vitamin a (general)
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ok, so i fixed a few things, and this is my new template.
i need to get some cheese info in there. but, now i'm at the point of pondering what and how i should supplement further, and the first vitamin in the list is vitamin a.
i know that vitamin a comes in two forms, and i know that conversion is often poor. i think i was previously overestimating the amount i was getting from a combination of tomatoes/soy/cheese/eggs, and i was told that vitamin a deficiency can't happen here and believed it, but after actually calculating the values, which i should have done years ago, i think i need to pay special attention to this.
this is worth sorting through to summarize the situation:
so, i'm getting about 54% of my vitamin a from actual retinol (soy, ice cream, eggs, margarine), not including cheese. the other 110% is from carotenoids found in fruit (you'll notice there's not yet any vegetables in my diet, and i need to change that). is that a good enough mix? well, for a, i'd like to shoot for 400% total, with 100% in the retinol and 300% in the carotenoids. that should eliminate any potential error, and make sure i'm converting as much as possible. a single carrot is an extra 250%, entirely via carotenoids, and with minimal k, so i think that solves that without even wading into the problems presented by broccoli. but, what about actual retinol?
given that i'm trying to avoid fish due to the mercury content, my only serious choice for vitamin a is via fortification or via dairy products, and i only really get dairy in the form of ice cream (which i think i'm maxed out on) and cheese (which is what i'm looking at next). i don't want to eat animal organs, 'cause gross.
so, next time somebody gives you shit about eating cheese, you might want to point to the retinol. unless they're eating a fair amount of liver or fish, or paying very close attention to how the grains they eat are fortified, or drink a lot of fortified whole milk, or eat eggs every day, or eat lots of fattening peanut butter, cheese is really the only serious way to get any. and, i'll pick cheese over the others...
how many of the options in this list sound appetizing to you?
on that note, the other thing i can do is buy a box of cereal and throw it in with the fruit. something like a cup of plain jane special k or corn flakes is not bad on fat, and will help with b complexes, too. it's cheap, as well. i just need to find the brand that has what i want, which is - lots of vitamins, minimal sugar, minimal salt & minimal price. and, i'll bring it home on the unicorn i parked in the lot.
so, that means i should be looking at cheddar-type cheeses, as they have more retinol than mozza type cheeses. i'm not sure there's any reason to migrate from the marble, but i'll see if i can get a better answer on that, too.
...which was actually pretty easy, i just went to the site:
my marble has 10%/30g, which is about on par with the cheddar numbers at the self site (maybe a little higher). the black diamond mozza is at 8%, which is consistent. but, if i'm eating cheese for a, i can actually max that out by moving to one of the flavours with 15%, which are:
- mild cheddar [180 mg of salt]
- medium [old or white] [180 mg of salt]
for reference, the marble has 200 mg of salt and is marketed as medium. that seems like what i should do...
so, i'm not adding anything in this post besides the top line of vitamin a, i'm just reposting the template. but, to get me to where i want to be with a, my options are:
- carrots (250% more carotenoids presents resolution for >300% carotenoids dv)
- cheese (~45% more retinol) (99%)
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- low sugar, low salt fortified cereal (20-30% more retinol) (presents resolution for >100% retinol dv) (if i can find it)
- doubling soy milk? (10% more retinol) (gravy)
it would be even better if they put vitamin a in the pasta & bread.
i need to do some court stuff today...
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i'm starting with vitamin a, on the top line and moving down, and i'm instantly finding an error in the data that could very well be catastrophic. the raw numbers at the self site seem to be pulled directly from the usda, but the conversion factors seem to be all wrong.
consider bananas.
there are supposed to be 30.7 μg of beta-carotene and 55.5 μg of alpha-carotene equivalents in 118 g of banana. the factor for beta-carotene is supposed to be 12 & the factor for alpha-carotene is supposed to be 24. this would suggest that there is a total of:
30.7/12 + 55.5/24 = 4.87 μg of retinol activity equivalents. yet, the site insists on 3.5 μg rae, and i can't immediately see what the conversion factor is.
worse, when you convert from 3.5 μg rae to ui, the factor should by 10/3. so you should get (7/2)*(10/3) = 35/3 = 11.67. yet, the site insists on 75.5 ui - which is indeed about 2% of 3000 ui, a bit more. but, converting backwards, you'd need to get to 22.65 μg rae, which seems a far cry from 4.87 or 3.5.
so, the numbers being thrown around don't appear to be consistent with each other, and if you go directly to the usda site, you might get the explanation i'm trying to find - they come from independent estimates. so, the ui is not calculated from the component sections.
