Talk:Nutrient/Archive 1

The
The piece I wrote on nutrients in water quality is modified from a similar piece I wrote for my company at and provided with appropriate permission. i wrote it during the 1980's. and then i went to the dog city and they took my dogs and the dog of the dog which were the dogs sons and they were dogs they also got stolen even though they wern't my dogs. Marshman brackets are usefull

Qaz -- um, what? Ethanol (unique among the simple alcohols) is a nutrient; humans can metabolize it for its energy content. The liver converts it to acetic acid which is a glucose breakdown product (see Krebs cycle). Why do you think heavy drinkers tend to get fat? Zack 19:48, 15 Mar 2004 (UTC) im in love with you

I'm not sure where the division of substances into two groups originated from. Although not "wrong", it is not really all that correct either. I've added a cautionary paragraph, but the whole top section could probably be rewritten. Maybe it just need to be clarified better? Metabolism is primarily energy production, so the terminology seems off - Marshman 06:00, 16 Mar 2004 (UTC)

I don't see fiber mentioned on this page.


 * For the same reason you do not see corn chips, t-bone steaks, or green tea. Fiber is a form that biological tissues take, it is not a nutrient per se. - Marshman 23:48, 6 Apr 2004 (UTC)

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Many people believe that boiling vegetables makes them lose nutrients. Reference_desk So does it somehow destroy the nutrients, or just leach the nutrients into the water ? Boiling water is not anywhere close to hot enough to destroy minerals (elements) or amino acids or protiens. (Boiling water "denatures" protiens, but they curl right back up again after they cool off). If it's true that all nutrients can survive boiling water, please say that in the article. If some nutrients are destroyed in boiling water, please say which ones in the article. Thank you. --DavidCary 16:19, 18 Jun 2005 (UTC)
 * Boiling vegetables in water will remove salts and minerals into the water and will alter proteins, so there certainly is some nutritional value destroyed by the process. But the caloric (energy) content is not changed - Marshman 02:19, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)

yes ir remubes it

people don't know about this

A brand new beverage
Is it possible to invent a beverage that has all the necessary nutrients for human energy and metabolism in it, including water?--Lukeelms 21:40, 17 October 2006 (UTC)

I don't see how that is relevant to this article... 121.220.222.175 09:38, 22 October 2007 (UTC)evilest_oreo

redirect from nutrient substance?
A nutrient provide us with energy; thus vitamins are not categorized as nutrients. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Joannfeng (talk • contribs) 17:07, 1 October 2007 (UTC)


 * A nutrient is any necessary dietary factor like vitamins, minerals, amino acids and fatty acids. Metabolic fuels (sources of energy) are not termed nutrients most often. 20:14, 1 October 2007 (UTC)  —Preceding unsigned comment added by Hardyplants (talk • contribs)

Holy Crap!
Did a 6 year old vandalise this article?! There is a paragraph in here that has no grammar and sounds like it was copy-pasted from an essay from a nutritional website. I'm not the normally the type to complain about grammar but, wow. I'm going to try cleaning up the grammar make it more formatted from wikipedia. 99.226.156.160 (talk) 05:30, 8 February 2008 (UTC)
 * Ok, i've cleaned up part of this article but alot of it is still very improperly formatted, if someone could please continue to fix this article,(I may not have the time and i'm not the type to edit wikipedia, I just felt this was so atrocious is had to be dealt with), that would be appreciated. I think this is an topic is worthy of having a proper article 99.226.156.160 (talk) 05:45, 8 February 2008 (UTC)

planet/animal/human
It strikes me that since we have separate articles for nutrition and human nutrition, it would help to consolidate their nutrient sections here, but that this article should support that effort by having sections that attempt to distinguish between plant and animal nutrition, perhaps with a third section on human nutrition.--Sharonmil (talk) 17:57, 25 November 2010 (UTC)

CHNOPS?
CHNOPS has been much in the news today, with the GFAJ-1 arsenic instead of phosphorous paper published by "geomicrobiologist Felisa Wolfe-Simon, a NASA astrobiology fellow in residence at the US Geologic Survey in Menlo Park, California."

