HoneyNut
Senior Member
When I was young my diet was a mess and a doctor I went to when I started having migraines told me to buy a book that has tables of the nutrient content of different foods and eat foods that would meet the vitamin/mineral requirements.
Of course if you can't eat a lot of calories then it is hard to meet the requirements. It also requires having a really varied diet, for me it was too much work to do that, so I started taking vitamins back then. At that time Vitamin A and the B-vitamins did me a noticeable amount of good, but my diet had been extremely bad (like french fries and ice cream only) and I also didn't eat meat for several years at that time, so I'm sure I was absolutely deficient in most nutrients.
Most of my adult life I've taken a multi-vitamin, but I'd add in extra of whatever was the popular nutrient but it is so frustrating that first the news would say take X, then later it would say don't take X.
Three years ago I was having trouble with muscle weakness, especially when I exercised a little too long. What worked for me was increasing sodium (after I added up what I was getting in food and discovered I'd gone too gung-ho into low-sodium), and B12 helped a lot, but I still wasn't quite back to normal, and the dental hygienist told me that her mother had been getting weak and that B12 plus Iron helped her. So I tried adding some iron and it worked. I'd been taking the iron-free senior vitamins for years and I guess my diet doesn't include enough iron-rich food (liver - yuck!). So I buy the type of multi-vitamin+iron that says the daily dose is two, but I only take one (so just a half-dose of iron).
Currently I take, D3, Magnesium, Calcium (added this past year because now I'm on an osteoporosis medicine that requires taking calcium to ensure the med doesn't cause inadequate calcium because the med prevents the body from taking calcium from the bones which is the body's normal method of maintaining a proper serum balance when the diet doesn't provide enough), fish oil (per the doctor's recommendation), B12 (even tho the blood tests says it is high now, my doctor said to continue it, tho I'm not sure if he said that because it helped my weakness or because I have a family history of pernicious anemia), a half-dose of a multivitamin+iron, and a probiotic.
I take a particular probiotic that has a lot of one type of beneficial bacteria that my gut-health analysis (poop test) showed I was low in.
Another caution about iron is that some people have hereditary hemochromatosis and don't know it. My brother only found out after he had a DNA test done and saw that he had both copies of a gene variant that can cause it and he went to the doctor and he does have it and now he has to have blood removed regularly (and they can't even use the blood because of the excess iron). I got lucky and inherited the good variant from both parents (parents had one good/one bad).
