Vitamin/Mineral levels and ratios page

[PaleoMom]

I've just noticed on fitday the vitamins and minerals I'm getting or lacking. For instance, how can I possibly not be getting enough iron with a pound of red meat a day???? I know the RDA is WAY off on most of these things. My calcium magnesium is way heavy on the magnesium side, which is good, except is it too much? (46mg calcium, 141mg magnesium) I take natural calm on top of that usually (thinking I should stop now).

Is anyone else modifying their meal plans to meet more vitamins and mineral needs. I feel like I should probably care a lot more about ratios than amounts overall, but would like confirmation of that Cal/mag should be 1:1 and copper/ zinc is 1:8 I think. Any others people know about? My vitamins c is often super low but so are my carbs so I'm not really worried about that.

Also I'm shocked my my O6/O3 ration is usually 2:1 even though I take 1 T. of CLO daily and only eat grass-fed beef, pastured chicken and no nuts or seeds except for 1 T. of pumpkin or sunflower seeds daily for hormonal reasons. I would have thought that would get me 1:1. Maybe you have to eat almost entirely fish/seafood to get that?

[breadsauce]

am amazed that your magnesium is too high - I struggle to get it anywhere near and usually it's about 60%. What are you eating to get that one up??!

[PaleoMom]

About 100 mg from 16 oz of beef and about 40mg from 1 T pumpkin seeds. This is still only 44% of the RDA but my calcium is only 4% the RDA, so it keeps it really magnesium heavy I guess!

[Eklecktika]

One thing to think about with the RDA:

It doesn't specify heme or non heme iron. Heme iron is found in animal products, nonheme is in everything else. Heme iron also absorbed much better-only 1-7% of the nonheme iron is absorbed, whereas 15-35% of heme iron 'soaks' in.

Side note-If you NEED more iron (anemia, etc.) ProferrinES is the most effective supp I've found so far. I'm almost always anemic, but that helps the quickest. It's a little pricey, but worth it.

[PaleoMom]

Thanks Eklecktika,

That is good to know about the absorption. I was surprised by my low intake, but I'm not worried about it based on how I feel. I have had anemia most of my life, but feel good now and my last blood test showed it was fine (although I wasn't eating as good then as now). I just don't want to have it too low and then take forever getting it back up again. I have a feeling though that this is like so many things... that when you don't eat stuff like grains and legumes that you use more of what you get and aren't losing what you have to anti-nutrients etc.

[Lewis]

I've just noticed on fitday the vitamins and minerals I'm getting or lacking. For instance, how can I possibly not be getting enough iron with a pound of red meat a day????

That's interesting. Maybe fitday's software is not totally reliable. I don't always use fitday but I have been this week and my breakfast puts me over the RDA. On the graph it shows as 139 percent. This morning breakfast did include 4 oz lamb's liver, 1 egg yolk, and some nuts. I'd have thought that not unexpected. A pound of meat not doing that ... something seems wrong.

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EDIT

I just added "Beef, cooked, lean and fat eaten" with a weight of 1 lb to my breakfast and fitday reported a figure for iron of 289 percent of the RDA. Take off the previous figure:

289 - 139 = 150

So a pound of beef is worth, according to fitday, 150% of the RDA — one and a half times the RDA.

If you're not getting the same, maybe fitday is not registering some of the information on the foods you enter. Maybe it's erratic with all of us and we never realized!

[PaleoMom]

Yeah, I just did it again with 16 oz. beef ( the search wouldn't even find "beef, cooked, lean and fat eaten" ) and it said 11.1 mg iron, 61% rda!

How weird is this...

ETA: I just did this on Nutrition Data and got the same results

[peril]

Both absolute amounts and ratios matter