Tracking Your Micronutrients

Tracking your micronutrients can reveal deficiencies in your diet.

Many people are familiar with the practice of tracking their macronutrients, or the amount of of fat, protein, carbohydrates and fiber that are taken in each day. These are nutrients with caloric value––fuel for the body to burn as energy. Many people use this strategy for weight loss or as part of an overall training program.  While you are welcome to employ this strategy on The Kaufmann Diet, it is not necessary to achieve the ends of the Kaufmann Diet, which is starving pathogenic yeasts and fungi in the body and eliminating foods contaminated with mold poisons (known as mycotoxins).

Micronutrients are different from macronutrients. Micronutrients include the wide array of vitamins, minerals and phytonutrients that are known to be necessary for good health. This include vitamins like vitamin A, B vitamins, vitamin C, vitamin D, calcium, potassium, magnesium and the whole spectrum of other nutrients that are needed or the body to perform its wide array of biochemical processes. While these are not necessarily fuel for the body the way that calories are, they are similarly necessary to sustain life.

We know that most Americans do not get the recommended amount nutrients in their diets. Largely, this is due to poor diet and a lack of fresh fruits and vegetables in favor of processed and fast foods. Other factors, however, like soil depletion can play a role in this as well. But, if we are honest, most people simply do not eat enough fresh, nutrient-dense food.

Many medical professionals argue that the body can get what it needs from diet alone, which is true––if you are eating the right diet. Even eating a poor diet will provide some nutrients. Most people are known to not get enough of these nutrients, and while most are not deficient enough that they get diseases like scurvy, there may be other implications for the nutritional void in many people’s diets.

High blood pressure is one example of this. We know that getting enough nutrients like potassium and magnesium are necessary for healthy blood pressure levels, but many people come nowhere close to getting the daily recommended amount of these and other nutrients. Of course, there are many factors that must be considered with blood pressure, but it is interesting to think about how many issues in the body would be resolved if people simply got the proper amount of these important micronutrients.

Largely, this is where the utility of a multi-vitamin can be extremely valuable, but there can be enormous benefit for taking inventory of your micronutrient intake on The Kaufmann Diet. Many (if not most) micronutrients likely exhibit some sort of anti-fungal benefit, in addition to providing the necessary nutrition to optimize our bodies for fighting pathogenic fungi and staying healthy.

This is can be a difficult task, but tracking your micronutrients can help inform what foods on the Kaufmann Diet you should include in abundance. You will notice that vegetables like spinach, kale and other greens, along with foods like avocados, berries and nuts are often loaded with nutrients. At the very least, tracking your nutrition can give you a good idea if you should be adding in a multivitamin supplement to your regimen, which can be very beneficial.

The recommended daily allowance is a good baseline to start with, but know that getting more of certain nutrients (like vitamin C) is when the therapeutic benefits of these nutrients begins to occur.