I understand that for most people when you eat more fruits & vegetables your body doesn’t take in excess vitamins, but if you already have extremely little can you just eat a WHOLE lot and regain it in 1 day or do you have to eat some every day for like a month or two ?
No, the body can only process a finite amount of nutrients form any one meal, the excess will be excreted. There may be some essential nutrient whose requirement is very very small but I don’t know what that would be.
Five things come to mind:
Individual factors will cause differences on these processes. E.g. gut permeability and enzyme production.
Different foods have different bioavailability. E.g. the body is more likely to absorb more iron from meats than vegetables (I’m excluding co-ingestion of Vit C for this example).
Certain nutrients are irreplaceable once taken from their stores. I.E. calcium and osteomalacia/osteoporosis. Maintaining adequate calcium intake prevents further deterioration of the bone.
Certain nutrients, if ingested all at once, can lead to toxicity or the like. E.g. drinking too much water at once can lead to hyperhydration and hyponatremia (sodium).
Certain nutrients are antagonistic when it comes to absorption. E.g. large quantities of zinc inhibits iron absorption, and vice versa.
To answer your question, it’s better for the average individual to spread out intake throughout meals, and to keep it up for months on end (preferably throughout lifespan).
Your body gets used to the low of amount of nutrients you do consume and adapts to your intake (amazing right?) So its not like a invisible meter exist in your body that goes from 0 to 100%. From my understanding its more like a rising baseline, where the more you consume consistently your body adapts to that higher input of nutrients. There is an “invisible” maximum your body uses per day, but it stores the excess in your fat cells. The reason why is if you do go a period of time without said nutrient, it will pull the required amount from your fat(this is also why its unhealthy to have too low of bodyfat). So the more you eat of said nutrient for a long period of time, the more you will reap the benefits of having high count of said nutrient.
You unfortunately can run out of said nutrients, it happens often in vegans/carnivores who make the switch and don’t micromanage their vitamin/mineral intake properly. From what accounts I have read its usually 4-5 years where you start to see some of the ramifications of nutrient deficiency.
TLDR: No you can’t just eat it all and one day and regain it, have to eat it consistently over a period of time and keep it up. It will be a forever fluxing thing so IMO just try your best to eat a varied diet as often as possible and you will be good.
As a recovering anorexic it can take MONTHS
Here’s what you need to do:
Take supplements of those missing nutrients while you’re eating those nutrients. Supplements only help if you’re already naturally consuming them from your food
No. No you cannot.But that meal is a first step, and without it deficiencies get worse until you’re super sick and withering away, so that one meal, though it’s not an immediate cure, is VITAL in its own right:D
What kind of deficiency? For example, the life cycle of red blood cells is 120 days…..iron is important for hematopoiesis…. It can also depend on the severity of the deficiency and the complexity of it, but let’s assume the easiest that it’s just diet related and that there isn’t a defect like a mutation…. You wouldn’t want excess iron in your body tho…so I don’t think it’s possible to fill it by overdosing on vitamins/minerals. But this was a really good question, I’ve never thought about it like that haha. Like they say, everything in moderation. But proper nutrition is a lifestyle, not a “when I feel like it” type of thing.
Replenishing iron stores can take weeks to months. If you tried to do it all in one day by overdosing on a supplement, you’d likely suffer iron toxicity. And since we absorb 2-30% of the iron we ingest, you’d have to eat an impossible amount of food to replace all your lost stores that quickly.
We only need 1-1.5mg of iron daily to keep us topped up if we’re iron replete.