Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong (or explain it better) - My understanding is that you need dietary fat in order to absorb any vitamins and minerals from your food, which is why salad with fat free dressing is stupid. So you could accomplish that with olive oil or even a soy or canola oil based dressing.



I do understand what you're saying about the essential fatty acids though - if you aren't eating foods that contain essential fatty acids, you're going to completely miss out on those.

WereBear - I laughed so hard this morning. Thank you for the great start of my day.

Just to add. My understanding which is from very old info, so could be wrong at this point, is that fat soluble vitamins need fat to cross thru the gut lining.

Has this changed??

( This morning at the grocery, talked to a much older fellow trying to find zero fat dairy products; I mentioned that I cant find full fat dairy products easily; and another woman piped up , saying in regard to a daily amount, not too much fat a day. Im not sure she saw the 15 pounds of beef fat in my cart!! IT was a bit much but we all remained not only civil but also cheery. )

I was shopping for bacon once in a smaller trendy store and all that I saw was some in a meat market style case.
I asked the clerk if there was any in the regular self service refrigerator. This couple turned to me and said, You'll like this one, we always buy it because it's so LEAN.
No, I didn't even go there.......

Still true as far as I know. I think Martin's point is not only that fat is needed to absorb fat-soluble vitamins but that it's good to eat the fat sources that contain those vitamins to begin with. Hard to absorb something that's not there.

"It didn't go well." Au contraire. The writer went extremely well, as illustrated by the hilarious video graphics.

Yes, that's it. It's got to be in the fat in the first place.

I don't actually know the mechanisms involved but I got an idea from elsewhere. It's to do with emulsion. OK, so basically it's two liquids that normally don't mix - water and oil. In order to mix those, we need a special type of molecule that has two different ends, where water can attach to one end, and oil can attach to the other end. This then allows water and oil to mix.

OK, so now the fat-soluble molecules (and the fat itself) don't mix in water, they need that special molecule. I think that's cholesterol, more specifically bile. Bile emulsifies fat so it can mix with water, then fat can be broken down into fatty acids and glycerol, and then this can be absorbed. Immediately after absorption, it's recombined into triglycerides and attached to chylomicrons for transport to various organs like the liver for processing and fat tissue for storage. So this is how it works for fat itself, and fat-solubles must be called that because they are also fat molecules, and so they also need bile to allow them to mix with water.

And here's where I think the problem lies. Fat is required to stimulate the release of bile. Fat-soluble vitamins alone don't do it. No fat -> no bile -> no emulsion of fat-solubles -> no absorption of fat-solubles.

Down the line we metabolize fat and fat-solubles. I think this also requires that special molecule. It can't be bile at this point, it must be something else. I'm not sure but I think we're talking about cholesterol here too. I mean, bile is recycled by the liver so it must make its way through there somehow, so maybe it's bile here too, at least for the storage of fat-solubles. Vitamin A is stored in the liver so that makes some sense.

As to why I say it's got to be in the fat in the first place, I'm not sure. Maybe the fat that contains fat-solubles somehow also contain something else that enters this whole sequence.

I haven't figured that out before now and I don't know if that's how it actually works, but it makes sense to me.

ROFL ..... OMG!!!!!!! ROFL !!!

OK, GOt it Mike.

My concern is that lots of our foods do not have the levels of vitamins like they used to. Like, how long has that food been " picked" and in storage? Or did that animal even geet much grass to up the VIt A? And Vit D... that is trickier.

Good reasons to support local market/farm stands; grass fed producers and maybe even have a veg patch.

I cant grow olives or avocadoes here, so I think about what the natives did for vitamin rich fatty foods...... nuts?

(by the way, it's Martin, not Mike)

Yeah, me too I think food in general isn't what it used to be. Since I lean toward animal flesh as the most dense in terms of all essentials, and if the problem is that all types of food is less nutritious than it used to be, then animal flesh is still most dense, just less than it used to be.

For vitamin D, it's much more simple. Get some sun. Done. The sun is just as stong as it ever was, and it's still pretty much the best source of vitamin D.

Now if we worry about skin cancer, we gotta wonder how much better it is to never get any sun, or put some absolutely non-natural stuff on the skin, which then gets absorbed for who knows what effects.

To me, the whole idea of sun exposure and skin cancer is bogus. I mean think about it for a second. We've exposed ourselves to the sun for eons. Skin cancer is a very recent problem by comparison. How is the relationship even possible?

Here's a much more possible relationship, because it's true. Along with the recent problem of skin cancer, we got the recent problem of cancer of all types. We also got the recent problem of poor diet. We also got the recent problem of skin care products. Specifically for our purpose here, we got the very recent problem of skin protection products to protect our skin from the sun. Well, I don't need to think very hard to see a direct relationship between the idea of the sun being bad and skin protection products. Call me a cynic but I'm willing to bet a buck that this idea comes direct from the makers of those products. We've seen this exact kind of argument from other makers of things. Like this: Hey, there's a problem and it's a very bad problem! Hey, there's the solution and it's a very good solution! Buy me!

Now if you disagree with the above, at least there's vitamin D supplements you can get. Take them with fat cuz that makes sense to me. And get the animal form (D3), not the veggy form (D2), cuz the animal form is just better.

Sorry , MARTIN!!

Vitamin D is tough to get here at my latitude. Z wrote about her adventures with Vit D ( see the Vit D thread), and her eventual MOVE from Boston to DC. , and the levels of supplemental D to compensate. For me, since " compensating" at 10,000 units daily for the winter I am doing MUCH better.

With the good levels of D and a good diet ( our LC sense of food) I am not worrying about skin cancer. My mother was diagnosis with melanomas well into her 70's--- after decades of extreme sun exposure, think home made tanning booth, to treat psoriasis. Though this method of treatment fell out of fashion with the MD's years ago, she is still out in the sun: In FL for the winter, and gardening in Maine in the summer. She too eats rather good quality foods and always has. IMHO, it is the vit D that kept the skin cancer at bay.

Ah there you go. Low-carb + vitamin D supplement = good stuff.

D3 + K2 for best results.

So much easier just to smile and say thanks

Yes, but I was laughing too hard for that.....