Nutrient density · 🧈🐟

Magnesium from Wheat

The obvious explanation for falling magnesium levels is depleted soil. Test it: drag the soil dial across its whole range and watch how little changes below. This simulation is most impressive when input and output are visible at the same time. It works on a mobile device, but I recommend a big screen for the effect.

More thought experiments worth having: the figures for “bound in the gut” and “lost through the kidney” are relevant to magnesium from sources other than wheat as well, as long as it is eaten together with the wheat-containing meal:

The phytates in wheat do not only bind the minerals the wheat brought along itself, but every mineral they come into contact with in the digestive tract. And the kidney does not tell magnesium apart by its origin either - it excretes it regardless.

A reenactment of the well-known 'Evolution of Man' meme with life-sized silhouette cutouts, led by a real person looking at their phone

Evolutionary Association, Chapter 9: Iodine

Iodine is everywhere and nowhere. It can be absorbed, substituted, or blocked at several stages. What we eat decides which of those happens.

Evolutionary Association, Chapter 8: Fertiliser

‘Spoiled soil’ is nowhere near the whole story, and fertiliser is nowhere near everything a plant needs.

Evolutionary Association, Chapter 6: Sourdough

Why modern turbo-bread burdens the body - and why the lockdown sourdough craze accidentally got it right: long fermentation pre-digests what the gut cannot.

A prepared dish with rice, beans and other ingredients in a wooden bowl

Superfood or Antinutrient?

Foods praised for their ingredients often bring the antidote along too. How do antinutrients work? Can they be rendered harmless? A selection.

Colourful breakfast things in a bowl and scattered across the table. Probably not healthy, but fitting for the rainbow theme

"Eat the Rainbow", Part 2

There’s a second aspect that can be read as a motive for ’eat the rainbow’. Because the rainbow also influences what you don’t eat.

A cow on grass. In the background, more cattle lie partially hidden in tall grass.

Allan Savory: What Holds Up, What Doesn't

In the first grazing article I flagged some dissent about Allan Savory. Turns out it’s not one but two objections.

Sign 'Due to health risks don't feed the ducks or geese'

Don't feed the animals

Why aren’t you supposed to feed the ducks in the park or the animals at the zoo - and what we can learn from it

Two combine harvesters in a large wheat field.

Grains

Grains are among the most fundamental staples - most people can hardly imagine doing without them. Yet depending on whether they are eaten by humans or fed to animals, they are credited with diametrically opposite properties. Schrödinger’s food

Cattle herd on pasture, in front of trees. One white animal among an otherwise black herd

Pasture-Raised Ruminants

Cattle get a lot of blame - how the farming method can turn that picture around

What this tool shows - and what it does not

What you are looking at is a visualisation of the magnesium content of wheat. Magnesium also comes from plenty of other sources, which are explicitly not considered here.

Every number here is an illustrative placeholder. They are chosen so that the directions hold and the orders of magnitude are plausible, but it is not only the decimal places that are unreliable: there is no target figure to reach here, and nothing on this page supports a conclusion about how much magnesium anyone ought to consume.

What it is for instead: showing where magnesium is lost on the way from the field to the body, and which of those places actually matters.

The background story is in the chapter on fertiliser - that is also where the sources behind these directions are, and what “variety and yield” is really about. That chapter was the inspiration for this simulator.

The three stations

Field. Soil, fertilisation and variety together determine how much magnesium reaches the grain at all. Soil sets a ceiling - as long as it is not the scarcest input, making it richer changes nothing. When a dial is currently doing nothing, it says so.

Grain. The magnesium content of the grain is a result of the field dials, not an input of its own. You can still grab it: set a target and the tool works backwards to how old-fashioned the variety would have to be.

Body. This is where it is decided how much of what is on the plate actually arrives. Phytate binds part of it in the gut, and the dough fermentation changes that considerably. And because high blood glucose and high insulin each independently make the kidney excrete magnesium, the result also depends on the metabolic profile you pick, which is taken from the glucose/insulin simulation.

The diagrams

The stack starts on the left with what would be possible on ideal soil with a heritage variety, and narrows at four points. Every narrowing is labelled. What arrives on the right is what stays. The table below gives the same quantities as numbers, so that ratios can be read off - not so that they can be memorised. Here above all: the numbers are in a plausible order of magnitude, but not experimentally validated. They are meant as an illustration!

The curve shows the absolute amount of magnesium from wheat that stays in the body, depending on the share of wheat in the diet.

Three experiments

Drag magnesium in the soil across its whole range. For most of it, nothing happens. That is the answer to the most obvious guess.
Drag variety and yield to the left. That is the dial that actually moves things.
Raise share of wheat slowly. More wheat delivers more magnesium - up to a point. The curve at the bottom shows where that point sits and what happens past it.

Your diet

This simulator makes no dietary recommendations: it merely visualises how, where and whether magnesium taken up by eating wheat ends up in the body, or where it is lost along the way.

There are many other, better sources of magnesium, and magnesium is not the only micronutrient that matters. Personally, I have felt considerably better since giving up grains altogether than I did before.