[jerf]

The problem with that sort of suggestion is that by the time you're eating the food that high in this and the food that's high in that and the food that's high in the other, you've gotten to your ~2000 calories for the day and are still missing nutrients, plus your diet is infeasibly bland.

There are some things that if you can't get them from a normal diet are certainly most easily obtained from supplements. Vitamin D, depending on your location, is certainly one. There's reasonable evidence that magnesium is another. IIRC, there's a couple of others where even eating a normal healthy diet won't really get you to where you ought to be. There's also plenty of vitamins where unless you eat a really crazy diet, or you've got some sort of absorption disorder (I'm in that camp so I've had to learn more about this than I really would have cared to), you're never going to be deficient, because you get plenty. Vitamin C, for instance, is effectively impossible to be deficient in. There's a lot of ongoing debate about the virtues of doses higher than "not deficient", but you'd have to go out of your way to get scurvy in the modern world.

[JustSomeNobody]

Then maybe the RDA is just wrong. If we can't eat enough healthy food to sustain us without becoming obese, then the numbers are wrong. I mean, how could we have possibly made it as long as we have as a species if we are only now realizing that we can't eat enough good foods to be healthy???

[trukterious]

>how could we have possibly made it as long as we have as a species if we are only now realizing that we can't eat enough good foods to be healthy?

Partly due to agricultural soil depletion of certain elements like magnesium, zinc, iodine.

Btw our prehistoric ancestors weren't especially healthy either:

https://imgur.com/gallery/2G0BDwx

[Matrixik]

> Partly due to agricultural soil depletion of certain elements like magnesium, zinc, iodine.

Well, maybe yes or maybe no

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S088915751...

[apocolyps6]

It wasn't poor health killing people at 30. The leading cause of death at that age was hunting accidents. Besides that and the high infant mortality, people otherwise lived to ~70.

[jerf]

In addition to trukterious' point, which I agree with, I would echo that the idea that the RDA is just wrong is also a distinct possibility. Take a look at this: http://blogs.creighton.edu/heaney/2015/02/13/the-iom-miscalc... Ponder what it implies about the other RDA values. And look at the date. It wasn't that long ago.

I just pulled a fairly recent bottle of CostCo Vitamin D out here, and it's still using a value of 800IU as the RDA.

[TheCoelacanth]

This seems like an example of the naturalistic fallacy.

Why assume that food with the optimally healthy composition of nutrients exists in nature? People can survive just fine without being maximally healthy.

[JustSomeNobody]

I didn't say "maximally healthy". It is, however, rather obvious that we were healthy and able to last this long and THUS the foods we had to consume gave us what we needed without having to take supplements.