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I'm concerned less with the long term health effects of this diet as it relates to missing nutrients, and much more concerned about quality control of the individual ingredients themselves. Who's actually checking that, say, the vitamin A palmitate coming from a supplier actually contains the dose requested, and additionally that it contains no other contaminates?

The supplement world is like the wild west as far as this goes. And as attracted as I am to a meal replacement like this, the worry about getting accidentally dosed with high levels of arsenic or lead from a shitty supplier really concerns me.




You reminded me of the consumer reports review of whey.. not just small companies... EAS (a $300m division of Abbott labs (a $38b company)) exceeded the limit of arsenic and cadmium: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/booster_shots/2010/06/protei...


I would be most concerned about overdosing some vitamin or mineral powder, taken in miligram range.

Just one pinch can cause serious and painful injury.

Will it always be mixed evenly?


Apparently this was one of his concerns in not releasing precisely what he was using.

"Several individuals experienced in chemistry have already figured out how to make it on their own. I'd like to keep it this way for now, as I trust them to measure the ingredients properly."

- http://robrhinehart.com/?p=474


Presumably this is a problem that's been long-solved in scale up manufacture, and something you should just be concerned with on the small scale.

Generally though - yes - anything water-soluble is pretty easy to get very controlled concentrations of, since you can dilute until your in the operating range of your weighing machine.


I'm not much of a biologist and I may just be spouting what I've heard in the past, but I think all the water soluble vitamins and such are totally safe and impossible to OD on, it is the fat-soluble ones where there's the potential to OD.

EDIT: Mostly correct! Fat-soluble vitamins build up in the fatty tissues and are much slower to release and are almost always responsible for Vitamin Poisoning, water-soluble vitamins are easily excreted in the obvious way.

There are exceptions though, you can overdose on some of the B vitamins which are water-soluble, I didn't follow up to find out why that is.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_poisoning


Nothing stops you from using a lipophile solvent rather than a hydrophile in preparing these dilutions.


This is a major concern for me as well and one I haven't found out how to mitigate at all outside of just testing most of the components to find out which suppliers are good and which aren't.




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