Vitamin A, RAE 3.54 µg 4/1/2006
Retinol 0 µg 6/1/2002
Carotene, beta 30.7 µg Analytical (16.5, 68.4) 12/1/2002
Carotene, alpha 29.5 µg Analytical (11.8, 88.5) 12/1/2002
Vitamin A, IU 75.5 IU 4/1/2006
Lutein + zeaxanthin 26 µg Analytical (15.3, 31.9) 12/1/2002
the numbers for the carotenoids appear to be an average calculated independently from the rae or iu numbers.
now, if i plug in the highest numbers in the sample, for fun, i get:
2*(68.4/12 + (88.5+31.9)/24) = 21.43 μg rae, which is at least close, but demonstrates a point i've been trying to get at by lowballing everything - these numbers are not static, and are going to depend on things like growing conditions and storage. when foods are fortified, their contents are determined in a lab and it's more clear; when they're plucked out of a produce section, you often just don't really know. you have to guess...
that's why i'm coming in low and aiming high on everything.
that said, i'm also assuming the ui numbers are for total retinol equivalents due to the calculated daily value numbers. it happens to be, though, that 3.54/0.05 ~ 70, meaning the conversion factor is much closer when it's calculated directly from beta-carotene. if that is what they did, and i think it is, then they made an error in the final conversion, as they should have calculated the rdi at 18,000 rather than 3,000 and that is only 0.5%. that would appear to be an error in conversion at the self site, rather than by the usda; the usda provides the numbers 3.54 μg rae and 75.5 ui, but does not derive one from the other, specify units for ui (retinol, or beta-carotene) or provide a daily value from them. yet, it is clear from the numbers that the usda must have meant ui beta-carotene, and the self site misread it as ui retinol. and, i wonder if that factor of 6 carries through (in fact, it does).
so, how do i fix that?
while i would like to add up the components as modularly as possible, i don't know how complete the listing is. there are more than six carotenoids, so i may miss total retinol by adding them up. further, i now *know* that i'm not going to get the same answers.
what i'm going to do is rely on the rae number. this should consistently be a very rough factor of six lower than what i had listed, due to a conversion error at the self site. i apologize for not catching that, but i just took the data as i saw it.
if you are an editor at the self site, please make that correction - you are not converting properly and are inflating carotenoids by a factor of 6.
so,
- bananas go from 4% to 7.08 μg (which is roughly a factor lower at .78%)
- strawberries are entered in at .75 μg, which is still 0%
- avocados go from 4% to 10.5 μg, which is that same factor downwards
- kiwis are at 3 μg, still very low
- the soy, ice cream & cereal present their dv% on the box as retinol (not carotenoids) and will be left as is.
so, the sum for this meal is now:
38% dv for retinol
21.33 μg rae carotenoid, which is 2.37% of the dv.
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40.37%, down from 47%.
i will correct these items in the chart.
now, this might seem terrible, but let's take a step back.
when i initially crunched these numbers, i decided i would need:
1) 100% retinol, split by threes because it's fat soluble.
2) 300% convertible, because i'm going to lose a factor of 3, roughly, if i have conversion issues.
the correction i'm making is a more aggressive one, but it is essentially working out the same concern, just putting it into the chart. and, as such, there's not any real reason to seek out 300% of the daily value of carotenoids if i'm calculating the rae up front.
let's see what the numbers for the rest of the meal look like:
peppers - first, note that i'm boosting the amount to 200 g because that's more realistic. the giant peppers i bought the other day are more in the 250-275 g range, but that's before they're cut. even so, i never really see the small ones, and am going to hold out for the biggest ones at the best price when i find them. so, that's 314 μg, and a much smaller 35% - but note that that is roughly a third of the 103% i was overshooting for.
pasta - the 1% was pulled from data in this paper, which eyeballed .5 μg. i should divide that by a factor of 24, which is .02 μg rae.
cheese - is from a modern label, and is 30% pre-formed retinol
carrots - i am likewise boosting carrots to 110 g as that is more reflective of reality. that number is chosen to get the carotenoid rae content over 100%, which is what i actually wanted. that's 918 μg.
so, i still have 30% pre-formed from the cheese and now have:
314+918+.02 = 1232.02 μg rae, which is 137% from carotenoids.
together, that's 167%, in more precisely measurable terms. and, note that 345/3 = 115 < 137, so i'm arguably doing better via that calculation, conceptually.
the eggs are the first and maybe only hybrid decision for vitamin a in the matrix. the numbers at the self site are interesting:
- 335 iu (7%)
- 88.8 μg of actual retinol
- 91.1 μg of total rae
that would indicate 2.3 μg of rae from carotenoids, and they do indeed appear to be measurable in the data.
as before, the iu does not appear to be calculated from the rae numbers but comes from an independent analysis that is close but off due to error. the carotenoid numbers would indeed appear to be roughly 2.5, so i'm going to be consistent and stick with the rae in order to minimize any further conversion errors at the self site. and, in this case, that number actually increases my total...
as before, the weight factor is three, so:
88.8*3 = 266.4 μg [29.6%]
2.3*3 = 6.9 μg &
91.1*3 = 273.3 μg, which is 30.37% total, up from 21%.
the cheese & margarine are from modern labels and come in at 15% and 10%, respectively.
so,
retinol: 54.6%--->54%
carotenoid: .77%--->1%
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55%
the soy in the coffee is from a modern label and will not be altered.
the new totals are:
126% retinol +
140% retinol equivalent carotenoids
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266% rdi
further, 140*3 = 420 > 354, so the recalculation actually suggests i was lowballing, as intended.
i'm going to apologize again, but it's not like this is really my fault - i didn't make a mistake in the calculation, so much as the site i was using made an error in their conversion factor, and i only caught it because the numbers didn't add up. i actually corrected somebody else's error, here. that's called peer review and this is why science needs it. that said, i had already compensated for this, conceptually, so it turned out to be a move sideways and not much of a big deal, after all.
note the altered requirements for a at the bottom.
we'll jump to b1 next, and make sure the numbers are right - relatively to the new weightings of the pasta bowl.
* - not really vitamins