Micronutrients
How to Take Micronutrients
Micronutrient timing isn't about consistency—it's about pulsatility. Learn how intermittent dosing mimics natural biological cycles and optimizes metabolic adaptation.
Micronutrients
Micronutrient timing isn't about consistency—it's about pulsatility. Learn how intermittent dosing mimics natural biological cycles and optimizes metabolic adaptation.
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Just recently, we held another Instagram Q&A session, topic: Our products.
Among the questions was whether you can take Product X daily and «forever» in Dose Y. Of course you can. Our products are safe and naturally designed so you can take them without problems all the time. But the next question was how «you» (meaning me, Chris) take our Multi, for example. I personally take everything pulsatile, meaning I don't always take everything daily, with the same dose, and possibly also at the same time of day. Big surprise: «Whaaat, why on earth would you do that?»
At that point, I always ask myself whether people take even five minutes to engage with our concepts. Why do we write blogs and books and so on and so forth? For example, page 36 in «Optimize Health, Increase Performance», Chapter: «The One Side of the Scale: ‹Power Law› or the Law of Interaction», Quote: «We just learned about human hunting behavior. It happens randomly, completely variable, and phase-wise – not chronically. Other predators in the animal kingdom, usually carnivores, behave similarly. Between hunts, there are longer pauses, and the stress is acute – not chronic.»
This brings us to deeper discussions about fundamental features of biological systems. One example: What distinguishes metabolically healthy people? What is the hallmark of metabolically ill people? The former can completely empty the tank. They can not only empty their energy reserves – for example, body fat and glycogen stores – to the max, with full power, whenever needed. The complete refill also works flawlessly and functionally. This is apparent, for example, in insulin secretion: metabolically ill people (pre-diabetic) always have too much insulin, but when it really matters – when there's a big load of food and carbs – they don't produce enough.
If we imagine a bellows, you would see in metabolically healthy people that its volume is fully exploited. The air is completely released, then it is fully refilled with air again. In metabolically ill people, the bellows is never fully emptied; on the contrary, it's always 80% full and has to breathe with the remaining 20%.
You can also explain it using the RPM range of cars. A healthy person, as a car, would use the full bandwidth of RPM, from very bottom to almost the very top of the limit. Metabolically ill people, in the analogy, would always be way too high or too low revved and couldn't exploit the rest of the RPM range at all, for whatever that would mean in a car.
Concretely: What's missing is pulsatility, the exploitation of ranges. One behaves opposite to the other. You can stress systems either pulsingly and massively, that is, to the full extent – or: something becomes chronic, i.e., permanently stressed, but then intensity is lost. But for biological systems, what's decisive is the degree of stress – the intensity. That is the measure of how well we can adapt to situations, how well we can «cope» with a situation. Aha. This also brings us, for example, to another biological field: training science in sports. Progression is only achievable if we manage to stress the system to the maximum(!) for a moment. But the training stimulus is only fully exploited if the body can cool down completely afterward. Recovery. «Better 10% undertrained than 1% overtrained.» Old athlete wisdom.
This translates into terminology: people speak of metabolic flexibility or heart rate variability. These aren't terms that just stand for themselves. They result from precisely the biological laws mentioned above and describe exactly those phenomena. Just as tides behave, many processes in the body behave. Only we humans always think we need to set up a permanent connection for everything.
Therefore, I believe – given that I've been supplementing nutrients in food for many years, really decades, deliberately creating surpluses or high availability for certain moments – that it makes sense to also not take micronutrient supplements permanently in the same dose daily, but to build in phases where there is less (or nothing). I think that's basically a worthwhile goal for everyone.
Because, as so often: people learn nothing from their mistakes and instead keep going with the same behavior in other areas of life. In other words: First you wreck your body with some chronic behavior (e.g., smoking, e.g., stress, e.g., overeating, e.g., ...) and then you think you have to keep going with another chronic behavior (e.g., excessive exercise, e.g., radical diet change, e.g., high-dose micronutrient therapy, ...).
Nothing understood at all.
An interesting recent study we don't want to keep from you at the end. Researchers want to come up with something. They observe that one in seven people in the US has kidney disease. Sometimes noticed, sometimes not. One in three is potentially affected. Since this is primarily an age-related disease, they wanted to test substances that have been shown to slow aging processes in tissues.
According to the researchers, there are «many fancy substances that are also extremely expensive». So what did they do? They gave mice a well-known, natural GSK-3 inhibitor ... lithium ... in low doses. GSK-3 rises, for example, when you're insulin-resistant (who's surprised anymore?). Insulin can no longer work well and tissues age faster. This is apparently reversed with low-dose lithium. As a result, the healing effects of insulin can unfold again. And: the «results clearly show that low-dose lithium slows kidney aging in mice».
Cool or cool?
