Frosty
Pro Bodybuilder
Nature’s Vitamins
When people discuss diet, they usually talk about macronutrient ratios. How much fat are you eating? How many carbs? Not that there’s an ideal ratio for everyone, but that’s another article in and of itself. But if diet discussions get beyond ratios, it’s usually something goofy like “do you eat beef or chicken? How many eggs?”
For some reason, the majority of people overlook a very important part of nutrition – vitamins and minerals! People will weigh the food they eat, count calories so their eating exactly 3500 calories a day, but they won’t even think to see if their meeting their nutrient requirements. And very often, when people do not pay attention to this, they end up having a diet with vitamin and/or mineral deficiencies.
If you haven’t already, go to www.fitday.com and sign up for a free account. Add in the foods you normally eat and then on the left side click on “Reports.” Then click on “Nutrition” and you will see what your vitamin and mineral intake is like. Not getting enough nutrients? Are you not even meeting the RDA which was established for 150 lb sedentary people? If you’re reading this, chances are you’re not sedentary. That means you need more nutrients! You can’t build something out of nothing. Don’t force your body to steal from itself to survive. After all, one of the functions of the skeletal system is to store minerals.
Without proper nutrition, your body can run into all sorts of problems. Maybe for a while your body can steal from itself for a while without a negative impact, but what happens when there is nothing left to steal? The body starts to degenerate. If not now, then down the road. I’m sure none of you want this to happen.
The great thing is some foods are extremely rich in vitamins and minerals. Why spend all sorts of money buying this vitamin and that vitamin, and then having to buy other vitamins that are needed for the other vitamins, and wait, you need minerals to go with that so they’re absorbed properly….enough to give you a headache! All those supplements add up. There are whole food vitamins available, but you know what? They’re expensive!
What is the athlete on a budget supposed to do? Having vitamin and mineral deficiencies isn’t an option, so the answer is to look for nature’s vitamins. Nature knows what it’s doing, and nature’s wisdom provided us with some very excellent nutritional options.
Oysters
The first “super food” is oysters. If you’re not allergic to them, they’re great. Oysters used to be a very popular food, and raw oyster bars used to be very popular. Let me just say this, if you have access to a good raw bar (near where they get them fresh, and where they shuck them in front of you), you should be making at least weekly trips there when the oysters are in season!
For the rest of us not lucky enough to have access to this, we have two main options.
The first is buying the oysters fresh from the store. This takes effort to cook it and make a dish out of it, because as much as I like oysters, cooking them plain is gross.
The other option is to get canned oysters. I found smoked canned oysters in olive oil (not junk vegetable oils). For a couple bucks, what do you get? A serving size that has 12g of protein delivers the following: Zinc – 153 mg (>1000% RDA); B12 – 32 mcg (>1300% RDA); vitamin D – 13 mcg (270%); selenium – 107 mcg (215%); magnesium – 80 mg (20%). Now there are more nutrients in there, but these are the main ones. And you know what’s great? Nature already put in all the synergistic nutrients for you to eat. They’re veritable “meat vitamins”! And since they’re a low life form, they are also low in toxins such as lead and mercury.
You could have a can once a week, or perhaps even a few a week, and you will be getting ample amounts of zinc and B12. Who needs a zinc supplement when we have oysters we can eat?
Other shellfish are also rich in vitamins and minerals, but they do not have the high zinc content of oysters. You can throw in clams and mussels for variety.
Liver
People either love liver or they hate it. Or they think it’s okay. Like it or not, liver does contain a lot of nutrients. It’s another “meat vitamin,” but it’s a meat vitamin nature put in animals for us to eat. Why do you think lions in Africa go for the innards? They’re smart enough to know that this is where the nutrition’s at! While a steak is yummy, it just can’t compare to liver in terms of nutrition.
Let’s look at the breakdown of the main nutrients in liver. An 8 oz serving contains the following: Vitamin A – 72,000 IU (1440%); B12 – 93 mcg (3900%); riboflavin – 3.4 mg (264%); selenium – 93 mcg (186%); folate – 362 mcg (90%); niacin – 13 mg (81%); iron – 9 mg (76%); B-6 – 0.95 mg (73%); phosphorous – 500 mg (40%); and also contains good amounts of vitamin D, vitamin E, zinc, thiamin, vitamin C (yes, that’s how Eskimos prevented scurvy!), and thiamin. Liver is also probably the best source of the mineral chromium. Yes, the one they sell for fat loss can be found in liver.
Liver is usually pretty cheap since not many people eat it. If you can’t find it at the store, ask someone to get it for you. Often stores only get it every once in a while since it isn’t very popular.
Probably the best way to cook it to cover the taste is to use a little flour with salt and pepper mixed in, and lightly cover the liver in it, and pan fry it on medium-high heat to give more flavor to cover up the liver taste. You can also brown onions in butter to serve with it. This will further mask the taste and make it actually taste kinda good.