Here is just one example, from ScienceNews:
 * "And of the six essential elements of life — carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur (aka CHNOPS) — phosphorus has a relatively spotty distribution on the Earth’s surface."

I'm fairly sure we'll find many more such uses in a Google search after a few days. Doing a Wikipedia search for CHNOPS tonight brings up this article on Nutrient, where CHNOPS is only lightly mentioned.

My questions is, should Wikipedia have a disambig page for the acronym CHNOPS? I doubt it is article-worthy other than as the resolution of the acronym, and the disambig link on that page for CHNOPS could then point to whatever article in Wikipedia best discusses the six-block basics of biological life as we (used to) know it. What do others think? N2e (talk) 01:23, 3 December 2010 (UTC)


 * User:Plumbago has created a disambig page for CHNOPS that (as of 2010-12-19) points to an article entitled [{CHON]]. Issue resolved.  N2e (talk) 00:35, 20 December 2010 (UTC)

Article prose is conflating animal and plant nutrients
Article (as of 2010-12-19) has several paragraphs that mix nutrients for general organisms with specific comments that only apply to plants, or to animals. The article could use a good copyeditor to reorganize, possibly create some new sections, and get the material laid out more clearly. Anyone else want to have input to thinking what might be appropriate? N2e (talk) 00:38, 20 December 2012#(UTC)

Alcohol
Alcohol provides energy, but that does not satisfy any definition of a nutrient. A nutrient is a substance that 1) is required for normal ("optimal" is being debated) function of an organism and 2) cannot be synthesized by the organism in sufficient quantities for normal (or perhaps optimal) function, and must therefore be ingested. (This is the academic definition.) Biology-online.org gives this definition:
 * "Food, or any nourishing substance assimilated by an organism, and required for growth, repair, and normal metabolism"

Alcohol is not required for any normal function. Fat, carbohydrate, and protein are each required. Most consumer dictionary definitions seem to define nutrients as "nourishing" substances, but this is circular, as nourishing is a synonym for nutritious, or nutrient-bearing. Energy is necessary, and alcohol provides energy, but that is incidental to the body's mechanism for disposing of it as a toxin. It is also sidestepping two issues. Energy is not a substance to ingest, and we are not talking about energy, we are talking about alcohol, which is not essential for normal energy requirements. (Antifreeze also provides metabolizable energy to humans, but we wouldn't call that a nutrient.) The body treats ethanol as a toxic substance, breaking it down and eliminating it as rapidly as possible.

Ethanol does induce a mildly antioxidant environment in the blood, which might eventually be a valid argument among nutritionists if the accepted definition of a nutrient refers to optimal rather than normal function, but the numerous negative health aspects of regular alcohol consumption would also be part of that discussion. Some have talked about the anticoagulant properties of alcohol being protective against stroke and heart attacks, but these are pharmacological effects that would mitigate a disease in progress, not promoting normal or optimal function of the body. This is a pharmacological benefit only for people with atherosclerosis or a clotting abnormality, or some other type of vascular stenosis. In any case, these are not the arguments given in this article for alcohol being a nutrient, and a consensus to that effect among nutritionists is extremely unlikely in the foreseeable future. Dcs002 (talk) 04:56, 16 July 2014 (UTC)


 * "The acetic acid in vinegar also provides a similar amount of energy per gram, but again, it is not a nutrient because it is not essential for normal function." There is no such thing as an essential carbohydrate like there is an essential amino acid and essential fatty acid. Carbohydrates are abundant in the wild, but not essential, so this needs to be reworded. We need some way to say that some chemicals such as non fatty acid carboxylic acids can be consumed, metabolized, and used in the Krebs Cycle, and other energy producing pathways, to derive energy, but they are not abundant in the wild. --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) (talk) 21:47, 3 February 2015 (UTC)


 * Responding to above: "The body treats ethanol as a toxic substance, breaking it down and eliminating it as rapidly as possible." All fats, proteins, and carbohydrates are also broken down in the body." Undergoing metabolism does not define a "toxic substance". Arsenic and lead and mercury are elemental and toxic. --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) (talk) 21:52, 3 February 2015 (UTC)

