What to do if deficient.

The biggest and first thing to do is also the easiest big pillar choice you should always be going for. Embrace nutritionally rich, higher-SPC food choices across virtually every meal of the week.

No matter your diet tribe preferences. You can be Indian, you can be plant-based, carnivore, high carb, low carb, vegan, muslim, asian, vegetarian, omnivore, or whatever, it does not matter.

Nutritionally rich foods that provide more micronutrients, fiber, and protein per unit of energy will always be beneficial for you. While the opposite will always remain true too, the more nutrient-poor foods you eat, the worse off you will become in health, fitness, and body composition.

Once you accept this simple reality, things will drastically improve for you.

Simply because nutrient-dense, higher-SPC foods make it so much easier to get all the health-friendly nutrients, essential vitamins, and minerals, and still remain within your real energy intake needs.

Yes, the big boring, eat good, quality food pillar is by far your best choice of action if you are deficient in any nutrient. Because it helps you with everything, and not just your mineral and vitamin intake.

And is it not better to learn how to get all, or as much as possible of all your nutritional needs, from the food you are already going to eat?

Real foods beat supplements easily. 

Forget about all the wicked, weird social media diet tribes that propagate their exclusionary food ideas. “Don’t do carbs, don’t eat berries, skip all oats, fiber is not needed, fruit is crack.” The world is filled with so many harmful diet ideas.

In reality, it’s quite easy; pretty much every big food approach can be made to work on an individual level.

Which is great news, so if all that you wish to consider regarding your own food habits are your nutritional needs, fitness, and health outcomes, you can then, by making use of actual fact-based choices, make all the big diet tribes work for you.

Especially if you follow a higher-protein, higher-SPC approach. It works beautifully across all food tribes. Be it low-carb, high-fat, or a fiber and protein-rich, higher-carb, lower-fat approach.

Bad food tribes and food habits.

There are, sadly, plenty of food tribes that turn away from science and facts and preach to emotions and ideas instead of looking at actual outcomes for each individual. Approaching the subject of human health, fitness, and nutrition more like a religion instead of keeping it as the healthy, fact-based, and safe nutritional, health, and fitness coaching that it is.

So once the big, nutritionally rich, higher-SPC, protein and fiber-rich food habit is in place, start to assess sleep quality, health, fitness, and body composition outcomes over time. Things don’t go from bad to perfect overnight.

So it’s not about achieving a perfect sleep score according to a technical gadget or app. It’s more about you pushing your trajectories in the right direction and keeping them going in the right direction over time.

This holds true for health, fitness, food, and sleep, too.

But once you have your big pillars in place across food habits, weekly exercise, your sleep schedule, and daylight exposure. You can, of course, supplement some key nutrients if there is an issue.

But, with a few exceptions, once you have really nailed your food habits in that big pillar, higher-SPC way, there really should be next to a minimal need for supplementation.

Yes, no one can eat enough Creatine, not even the world’s biggest, most wickedly unsustainable carnivores will get enough Creatine from their food on a daily basis to match the body and brain benefits that a proper all-year-round creatine supplementation will provide.

Ergo: everyone should be supplementing with a little bit of daily Creatine. And B12 is another problem area for most people, not just vegans. Unlike Creatine, tho, B12, and many other nutrients can be readily found in many high-quality plant-based foods thats already enriched with it.

So, before you head to the store to buy magnesium because you think that’s the key to your perceived sleep issues, take a look at your actual food choices.

And also, take a look at your actual sleep. Is it really problematic? Or is it just perceived as a problem for you?

You don’t need 8 hours to have perfect sleep and sleep-related health outcomes.

The golden zone of “perfect” sleep.

The golden zone for health outcomes when it comes to sleep is 6 to 8 good hours of sleep per day on a regular schedule. Inside this zone, 6 hours provide health outcomes that are exactly as good as what 8 hours will give you.

This flawed claim that everyone needs 8 hours is very similar to the old debate about 10k steps. It´s a great target, but you can walk less or more, and it is going to be nothing but good. And for sleep, the vast majority of humans will get their best health, fitness, and body composition outcomes from 6 to 8 hours of sleep.

A smaller number of people, mostly women, might need up to 9 hours of sleep to max out their outcomes over time and feel fully rejuvenated.

So, supplementation should not be your main choice.

However, supplement if a test does reveal that you have nutritional deficiencies, and there is no way for you to improve your daily food habits in a good enough way.

Finally, as you can see in the cited study, nutritional deficiencies always matter; it’s not just about macros or energy in versus out. Our fiber intake matters, as do our antioxidants, minerals, and vitamins.

In the specific case of Magnesium and sleep, a low magnesium intake will disrupt sleep quality and rest, while poor sleep will further deplete magnesium, amongst many other things. And if there is no way for you to cover your nutritional needs with better, higher-SPC food choices that’s also smartly enriched, well then you should supplement what’s still an issue, because our daily intake of vitamins and minerals matters greatly over time.

Nutritional deficiencies.

I have previously written about the immense issue of nutritional deficiencies worldwide, and a lot of people fail to realise that billions of people around the world, many of whom are obese omnivores, are deficient in many nutrients. So, do take the time to get your food habits in check; just eating food to no end does not mean that you are getting all the micronutrients, minerals, vitamins, antioxidants, and fiber that your body needs.

Link down below to that article.