OK Mr. Random Troll.

You're really not getting this. Assume for the moment that humans lack the ability to see forward into the future. This is not for women to take "for a brief time before pregnancy". The whole point of the recommendation is that all women, post-menarche (and in fact even pre-menarche if there's a possibility of getting pregnant) and pre-menopause should be taking supplements regularly unless it's certain they're not going to get pregnant. That's not an edge case. Quite frankly, even your original interpretation still would not have been an edge case. 80%+ of women in the US get pregnant at some point. 40% of the population is not an edge case.

Sigh. I was quite explicit that you could also directly consume methylfolate, although I did also point out that the methylfolate available in most food sources is not actually the straight methylfolate that you get after internally converting other forms of folate or taking synthetic methylfolate supplements. Specifically, the methylfolate you get from most food sources is in the form of polyglutamates that have to be broken down into the monoglutamate form your body directly uses. The synthetic methylfolate supplements and the final form in your body don't require that. So, when you consume natural methylfolate from food sources, the enzymatic process that breaks it down is not all that efficient with significant amounts passing through without conversion or being destroyed. Basically, natural food methylfolate is about half as usable as synthetic methylfolate.

The other issue is that you seem to be applying a false dichotomy to methylfolate and folic acid. There are actually many different versions of folate available both naturally and as supplements (mostly synthetic, but there are some natural ones too). Virtually all of them, including most of the natural methylfolate, require some sort of conversion into the monoglutamate methylfolate form. Broadly speaking, the synthetics are all more bio-available.

It seems pretty clear you wrote your responses before fully reading through. I am quite clear on the fact that there are multiple food sources. I mentioned sauerkraut and liver specifically, but nothing I said limited it to just those. As for cooking, it depends on the actual method, obviously. Light steam vs. boiling for example will preserve different amounts of it. Boiling can eliminate in the range of 80% of it through both heat and it soaking into the water. The point is that women especially often don't get the amount they would need even from salads, so cooked versions are even less likely to provide enough.

Well, yes, that's pretty much the point of the recommendation for supplements. Hence why your rule that someone would have to be a moron to get micronutrients from supplements rather than quality food is problematic and I suggested you needed to qualify it. I will also note that I presented folate as only one example, but there are plenty more. More on that later.

While the problem in the headline may make things worse, there's still plenty of medical need for vitamin and mineral supplements without that problem.

See, the problem here is devolving things into false dichotomies again. Yes, there is a very scummy supplements industry, and also lots of problems in the pharma industry. But there's also plenty of legitimate public health research. For example the folic acid study I mentioned was actually sponsored by the UK Medical Research Council. Basically, you appear to have turned cynicism about this into a simple heuristic to be applied without actually thinking through the individual merits on a case by case basis.

Now, let's consider some other cases where someone would clearly not be a "moron" for getting nutrients from supplements instead of quality food. Let's start with one of the classics. Iodine. Your body needs it, but natural food often doesn't have enough in a lot of localities. There of course, you are spared from specifically taking pills, your food just gets artificially fortified with it. I mean, it's still a supplement, just usually in the form of a powder that's sprinkled on or cooked in. There's vitamin D, because a lot of people don't get enough sun, so they take supplements and it's also added to milk. Then, for those whose bodies can't use vitamin D because of problems like kidney failure, there's alternate forms like calcitriol. There's also vitamin B12 for vegans and the like, although frankly "supplements" like that should probably just be considered farmed food because the supplements are not synthetic, they're from grown microorganisms, just like all B12. Of course, aside from vegans, there's people (like a significant fraction of elderly people) whose digestive systems can't efficiently separate B12 from the animal proteins that most people get their B12 from, so they have to take supplements, where the B12 is more available. There are Iron supplements (once again, especially for women in pregnancy) because it becomes almost impossible to keep up through diet. There's B6 for people with liver problems who can't convert the food forms. Then there are all kinds of conditions (for example kidney failure again) where normally nutritious things like potassium or phosphorous become unhealthy - think weakened bone and "crunchy" blood vessels, or just outright paralysis followed by death from heart failure. Conditions like that often involve special diets with catch-22 requirements where the patient has to avoid nutrients that will kill them, while requiring heavy amounts of other nutrients with there being pretty much no natural foods that satisfy both sets of requirements. So, supplements can become literally required to live with special diets for specific organ failures, diabetes, and other kinds of medical conditions with dietary restrictions.