The working definition of a nutrient for this entry includes essential and non-essential nutrients, so that does not automatically exclude ethanol. There is a large body of evidence with claims for a "J-curve" relationship between alcohol consumption and health - meaning that moderate consumption is better than none at all, even though higher consumption is clearly negative. This would concur with ethanol being a non-essential nutrient. However, a 2016 meta-analysis takes the position that much of the earlier work is flawed because it counted former drinkers who are current abstainers along with the never-drinkers. The hypothesis here is that people who were chronic drinkers and then stopped may have done so for a diagnosis of a health problem; combining them with never-drinkers falsely increases morbidity and mortality. In short - no consensus. See T. Stockwell 2016.David notMD (talk) 20:35, 20 March 2017 (UTC)

Merger proposal
I think that Essential nutrient should be merged into this article. The material there is better structured (at least with regard to human nutrition) and it's a case of WP:OVERLAP with the essential nutrient section of this article. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Kyle MoJo (talk • contribs) 16:44, 21 October 2017 (UTC)
 * I agree. Bad enough that Wikipedia has Nutrition, Human nutrition and Animal nutrition without the additional overlap of Nutrient and Essential nutrient. David notMD (talk) 18:07, 24 October 2017 (UTC)
 * Support. The content of "Essential nutrient" logically fits in the subsection here by the same name. Should be an easy manual merge. --Zefr (talk) 05:20, 15 November 2017 (UTC)
 * I'm uncertain about whether or not to merge the two, but Essential (biology) should be merged into Essential Nutrients. It doesn't seem to be more than demonstrating a layman's definition of the word - saying mitochondria are essential to life is hardly specialist vocabulary. Whenever I've seen it used in a biological context it's meant in the sense of essential nutrients. --213.205.253.168 (talk) 11:04, 20 November 2017 (UTC)
 * Support. I also agree with IP user 213.205.253.168 regarding article Essential (biology). I think it should be a redirect page to article Nutrient or perhaps better, to a subheader Nutrient#Essential if the article Nutrient becomes more structured and receives a subheader distinct like that. --Treetear (talk) 01:36, 26 December 2017 (UTC)

Neither this article nor the essential nutrient article (prior to the merger) was long enough to merit a separate article on that sub-topic with WP:Summary style coverage in this article, so... ✅  Seppi  333  (Insert 2¢) 22:15, 29 December 2017 (UTC)

Selected as article for improvement
As an article that gets 25,000 visits per month, this is skimpy, under-referenced, meandering, has useless images, neglects to cover the nutrient needs of protists, fungi and plants in favor of animals, and lacks links to most of the articles that provide more depth and referencing: Nutrition, Vitamin, Mineral (nutrient), Protein (nutrient), Lipid, Carbohydrate, Dietary fiber... David notMD (talk) 14:59, 27 December 2017 (UTC)
 * I replaced all of lead. My background is human nutrition, so we need people contributing who have a good grasp of animal, plant, fungi and protist nutrient needs. Help! David notMD (talk) 18:55, 29 December 2017 (UTC)
 * The lead is supposed to summarize the content in the body of the article (see MOS:LEAD or WP:SUMMARYSTYLE), so you should probably either revise the current lead accordingly or cover the missing concepts from the current lead in the body. Also, I don't know if the definition of organic vs inorganic compounds differs in the context of nutrition, but those terms are normally used to describe compounds the contain one or more (=organic) or lack any (=inorganic) carbon atoms. So, I think a definition should be given before listing examples of each.  Seppi  333  (Insert 2¢) 22:33, 29 December 2017 (UTC)
 * The Lead was such a hodge-podge I figured start there, see how everyone addresses the body of the article. then loop back to modify the Lead. If there is a better definition of organic (versus inorganic), let's use that. My thought behind what I wrote was molecules made by organisms versus minerals. David notMD (talk) 01:37, 30 December 2017 (UTC)

