap that is specific and real, created by how I eat rather than by anything general. The multivitamin I keep on a different basis entirely, and I would rather say so than have it absorbed quietly into the other three.

That basis is an asymmetry — nothing I can find on the downside at ordinary amounts, against a gap I cannot rule out, at a cost not worth the arithmetic. It is a real way to decide something when evidence is unavailable. It is also, almost word for word, the reasoning the entire supplement trade is built on. The only things separating me from the aisle are that I will tell you which of the two kinds of justification I am using, and that I drew the line at anything carrying a genuine downside — which is exactly why the potassium is treated differently from the rest.

Here is what would end the rest of it, stated now so that it is not something I get to reinterpret later:

A validated measure showing no shortfall, and I stop. Evidence of harm at these amounts, and I stop. The multivitamin goes the day the asymmetry stops holding — the moment somebody shows a cost on the other side of it, the only argument I had for it is gone. And the potassium goes first and goes immediately at any sign of kidney trouble, because it is the one of the four with a real capacity to hurt me.

One more commitment, and it is the one I think matters most. The list does not grow. Every addition past this point would require a better reason than the ones I already have, and I do not have better reasons available, because nobody does. A stack that only ever gets longer is not a considered position. It is a habit wearing the clothes of one.

I will add that my own eating is well down the list of things I find worth worrying about. What concerns me is not what one man at a desk in Florida has for dinner. It is that two hundred million people are making this same call, with less information than I had, against a baseline nobody wrote down.

And if something does change for you, pass it on.

Not as advice — as a case report. Say what you changed. Say what else you held still, which is the part almost nobody says. Say what you measured and what you only felt, and keep the two separate. Say what you would have expected to see if you were wrong.

That is the whole difference between evidence and a story, and it costs you nothing but the care. In the absence of anybody running the study, it is the only record that is ever going to exist.