Marmite Outrage

[Green Aura]

Dunno Dunc. Most nutritionists tell us that if we get a good, balanced diet we shouldn't need supplements. Unless they're counting on everyone including fortified plastic bread and cereals in that diet too, of course!

I know they started adding Vits A and D to white flour because of deficiencies but that reinforces my point, I think.

[Odsox]

The idea that pre-modern people were all paragons of health

It does rather depend on what era you are talking about Dunc.
If you go back about 2 generations to my grandparents for instance, they lived off unadulterated fresh meat and home grown fruit and vegetables, raised 7 kids without the benefit of folic acid, never ate a cornflake or a Marmite sandwich, and both managed to survive into their nineties.
Those 7 kids all made it to at least their 70's (one to 97) and raised 12 of their own between them, of which 4 didn't make it to their 50's and two more have cancer.

[gregorach]

Dunno Dunc. Most nutritionists tell us that if we get a good, balanced diet we shouldn't need supplements.

My point is that that's a very big if. A great many people survived (and still do survive) on what we would regard as lousy diets. Sure, improving the general diet would be the ideal solution, but have you ever heard the saying "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good"? Until we manage to completely eliminate poverty, ignorance and laziness, lots of people are going to have sub-optimal diets. I'm not holding my breath...

The idea that pre-modern people were all paragons of health

It does rather depend on what era you are talking about Dunc.
If you go back about 2 generations to my grandparents for instance...

Yeah, and in roughly the same period, severe vitamin D deficiencies were endemic in many places.

I'm not saying that nobody had a good diet, I'm saying that many people didn't, and that nutritional deficiencies are not just a modern phenomenon. I'm not saying that absolutely everybody was always nutritionally deficient - but nevertheless, many people frequently were. Nor am I arguing that nutritional supplementation is always essential. I'm just disagreeing with the idea that "pre-modern people were all paragons of health enjoying healthy balanced diets". Sure, some of them were, but lots of them weren't.

Whether this sort of nutritional supplementation is generally a good idea or not is something you'd need really big, long-term population-level studies to answer. However, I do know that I've never seen anyone with rickets, but if I had been born a hundred years earlier, I almost certainly would have.

It's not all black and white.

[greenorelse]

I'm not entirely convinced that nutritional deficiencies are an entirely modern, "Western" phenomenon. The idea that pre-modern people were all paragons of health enjoying healthy balanced diets is not supported by the evidence so far as I am aware. The field of osteoarchaeology clearly shows widespread nutritional deficiencies in many populations throughout much of history, at least since the development of agriculture. They just weren't severe enough to prevent at least some people from surviving to reproductive age.

That's my understanding too, gregorach. Read up on 'Derbyshire neck', for instance.

Eating totally local food limits the content of your diet to whatever is found in the soil thereabouts. You need some food 'imported' - even if only from fifty or a hundred miles away - both for variety and nutritional balance.

I think it must be because as I've read through the list

List?

[Odsox]

The idea that pre-modern people were all paragons of health

It does rather depend on what era you are talking about Dunc.
If you go back about 2 generations to my grandparents for instance...

Yeah, and in roughly the same period, severe vitamin D deficiencies were endemic in many places.
It's not all black and white.

Yes you're right, I admit I did have a blinkered view while I was writing the above.
I will definitely accept that people who lived in towns and cities in the first half of the last century were almost certainly deficient in a quite a few essentials. I was born during that period in a very rural area where most people grew their own fruit and vegetables, where meat animals were raised very locally ... etc. etc., and apart from TB and what used to be call infantile paralysis (polio) there were no dietary ailments or diseases that I remember.

I certainly don't need any further encouragement to continue to grow all my own veg, make my own bread, cook all my food from scratch and stay out of fast food "restaurants".

[oldjerry]

Also mass ,compulsory (and mostly unrealised)medication has been going on for decades in the UK,see flouridation of drinking water in Anglesey.

[chickenchargrill]

It's all made up apparently. Marmite has not been banned, it was never okayed in the first place.

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/denmark-denies ... 80%99.html

[prison break fan]

We have friends with a black Labrador puppy called Marmite, simply because she is black and beautiful! pbf.

[Henwoman]

Rickets is apparently more prevalent in the UK nowadays, partly due to children playing inside on computers. If they were outside in the sunshine they would be producing Vitamin D. Also non-white immigrants have a higher incidence of rickets as it is harder for pigmented skin to absorb the sunlight in the less sunny climes of the UK.

[JulieSherris]

Well, personally I think Denmark are right to ban Marmite. Then everyone can just have Bovril on their toast, like what I do.....

Love it? Hate it? I think you know what camp I fall in, ahaha!

[niknik]

As a baby/toddler, I was fed a lot of it and apparently loved it...... now just the thought of it....yuk yuk yuk.

I did use some in cooking for a whiile, simply because someone who moved away gave us all the food stuffs they werent taking, but such minute amounts, it would have taken me years to getthrough a small jar! but then I found someone else to pass it on to

[RuthG]

Rickets is apparently more prevalent in the UK nowadays, partly due to children playing inside on computers. If they were outside in the sunshine they would be producing Vitamin D. Also non-white immigrants have a higher incidence of rickets as it is harder for pigmented skin to absorb the sunlight in the less sunny climes of the UK.

Can rickets be prevented by eating Marmite I thought Marmite was rich in B vits and rickets was a deficiency of Vit D