What is the goal? At the start of this Article for improvement effort the metrics were length 15,000 bytes, C-class (really, more like Start), and under 20 citations. In comparison, "Nutrition" tops 100,000 bytes, is currently B-class (Was a Good Article 2006-2009), and has 118 citations. "Nutrient" does not have to aspire to that for length and citation count, but ideally should gain in length and quality to justify a rating of B-class. David notMD (talk) 17:00, 30 December 2017 (UTC)

B-Class rating
Provided that the 6 citation needed tags are replaced with a suitable reference, this article really only needs relevant supporting material/illustrations to merit a B-class rating. One of the images from Special:Permalink/816956065 or one of the subcategories of Commons:Category:Nutrients could probably be used to address this (NB: most of the images in the main/parent category for nutrients on Commons seem irrelevant to this page).  Seppi  333  (Insert 2¢) 23:22, 4 January 2018 (UTC)
 * Right now I trying to flog Milk allergy from C-class to Good article. When that dust settles I will try to get back to Nutrient. Personally, I would like to see more on animal nutrition, especially what we have done to our domestic food animals. David notMD (talk) 02:28, 5 January 2018 (UTC)
 * Sounds good.  Seppi  333  (Insert 2¢) 03:05, 5 January 2018 (UTC)

Discrepancies in table
In two cases, the table shows minimum recommended intakes which are higher than the recommended maximum, albeit from different sources. This appears to be nonsense, and in my opinion the whole table needs to be thoroughly checked. Ehrenkater (talk) 15:12, 17 January 2018 (UTC)
 * The table is correct. The two nutrients you question are magnesium and niacin. For both, the UL addresses adverse effects if those amounts are consumed at one time as a dietary supplement. For magnesium, the adverse effect is diarrhea. For niacin, it is flushing of the face and a sensation of increased body warmth. I will add footnotes to the table clarifying this. From looking at your Talk and your Contributions on your User page, this is a new area for you to be involved in. Please be conservative in your changes to the article. Thank you. David notMD (talk) 16:38, 17 January 2018 (UTC)

That appears to be complete nonsense. Would you say that the typical consumption of these nutrients was above the maximum limit or below the minimum limit? (or maybe both!) Whatever your answer, why are the adverse symptoms not frequently experienced? Ehrenkater (talk) 20:38, 26 January 2018 (UTC)
 * The only way to experience magnesium or niacin adverse symptoms is to take a high-dose supplement. In the U.S. (at least), it is possible to buy high dose supplements, and there are warnings on the labels of adverse effects. Which may be experienced. The risk of adverse effects does not preclude selling high-dose dietary supplements. David notMD (talk) 18:33, 14 May 2018 (UTC)


 * Added new column to table for EU PRIs (same concept as RDAs). This is to show that for recommended intakes, as for safe upper limits, governments do not necessarily agree. The EU does not believe chromium is an essential nutrient! Because in Japan, people eat a lot of iodine, the government sets safe intake five times higher than the EU!! David notMD (talk) 13:19, 19 January 2018 (UTC)

The section on Essentiality does not mention Carbohydrates. Logically, they should be classed as conditionally essential (if they are only relevant when other macronutrients do not supply sufficient calories), or non-essential, or, like alcohol, "non nutrient", providing only calories. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.124.116.101 (talk) 18:13, 22 February 2020 (UTC)

The article on choline states that it IS essential. It has been reclassified as essential by the USDA. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.124.116.101 (talk) 18:16, 22 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Choline is in the table as essential. For US and Canada, there is not enough information to set an EAR or RDA, but there is enough to set an AI. David notMD (talk) 20:41, 22 February 2020 (UTC)

nutrition
nutrition 213.55.90.5 (talk) 06:36, 18 August 2021 (UTC)

Bromine is an essential nutrient
https://www.zrtlab.com/blog/archive/bromine-an-essential-element/ Encyclopedant (talk) 03:12, 22 December 2021 (UTC)
 * Blogs are not considered reliable source references. David notMD (talk) 15:21, 22 December 2021 (UTC)

Science
Nutrient 223.190.138.59 (talk) 13:16, 23 March 2022 (UTC)
 * Do you have a question or comment about any part of this article? David notMD (talk) 22:27, 23 March 2022 (UTC)