Vitamins and minerals have no fattening substances in them at all. But indirectly they can still make you fat.

In these articles on weight loss our premise is that you get fat when your body regularly runs low on one or more of the vital substances it must have in order to keep you healthy. How does this happen?

Whenever it runs low on something, your body triggers hunger to make you go eat food that will give it some more of whatever it's running low on. But with the super-selection of foods generally available in modern societies, you will often eat things that give you lots of Calories but not much of what actually made you hungry.

Then you run low on that again - get hungry again too soon - eat more food with more Calories - which just get stored in your fat cells - and make you fat.

And this cycle can repeat almost constantly - unnoticed - for years.

Fortunately, it's also easy to lose the weight you've gained by deliberately and consciously reversing the process. You do this using information, certain concentrated natural foods, and dietary supplements.

The common characteristic of all these is that they let you supply your body lots of one or more of the vital factors you need while at the same time restricting Calories.

This means your body can use Calories from stored fat for energy while still not running low on anything else (thus making you hungry and destroying your diet).

Vitamins/minerals are one of the most important classes of substances that your body must have to stay healthy and be happy. (We discuss the other major classes in other articles.) If you run low on even one vitamin or mineral, your body will trigger the hunger, cravings, or other "food seeking" sensations that have always made your diets so miserable and ineffective.

To eliminate this problem, you simply make sure you never run low on any vitamin or mineral while you are dieting. You do this by taking multivitamin and mineral supplements.

BUT - although simple in theory - this is not as easy in practice as you are often told.

Generally you hear that all you have to do is take a daily multi-vitamin/mineral tablet with 100% of the recommended dietary intakes (RDIs) of each vitamin & mineral.

That's good as far as it goes - and you should do it - but it doesn't go far enough.

The problem is that there are SEVEN minerals that are required by the human body in relatively large daily amounts. These amounts too large for the average single-tablet multi-vitamin/mineral formula to provide.

Nutritionists call these seven minerals "macrominerals". A single-tablet multi-vitamin/mineral supplement cannot provide enough of all of them because if it did, the pill would probably be the size of a golf ball! (I exaggerate only slightly.)

These seven macrominerals are: potassium, sodium, calcium, phosphorus, magnesium, chloride, and sulfur.

Fortunately it's still easy to get enough of these in your diet by "supplementing the supplement". How do you do this?

There is a bit more technique to doing it properly than can be stated in a short article, so you should get additional guidance before attempting it, but here is the general approach.

Sodium and chloride are the two halves of ordinary table salt, so they're especially easy to supplement. The other five macrominerals are readily available in various supplement tablet and other forms in supermarkets and healthfood stores. The labels on the containers tell you how much of each mineral is being supplied, which makes it easy to get enough.

But although it's important to get enough, it's also important not to get too much. Mineral supplements make it especially easy to take too much without noticing. Too much is a particular problem with potassium, because too much can give you a heart attack!

The daily amounts of the macrominerals that nutrition science has determined are proper for the adult human body are:

potassium - about 3500 mg 
sodium - about 2400 mg 
calcium - about 1000 mg 
magnesium - about 400 mg 
phosphorus - about 1000 mg 
chloride - about 3400 mg 
sulfur - unknown (but you are usually assumed to be getting enough sulfur if you eat normal amounts of protein, which provides it)

The best way to ensure you get enough but not too much of each of these when dieting is to keep track of what kinds and how much food you eat and check the macromineral amounts this food gives you using a food composition table. Then you take supplements to get the total up to the recommended daily amounts - but not much higher.

Nutrition-tracking computer programs are the easiest way to do this, but it can also be done fairly easily with paper charts and tables designed for the purpose.

Of course, if you have any kind of medical condition, or are taking prescription drugs, you should never take any kind of dietary supplement without first informing your doctor.

In my next article, we'll discuss another substance that makes you fat when you don't get enough, but which is also easy to manage when you know how.

-Anderson A. Anonymous, M.D., Ph.D.- Copyright © 2000 Hamilton/Wolcott Publishing

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"Dr. A." is a nutrition researcher who has deliberately chosen to publish anonymously.

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