A pound a week of it would definitely provide your body with a lot of nutrition.
Egg yolks
All the nutrition in eggs is in the yolk. Yolks contain EPA and DHA if you buy the good organic kind.
Eggs are a good cheap source of calories, fat, and protein. 8 jumbo eggs provide the following nutrition: Vitamin A – 100%; vitamin D 135%; vitamin E - 55%; riboflavin – 203%; B12 – 216%; B6 – 55%; zinc – 38%; selenium – 320%; phosphorous – 74%; calcium – 20%; and folate – 61%. So you get all this nutrition, EFAs, highly bioavailable protein, and they’re cheap! What a bargain.
Cod liver oil
Cod liver oil is cheaper than fish oil, contains the EPA and DHA that fish oil does, but also contains vitamins A and D. These fat soluable vitamins are very important, and many people do not get much of them in their diet. 1-2 teaspoons per day would be good, but 1 tablespoon per day would be fine if you’re training hard. That will give you 14 g of omega-3 fats. You can take this with your whey shakes if you use them, or with some cheese or milk. The vitamin D will help your body utilize the calcium in these foods.
Now let’s move on to plant “super foods.”
Blackstrap molasses
This is only recommended for use after workouts. Blackstrap molasses is the richer form of molasses, meaning it’s not as sweet and is darker (more nutrients). Molasses is what they take out of sugar cane to make white table sugar. So you end up with the refined white sugar with no nutrients, and a sweet mineral syrup with all the nutrients.
It’s not the cheapest carb source out there by far, but the thing that makes it stand out is that it is the richest source of minerals for any post-workout carb. I mix mine into a few cups of milk with a blender and it’s delicious. Let’s say we used 3 tablespoons worth after a heavy workout, which is 45g of carbs. This serving provides the following nutrition: B6 – 40%; calcium – 49%; magnesium – 40%; selenium – 26%; iron – 108%; and it even contains smaller amounts of zinc, phosphorous, niacin, riboflavin, and thiamin. Let me give you a frame of reference to the significance of this in terms of carbs. Honey is a natural sweet that has the nutrients in it. For the same 45 g of carbs, the highest level of anything in it is 2% of the RDA for iron! Everything else is about 1% or lower! What a stark contrast to molasses.
Seeds and nuts
There are too many to go over the amounts of nutrients in all the different nuts and seeds, but some of the best are brazil nuts, almonds, pecans, sunflower seeds, and pumpkin seeds.
However, you need to soak and then dry these before you eat them. They contain phytic acid, which inhibits the uptake of important nutrients such as calcium, magnesium, zinc, iron, and copper. Yikes! Luckily soaking neutralizes this problem. Raw nuts and seeds also contain enzyme inhibitors which halt digestion. There are also enzyme inhibitors in beans, and that halts digestion, and the carbs ferment, creating gas. Soaking neutralizes this problem as well! So soak these overnight, then dry them either in the oven at low temperature or in a dehydrator.
The nuts and seeds I mentioned above are extremely rich sources of nutrients, but they require soaking and drying, and they should only be eaten in moderation (like anything). Only eat a couple Brazil nuts per day, since they are such a potent source of selenium. You can rotate these nuts and seeds each week if you wish, but only eat a handful a day.
Sea vegetables
There is a wide variety of sea vegetables, and you can find it in the Asian section of the store (if they have one). One thing that all the sea vegetables have in common is that they are all very excellent sources of iodine to keep your thyroid working well. They also contain a good amount of vitamins and minerals. Just don’t eat too much of these, since excessive iodine can reduce thyroid function. Moderation is key.
“Spring mix” salad
This is something you can find in your grocery store that usually comes in bags pre-washed. 4 cups of it contains a lot of nutrients: Vitamin E – 15%; vitamin K – 570% (this one is important, since most people lack vitamin K in their diets); vitamin C – 60%; folate – 64%; magnesium 13%; and contains decent amounts of B vitamins and minerals. Just remember that plants do not contain vitamin A. They contain what CAN be converted into vitamin A in the body, but it is not vitamin A. Real vitamin A is found in animal products like cod liver oil, liver, eggs, etc. Just add a pinch of sodium bicarbonate (baking soda) when you eat this to help neutralize the oxalic acid in these veggies. Oxalic acid binds with calcium in the body, so it’s good to neutralize it.
So there you have it. These are nature’s vitamins, and you should take advantage of them and include them in your diet! Just use moderation (moderation is good for health and because it’s cheaper). You don’t need all sorts of vitamin and mineral supplements for the most part since you can get a lot of great nutrition from these foods. They contain all the synergistic nutrients along with them and are highly bioavailable. After all, nature knows what it’s doing.
