I am a person who does not like seafood and I usually sit inside most of the day (software engineer). I guess there are egg yolks or dairy products like cheese that also contains some but it seemingly wasn't enough for me.
Resulted visiting a doctor who did a blood test, saw I had critically low vitamin D level (~5 ng/ml). Gave high-dose supplements of 20 000 IU to take every day for up to a month and to touch some grass under the sun :D
After fixing vitamin D I did improve my diet more as well (added more vegetables that fixed few other micronutrients that were just slightly low). Combining that with more exercise gave my next big jump in health improvement. I think my diet is pretty close to typical paleo-type diet excluding fish.
I know mine was chronically low in Magnesium. The first indicator which got my attention and pointed to a potential problem was that taking a multi vitamin would make me feel _much_ better than normal the next day.
taking a multi vitamin would make me feel _much_ better than normal the next day
My first comment is that I think this is why we have placebo-controlled double-blind studies.
My second is that I took a multi-vitamin for many years and I recommend caution in their use. For much of that time, when I went to the doctor for my yearly physical I would have elevated AST and ALT liver enzymes which is a marker of liver damage. All tests for typical causes of this (hepatitis, others) came up negative.
Finally my doctor asked if I took a multivitamin. I said yes and she told me to stop taking it. That was about 15 years ago and I have never had elevated liver enzymes since then.
> You also get to see what foods have what, it’s interesting. Like how one little prickly pear has 200% of your vitamin E needs.
Do you have a source for this (USDA FDC data and google-fu don't concur)? I'd love to have alternate options for Vit E besides almonds :). It's a fat soluble vitamin, available from nuts and nut oils - vegetable sources are harder to find.
