Micronutrient adequacy at low total intake posts 31–60
This is a continuation of a long topic, addressed by post number rather than by page. Start at post 1.
I had written a reply contradicting post #28 and deleted it. Here is what survived.
Eating anything at all: on substantial appetite suppression, eating enough total calories to maintain lean mass is the priority. Protein comes second to total intake.
Anyone who has looked at this more carefully, please correct the record.
Distinguishing three things in the micronutrient adequacy discussion that keep getting used interchangeably: the observation, the proposed mechanism, and the recommendation that gets attached to both.
Post #33 is the version of this I will quote in future. One addition.
Leucine and MPS: leucine stimulates muscle protein synthesis at a threshold of roughly 2 to 3 grams per meal. That influences how much protein per meal matters, but total daily protein still matters most.
That is the version I use. It may not be the version that is correct.
Where I part company with post #32, and it is a narrow parting.
Micronutrient adequacy would be much easier to settle if anyone reported the denominator. Almost nobody reports the denominator.
Published guidance on protein during weight loss is reasonably consistent and is easy to find, which makes this one of the better-evidenced practical questions here.
Where somebody reports losing strength, intake and training stimulus are the first two things to look at rather than the compound.
Building on post #38 rather than restating it.
Where the micronutrient adequacy reasoning breaks down for me is the step from the group result to the individual case. That step is almost never argued for.
A note on scope: what I am saying about micronutrient adequacy applies to the case in the first post and I would not extend it further without checking.
I read post #37 twice before replying, because I had assumed the opposite.
Timing of protein: spreading protein intake across the day, with some at each meal, is more practical than trying to hit the whole target at one sitting on suppressed appetite.
Taking micronutrient adequacy seriously for a moment rather than deflecting: the honest position is that the community has observations and no controlled comparison, and those two things support very different sentences.
The reason micronutrient adequacy keeps being re-asked is that the answer is conditional and people quote it without the condition. It is not that the answer is unknown.
Liquid sources are tolerated better than solid ones by many people here, and that is a practical observation rather than a nutritional principle.
Happy to be the one who is wrong here if it settles the question.
Density matters more than quantity when total intake is limited. The same protein in a smaller volume is the whole game.
This is the version I would want a new member to read first.
Picking up post #45: that is the part I would want checked first.
My experience of micronutrient adequacy contradicts the reply above. I am posting it as a data point rather than as a refutation, because one person's experience is exactly that.
No disagreement from me. Posting only so the question does not look ignored.
The arithmetic in post #48 is right; the assumption feeding it is the part to check.
Two people in this thread mean different things by micronutrient adequacy and are disagreeing about the definition while believing they are disagreeing about the facts. Worth pausing to define it.
Self-reported intake is optimistic by a consistent margin in the published comparisons, which is worth applying to your own numbers.
Following, with nothing to contribute beyond having asked the same thing elsewhere.
Collapsed as off-topic by two members at trust level 3 or above
Picking up post #51: that is the part I would want checked first.
Nothing here is medical or dietetic advice, and a dietitian is the professional this subcategory most often recommends.
Flagging that the sources on this are thinner than the confidence in the thread suggests.
The most useful thing anyone has posted about micronutrient adequacy in this category was a table of what had been measured and by whom. That is what I would want again.
Where intake has fallen a long way, protein is usually the first thing to fall because it is the least appealing macronutrient when appetite is reduced.
Thank you for the correction. I would rather find out here than later.
The useful distinction on micronutrient adequacy is between what was measured and what was inferred from it. Both end up in the same sentence and only one of them has error bars.