When people discuss diet, they usually talk about macronutrient ratios. How much fat are you eating? How many carbs? Not that there’s an ideal ratio for everyone, but that’s another article in and of itself. But if diet discussions get beyond ratios, it’s usually something goofy like “do you eat beef or chicken? How many eggs?”
For some reason, the majority of people overlook a very important part of nutrition – vitamins and minerals! People will weigh the food they eat, count calories so their eating exactly 3500 calories a day, but they won’t even think to see if their meeting their nutrient requirements. And very often, when people do not pay attention to this, they end up having a diet with vitamin and/or mineral deficiencies.
If you haven’t already, go to www.fitday.com and sign up for a free account. Add in the foods you normally eat and then on the left side click on “Reports.” Then click on “Nutrition” and you will see what your vitamin and mineral intake is like. Not getting enough nutrients? Are you not even meeting the RDA which was established for 150 lb sedentary people? If you’re reading this, chances are you’re not sedentary. That means you need more nutrients! You can’t build something out of nothing. Don’t force your body to steal from itself to survive. After all, one of the functions of the skeletal system is to store minerals.
Without proper nutrition, your body can run into all sorts of problems. Maybe for a while your body can steal from itself for a while without a negative impact, but what happens when there is nothing left to steal? The body starts to degenerate. If not now, then down the road. I’m sure none of you want this to happen.
The great thing is some foods are extremely rich in vitamins and minerals. Why spend all sorts of money buying this vitamin and that vitamin, and then having to buy other vitamins that are needed for the other vitamins, and wait, you need minerals to go with that so they’re absorbed properly….enough to give you a headache! All those supplements add up. There are whole food vitamins available, but you know what? They’re expensive!
What is the athlete on a budget supposed to do? Having vitamin and mineral deficiencies isn’t an option, so the answer is to look for nature’s vitamins. Nature knows what it’s doing, and nature’s wisdom provided us with some very excellent nutritional options.
Oysters
The first “super food” is oysters. If you’re not allergic to them, they’re great. Oysters used to be a very popular food, and raw oyster bars used to be very popular. Let me just say this, if you have access to a good raw bar (near where they get them fresh, and where they shuck them in front of you), you should be making at least weekly trips there when the oysters are in season!
For the rest of us not lucky enough to have access to this, we have two main options.
The first is buying the oysters fresh from the store. This takes effort to cook it and make a dish out of it, because as much as I like oysters, cooking them plain is gross.
The other option is to get canned oysters. I found smoked canned oysters in olive oil (not junk vegetable oils). For a couple bucks, what do you get? A serving size that has 12g of protein delivers the following: Zinc – 153 mg (>1000% RDA); B12 – 32 mcg (>1300% RDA); vitamin D – 13 mcg (270%); selenium – 107 mcg (215%); magnesium – 80 mg (20%). Now there are more nutrients in there, but these are the main ones. And you know what’s great? Nature already put in all the synergistic nutrients for you to eat. They’re veritable “meat vitamins”! And since they’re a low life form, they are also low in toxins such as lead and mercury.
You could have a can once a week, or perhaps even a few a week, and you will be getting ample amounts of zinc and B12. Who needs a zinc supplement when we have oysters we can eat?
Other shellfish are also rich in vitamins and minerals, but they do not have the high zinc content of oysters. You can throw in clams and mussels for variety.
Liver
People either love liver or they hate it. Or they think it’s okay. Like it or not, liver does contain a lot of nutrients. It’s another “meat vitamin,” but it’s a meat vitamin nature put in animals for us to eat. Why do you think lions in Africa go for the innards? They’re smart enough to know that this is where the nutrition’s at! While a steak is yummy, it just can’t compare to liver in terms of nutrition.
Let’s look at the breakdown of the main nutrients in liver. An 8 oz serving contains the following: Vitamin A – 72,000 IU (1440%); B12 – 93 mcg (3900%); riboflavin – 3.4 mg (264%); selenium – 93 mcg (186%); folate – 362 mcg (90%); niacin – 13 mg (81%); iron – 9 mg (76%); B-6 – 0.95 mg (73%); phosphorous – 500 mg (40%); and also contains good amounts of vitamin D, vitamin E, zinc, thiamin, vitamin C (yes, that’s how Eskimos prevented scurvy!), and thiamin. Liver is also probably the best source of the mineral chromium. Yes, the one they sell for fat loss can be found in liver.
Liver is usually pretty cheap since not many people eat it. If you can’t find it at the store, ask someone to get it for you. Often stores only get it every once in a while since it isn’t very popular.
Probably the best way to cook it to cover the taste is to use a little flour with salt and pepper mixed in, and lightly cover the liver in it, and pan fry it on medium-high heat to give more flavor to cover up the liver taste. You can also brown onions in butter to serve with it. This will further mask the taste and make it actually taste kinda good.