So, at the end, I would like to know, since you didn't actually point out anything I was supposedly incorrect or half-correct on, what those items were?

To be clear, the recommendation I was speaking about was for absolutely any woman (about half the population) who might become pregnant. That's a pretty huge edge case.

Actually I don't have it backwards. Methylfolate is, indeed, a natural form of folate, but it's the natural form of it that's active in our bodies. In other words, it's an intermediate form that our bodies convert it into when we eat other folate. Now, it can be found in specific green leafy vegetables if you eat them basically raw, but even someone who has a salad every day still has trouble getting enough that way (the same goes for some of the other possible sources like animal liver and sauerkraut) One of the main reasons is that even the methylfolate in food is not as simple and easy to digest as synthetic methylfolate, so even there you are far better off with the synthetic. In any case the vast majority of women don't eat a very large fresh salad every day, or a beef liver, etc. so they don't get enough. So, supplements are recommended and of course aside from folic acid there are synthetic methylfolate supplements. The big problem is having enough folate during a narrow window of early embryonic development while the neural tube forms and that window is inside the time period before most women know they are pregnant. So, a synthetic supplement is recommended to avoid the 1 in 1000 chance of such a defect (notably, that's rarer than it used to be before public health mandates increased the use of supplements and fortification of foods.

On another note, another reason for the strong recommendation for synthetic folic acid specifically is because the foundational studies on preventing neural tube defects used it, so the clinical evidence is not as strong for other forms, even though they could be as effective. That's why synthetic folic acid specifically is often mentioned for these recommendations, but it's not the only synthetic folate supplement available. As I pointed out, there's also methylfolate, but there are other forms as well.

I mean, I guess I was just trying to save a little of his dignity for not being able to figure out how to do it himself. Of course, it may depend on who his employer is. It's quite possible that some employers might absolutely insist on this. Of course, given the poster in question, such an employer would be a really, really bad fit.

You might want to qualify that a bit. Synthetic folate is much more effective than natural. It is absolutely recommended by doctors that any woman who might become pregnant should be taking synthetic folate supplements to avoid neural tube defects in offspring.

You do know that no animal actually produces cobalamin itself right? It's only made by a relatively small number of micro-organisms and it's inherently vegan. Growing those (in a matrix containing some cobalt) to eat isn't synthesizing in a lab, it's just farming. You tend to get it from animal products because either the animals in question eat and accumulate it from the environment, or one of the micro-organisms that produces it lives in their intestinal tract and produces it and it gets into the rest of the animal's body. For that matter, humans actually host microorganisms that produce it as well, but typically too far down our intestinal tracts for enough to be absorbed into our bodies.

As for creatine, we synthesize that in our own bodies from amino acids. Vegans don't have quite the levels found in people who eat a lot of meat, but since the amount created internally increases to compensate for a lack of any from diet, Vegans aren't deficient in it. For the most part, having high levels of creatine is only really useful for certain types of athletics and the simple fact is that pretty close to 100% of those athletes are not getting it from meat anyway, they're getting it from supplements.

The AC appears to be a nutbar, or, at the very least conflating this college with some other one. I can't find any record of any mass casualty event at Elgin college.

Better to extend the black plastic bag idea. The think about those bags is that they're generally recognized as trash, so there's not much legal recourse you can take for vandalism if Flock's people destroy your black plastic bags. What if, instead, you get a metal enclosure to put around the camera and lock it in place with a padlock? Mark it with "property of Elgin college" Then they can't clear the camera without very clearly destroying your property. When they come to do it film them and call the police or, if you have your own campus police, have them arrest the perpetrators. If there's any legal issue with mounting that on the poles, perhaps from a contract requirement, then make an enclosure that goes around the camera, but sits on its own pole and doesn't technically touch their pole or camera, just obstructs it. Or maybe put in a hedge around it. Basically something that is very clearly yours and has value and can't be removed without it being an illegal act against your property. If they want to play stupid legal games, play the game with them.

