On Wed, 4 Oct 2000 16:09:43 EDT, Gawen Harrison <[log in to unmask]> wrote: >I seems that your Paleo vegetarianism may need to be questioned if you need= >to take pills to stay healthy >-Gawen Gawen, perhaps you didn't get my point. I got some problems *after* I ate the additional vitamin B12 and pausing it. I've come to the point to question the whole supplementation. It was only based on a comparison of my blood and some "average" (154 compared to average 200 to 900). As the experience of my girlfriend suggests, the slightly lower level (than "average") could remain stable further. She will not supplement. I agree with your point of view, that pills should *not* be necessary to stay healthy. Despite the opinions expressed from time to time - it *is* possible to eat about RDA with a natural selection IMO. At last vitamins as essentials were necessary all the millions of years and also for paleolithical humans, humanoids and predecessors. Without pills. Only exception may be to cope with disease situations. Making vegetables a staple is very good for this. Its easy to eat very much vegetables, because they are not so dense energetically and in this way you get much more vitamins and minerals. Eating low dense, high volume, high fiber, high vitamin, high mineral -- well I think that's real paleo. I tried computations with meat based nutritions too. The result was, that you can get close to RDA with most vitamins if you ate *very* high amounts of meat. About 1kg per day. This is close or beyond the limit of protein toxicity. I'll include an example below. Some vitamins are hard to get is this way. Particularly Vitamin E and C and Calcium. I did include organ meat as well (liver). So I could include folic acid and a little vitamin C. But though vitamin C is still at only 33%, Vitamin A is already at up at 1400 percent. 14-fold. Vitamin A intoxication would follow up after some time. Carefully adding intense vitamin C sources would be necessary. Plus vitamin E, and some fat (calorie) sources, as game meat is such a bad energy source. How to add enough calcium....... *you* should tell. Then, with a plant selection it's easier to supply the needs. If you include seeds (nuts or any other) then without eating extreme big volumes. Only vitamin B2 hard to get above some 50% with it. And then Vitamin B12.... there's no good reasoning for the RDA (just what is= consumed "by average"). How could they, if each human has a stores for 10 years. Deficiencies occur if the *re*-uptake fails. That 1 micro-gram.... it's a guess. below the meat only example for your information Cheers Amadeus S. Composition: item grams energy Deer (medium fat) 500 717.7 Liver 100 135.4 "meat" fresh 500 1574.2 (note the big liver part- more as paleopossible also note that i included ordinary 24%fat meat this is NOT available in a savannah but otherwise it would have been impossible to collect enough energy) Summary was: (forgive me not translating from german language I think you'll understand) Item Sum Recommended percentage achieved Energie: 2427.3 kcal 2600.0 kcal 93 Eiweiss: 220.0 g 55.0 g 400 Fett: 148.8 g 75.5 g 197 Kohlenhydrate: 2.2 g 408.0 g 1 mehrf. ung. FS: 14.6 g 10.0 g 146 Ballaststoffe: 0.0 g 30.0 g 0 Natrium: 700.0 mg 2000.0 mg 35 Kalium: 2950.0 mg 3500.0 mg 84 Magnesium: 318.0 mg 350.0 mg 91 Calcium: 157.0 mg 800.0 mg 20 Phosphor: 2560.0 mg 800.0 mg 320 Eisen: 44.0 mg 12.0 mg 367 Zink: 30.0 mg 15.0 mg 200 Vit. A: 14283.0 =B5g 1000.0 =B5g 1428 Vit. E: 3.3 mg 12.0 mg 27 Fols=E4ure: 292.1 =B5g 160.0 =B5g 183 Vit. B1: 1.2 mg 1.4 mg 85 Vit. B2: 4.7 mg 1.7 mg 277 Vit. B6: 3.5 mg 1.8 mg 194 Vit. C: 25.0 mg 75.0 mg 33 so far....