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Does exercise affect how much nutrients you need?

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Yes but this will impact your performance, it won’t make you more healthy. You won’t be deficient in anything because you are exercising if you are hitting the RDA’s, you just won’t see the same benefits from that exercise.

As an example B1, B2, B9 & B12 are all used in energy metabolism and you will fatigue faster if these are not available. Potassium is required for muscle tissue growth so even if you have plenty of aminos available without potassium your workout won’t build muscle. In reality you have to be in the region of an elite athlete before this kind of optimization becomes important if you are eating a balanced diet, your vitamins & minerals will be scaling with your calories. Even without exercise things like intense cognitive activity has its own nutritional needs, PUFAs as a very good example here.

> If not, can I bridge the gap with supplements?

Sure. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with taking supplements, they just shouldn’t be relied on as an alternative to good nutrition. You figure out your diet and then supplement for the things you struggle to get via diet. Vitamins D & E are often a PIA which is why things like milk & OJ are often fortified with them. I can’t seem to get zinc to the RDA so supplement that.

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>Does doing exercise affect how much nutrients you need in a day?

Yes. Athletes have different metabolic needs because of all the high-intensity activity, and exercise is going to (moderately, in proportion to how close you’re actually getting to an athelte’s exercise level) set your body more towards their needs.

One of the most important is total protein: athletes need more than sedentary people, so it’s good to get more protein if you’re exercising regularly.

>Can I safely burn calories without affecting the nutrients I need?

An underappreciated fact of metabolism is that you don’t exercise to burn calories. Exercise accounts for only a very small fraction of the calories burned throughout the day, and it triggers compensatory reductions in other calorie-burning activities.

And that’s a good thing. For example, one of the things exercise does is, it lowers inflammation. But inflammation burns calories; by lowering it, you’re lowering the number of calories you burn.

And the reason why it lowers inflammation, is because during exercise, your body tries to conserve energy by cutting down on metabolic activity that isn’t important right now, during the exercise.

So you don’t work out to burn calories, you work out in order to modulate your body’s way of spending energy…

…or, possibly, to build muscle mass. Having more total muscle mass will increase resting energy expenditure… but only over the long term, and only if your workouts actually do that, only if they do build muscle. (Remember that muscle doesn’t have to mean arms and abs, legs have muscles too, the body’s biggest, in fact.)

>If not, can I bridge the gap with supplements?

Sure, yeah… although, be careful not to overconsume supplements. It’s bad to have excess vitamins and minerals, and it’s usually impossible with normal food due to the way the body absorbs the things; when we see people suffering from too many vitamins and minerals, it’s almost always supplements that are the cause (I think I remember hearing about some extreme fad diet that led to a nutrient excess once, but it’s usually supplement overconsumption).

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