With MacroFactor radically expanding its micronutrient analytics, we thought this would be an opportune time to discuss micronutrients: what they are, what micronutrient targets represent, and considerations for tracking micronutrient intake.
This is part five of a five-part series:
1) Understanding Micronutrient and Essential Nutrient Categories
2) Understanding Nutrient Targets
3) Considerations for Micronutrient Tracking: Precision and Difficulty
4) Which Micronutrients Are Worth Monitoring?
5) Micronutrients are Important, But They Aren’t Everything
Our Knowledge Base also has an archive of additional information about each nutrient you can track in MacroFactor, including what the nutrient actually does, the likelihood of insufficient or excessive intake, and good food sources for each nutrient.
With that out of the way, let’s dive in!
Beware of Micronutrient Reductionism
To wrap up this series, I think it’s worth cautioning against something I like to refer to as micronutrient reductionism.
Humans have a tendency to like numerical targets that they can treat as proxies for outcomes that matter to them. In this case, I think there’s a tendency to operationally define a “healthy diet” as “a diet that contains the recommended amounts of all essential nutrients.”
In a vacuum, there’s nothing wrong with that. If you try to eat a variety of minimally processed foods that allow you to meet all of your nutrient targets, I think you’d have a hard time not eating a generally healthy diet.
However, it can become problematic when the targets themselves become your only goal and metric for success. In other words, you might run into problems when a proxy for your goal (in this case, meeting your micronutrient targets) replaces the actual goal itself (eating a diet that generally promotes good health).
When the focus shifts excessively toward numerical targets, you might start making choices that are optimized for the pursuit of those targets instead of the pursuit of the actual goal. Just as one example, consuming preformed vitamin A (retinol) is a more efficient way to meet your vitamin A targets than consuming carotenoids that can be converted to vitamin A. So, you might “realize” that you’re better off consuming one serving of liver per week, instead of consuming a variety of fruits and vegetables that are rich in carotenoids. But, the effects of foods aren’t reducible to their macro- and micronutrient composition, so by going this route, you’d be missing out on a host of other benefits that come from fruits and vegetables.
Or, for a more extreme example, you might realize that there’s an incredibly simple “hack” for meeting your micronutrient targets – just take a multivitamin. Then, with your micronutrient needs taken care of, your diet is already de facto “healthy,” so your other food choices are effectively irrelevant.
However, micronutrients aren’t everything. Adequate micronutrient intake is necessary for maximizing the general healthiness of a diet, but it’s not sufficient. In other words, adequate micronutrient intake helps you avoid certain disease states that can result from micronutrient deficiencies, but if you “just” meet your micronutrient targets, you’re not capturing all of the benefits that can come from a healthy diet.
There are plenty of health-promoting bioactive compounds (mostly in fruits and vegetables) that aren’t classified as essential nutrients. Not consuming these compounds doesn’t cause any known diseases, but these compounds do still bring unique benefits.
Two examples are polyphenols and isothiocyanates.
Polyphenols are found in a variety of fruits and vegetables – most notably berries, cherries, pomegranate seeds, and certain spices (like turmeric). Polyphenols have positive effects on neurodegenerative disease risk, inflammation, cancer risk, cardiovascular health, type II diabetes risk and management, and obesity risk via a surprisingly wide array of mechanisms.
If you were simply optimizing for micronutrient intake, you might reasonably eschew most of the foods that are high in polyphenols, because most of them aren’t micronutrient powerhouses. For example, blueberries have exceptionally high concentrations of a class of polyphenols called anthocyanins, but blueberries aren’t particularly rich in most vitamins or minerals. They’re a decent source of vitamin K and manganese (though there are plenty of foods with much higher concentrations of both nutrients), and they’re an alright source of vitamin C (though they pale in comparison to citrus fruits), but that’s about it. The micronutrient profile of cherries gives you even less to be excited about.
Isothiocyanates are a class of compounds primarily found in cruciferous vegetables (broccoli, brussels sprouts, cabbage, mustard greens, kale, etc.). They have potent antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, anticancer, and antibacterial effects. Much like polyphenols, they exert these effects via a surprisingly wide array of mechanisms.
In terms of micronutrients, cruciferous vegetables fare a bit better than polyphenol-rich fruits, but you still probably wouldn’t pick them out of a lineup. They’re pretty good sources of vitamins C and K, but they probably wouldn’t be your first choice if you were optimizing your food choices exclusively for micronutrient content.
The fact of the matter is that you can’t reduce the overall “healthiness” of a diet to its micronutrient content. If you could, the humble multivitamin would be a wonder drug, but it’s not. The same applies to supplementation of individual vitamins that tend to be under-consumed (like vitamins A and D).
So, if you track your micronutrient intake, just make sure you don’t miss the forest for the trees. Micronutrient intake is important, but don’t let the pursuit of micronutrient targets come at the expense of (or take the place of) consuming a generally healthy diet. Eat your protein, eat your fiber, don’t go overboard with added oils and sugars, and make sure you’re consuming a variety of fruits and vegetables. A healthy diet will generally be a micronutrient-rich diet, but don’t assume that micronutrient completeness will necessarily guarantee that your diet is optimized for health. It might just be optimized for micronutrient completeness.
