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paper-machine comments on Announcing the Quantified Health Prize - Less Wrong
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It might turn out that for all or most micronutrients there is no advantage at all in consuming more than a certain minimum requirement, and hence that the "optimal" amount of minerals is anything between the daily minimum and a toxic dose.
If that were the case then it would not be bizarre at all if it turned out that most people in the developed world were getting an optimal amount of minerals, given that our dietary staples are fortified with micronutrients for the specific purpose of preventing micronutrient deficiency and that micronutrient deficiency as a public health issue is something we've been aware of and working to reduce for quite a while now. If you eat breakfast cereal with milk in the morning and a sandwich made from commercially-sold bread and meat for lunch I suspect you would have to try very hard to develop any micronutrient deficiency.
It would be a lot more interesting if there was some sort of dose/effect curve for these micronutrients where we could find all the maximum values and hit them, as opposed to a boring dose/effect plateau, but just because it would be interesting doesn't make it true.
I didn't research it for more than five minutes, but I suspect someone on such a diet could easily develop a vitamin K deficiency. The DRI for males/females is 120/90 mcg/day, and I found no breakfast cereal, milk or bread that had anything close to that. There are too many lunchmeats to check, but the highest values I saw were in the 3 mcg / 28 oz range.
This source indicates that vitamin k uptake is very poorly understood, but that vitamin k deficiency is rare in practice and that you have to put people on a very low vitamin k diet for an extended period to show any negative effect at all. This would be very weird except that our gut flora is known to produce vitamin k, so we're probably producing a fair chunk of what we need internally.
From that article:
Based on that article there's certainly grounds for adding some green salad to that sandwich to be on the safe side, but it seems likely that your gut flora would keep you going regardless.
I was pretty sure that vitamin k deficiency was practically unknown (and a vitamin k overdose relatively dangerous), and so for that reason making vitamin k supplements available was generally seen as a bad idea, but I learned a bit more about the whys of that because you raised that question, so thank you.
On the plus side you'll probably never need warfrin!