A pound a week of it would definitely provide your body with a lot of nutrition.
Egg yolks
All the nutrition in eggs is in the yolk. Yolks contain EPA and DHA if you buy the good organic kind.
Eggs are a good cheap source of calories, fat, and protein. 8 jumbo eggs provide the following nutrition: Vitamin A – 100%; vitamin D 135%; vitamin E - 55%; riboflavin – 203%; B12 – 216%; B6 – 55%; zinc – 38%; selenium – 320%; phosphorous – 74%; calcium – 20%; and folate – 61%. So you get all this nutrition, EFAs, highly bioavailable protein, and they’re cheap! What a bargain.
Cod liver oil
Cod liver oil is cheaper than fish oil, contains the EPA and DHA that fish oil does, but also contains vitamins A and D. These fat soluable vitamins are very important, and many people do not get much of them in their diet. 1-2 teaspoons per day would be good, but 1 tablespoon per day would be fine if you’re training hard. That will give you 14 g of omega-3 fats. You can take this with your whey shakes if you use them, or with some cheese or milk. The vitamin D will help your body utilize the calcium in these foods.
Now let’s move on to plant “super foods.”
Blackstrap molasses
This is only recommended for use after workouts. Blackstrap molasses is the richer form of molasses, meaning it’s not as sweet and is darker (more nutrients). Molasses is what they take out of sugar cane to make white table sugar. So you end up with the refined white sugar with no nutrients, and a sweet mineral syrup with all the nutrients.
It’s not the cheapest carb source out there by far, but the thing that makes it stand out is that it is the richest source of minerals for any post-workout carb. I mix mine into a few cups of milk with a blender and it’s delicious. Let’s say we used 3 tablespoons worth after a heavy workout, which is 45g of carbs. This serving provides the following nutrition: B6 – 40%; calcium – 49%; magnesium – 40%; selenium – 26%; iron – 108%; and it even contains smaller amounts of zinc, phosphorous, niacin, riboflavin, and thiamin. Let me give you a frame of reference to the significance of this in terms of carbs. Honey is a natural sweet that has the nutrients in it. For the same 45 g of carbs, the highest level of anything in it is 2% of the RDA for iron! Everything else is about 1% or lower! What a stark contrast to molasses.
Seeds and nuts
There are too many to go over the amounts of nutrients in all the different nuts and seeds, but some of the best are brazil nuts, almonds, pecans, sunflower seeds, and pumpkin seeds.
However, you need to soak and then dry these before you eat them. They contain phytic acid, which inhibits the uptake of important nutrients such as calcium, magnesium, zinc, iron, and copper. Yikes! Luckily soaking neutralizes this problem. Raw nuts and seeds also contain enzyme inhibitors which halt digestion. There are also enzyme inhibitors in beans, and that halts digestion, and the carbs ferment, creating gas. Soaking neutralizes this problem as well! So soak these overnight, then dry them either in the oven at low temperature or in a dehydrator.
The nuts and seeds I mentioned above are extremely rich sources of nutrients, but they require soaking and drying, and they should only be eaten in moderation (like anything). Only eat a couple Brazil nuts per day, since they are such a potent source of selenium. You can rotate these nuts and seeds each week if you wish, but only eat a handful a day.
Sea vegetables
There is a wide variety of sea vegetables, and you can find it in the Asian section of the store (if they have one). One thing that all the sea vegetables have in common is that they are all very excellent sources of iodine to keep your thyroid working well. They also contain a good amount of vitamins and minerals. Just don’t eat too much of these, since excessive iodine can reduce thyroid function. Moderation is key.
“Spring mix” salad
This is something you can find in your grocery store that usually comes in bags pre-washed. 4 cups of it contains a lot of nutrients: Vitamin E – 15%; vitamin K – 570% (this one is important, since most people lack vitamin K in their diets); vitamin C – 60%; folate – 64%; magnesium 13%; and contains decent amounts of B vitamins and minerals. Just remember that plants do not contain vitamin A. They contain what CAN be converted into vitamin A in the body, but it is not vitamin A. Real vitamin A is found in animal products like cod liver oil, liver, eggs, etc. Just add a pinch of sodium bicarbonate (baking soda) when you eat this to help neutralize the oxalic acid in these veggies. Oxalic acid binds with calcium in the body, so it’s good to neutralize it.
So there you have it. These are nature’s vitamins, and you should take advantage of them and include them in your diet! Just use moderation (moderation is good for health and because it’s cheaper). You don’t need all sorts of vitamin and mineral supplements for the most part since you can get a lot of great nutrition from these foods. They contain all the synergistic nutrients along with them and are highly bioavailable. After all, nature knows what it’s doing.