Is that in direct response to

As in, (to paraphrase Weird Al) "drag[] [them] by [their] ankles to the middle of the forest and stuff[] [them] in a big plastic bag!"

He did say it was his work phone, so this might be a Mobile Device Management setting imposed by his employer. Of course, that would mean that he's misdirecting his anger from his employer towards... actually, not really sure. I mean, in his post he goes from complaining about heavy manufacturing going to China to complaining about phone settings that he appears to think are "woke" or something apropos of nothing.

Not teleology, I'm still talking about an emergent system. It's just a question of what sort of characteristics end up having a lower chance of ending up as dead ends. Adaptability, including characteristics that improve evolutionary adaptability is a characteristic that helps avoid dead ends. The simple, middle-school version of evolution basically has a model where mutations occur at random. However we already know of systems where organisms have evolved so that at least certain mutations are promoted. For example, spots on animals actually happen through standard mutations that happen at particular ratios. Basically, the organism evolved so that some of its cells always mutate in certain ways. Basically genetic instability and mosaicism, and those characteristics are evolved. That's just a sideshow to what I'm talking about though, and it turns out that the word for what I'm talking about is evolvability. So, things like stress evolved mutagenisis (beyond just epigenetic factors). Some species are prone to chromosomal crossover during gamete combination from sexual reproduction. There's also evolved tolerances to the effects of gene duplication. There's another neat one I just learned about during this discussion, heat shock proteins.

Anyway, you are right that lots of things that are not biological evolution get conflated with it. Of course, that's very tricky because biological evolution is a reaction to environment, and social systems, for example, provide selection pressure, so these systems can co-evolve. A parting thought about Lamarckian "evolution" of course is that, as wrong as he was in general, in some specific ways, his ideas actually do work (for example stress related epigenetic factors that pass on down through generations) in very limited ways. Also, it's very clear that the famous mouse experiment could have actually worked in the end (though it was actually conducted to disprove him). The reason for this is that the experiment went on for 22 generations (though some sources say just 5). The thing that always bothered me about that is that mice have 5 to 8 pups per litter. Even just 5 generations is hundreds of mice, but 22 generations would be what, quadrillions? So, obviously mice would be discarded from every generation, and human bias would be almost impossible. If the bias was based on tail length the tails might actually get longer or shorter depending on the specific bias. In the actual experiment though, apparently the selection protocol was for health, vigor, and fertility. So, even if it didn't affect the tails, it almost certainly would have been selection pressure for other traits. Not to mention that he was almost certainly inbreeding, so that would have had effects as well. Of course, I should note that most criteria for health that would be used in such an experiment would probably increase overall size, which probably would mean that tails would grow proportionately.

Anyway, sorry to ramble, but the potential unintended consequences of those experiments has always been fascinating. Just in general how difficult it is to actually predict every outcome of playing around with emergent processes like evolution/natural selection.

OK. Good point. There is a problem, but it's not the cut bananas going brown too quickly.

And yet, Starship has taken more than twice (more than three times by some estimates, depending on how you define the starting point) as long as the Saturn V to actually get to orbit.

As it stands, even without the lemon juice, the bananas I seem to get from the supermarket these days pretty much don't seem to brown very quickly anyway. As long as they don't have to sit in a fruit salad for too long, there isn't really a problem.

I think we're pretty much on the same page with this. I think what we need to always remember about evolution/natural selection is that even the process itself is subject to natural selection. Adaptive behavior is itself a trait that can evolve like any other trait. Even to the degree that, while Lamarck wasn't exactly right, it actually really is the case that some environmental pressures will cause hereditary changes through generations through what I think we're still calling epigenetic factors. Usually these are where stress factors like prolonged food shortages can lead to, for example multiple generations of smaller individuals despite nutrition levels rebounding. Or, even in a single extant individual, prolonged exposure to environmental conditions can lead to long-term physiological adaptation such as lots of exposure to the cold reversing the behavior of blood flow to extremities from restricting blood flow to conserve heat while sacrificing the extremities to increasing blood flow to protect the extremities. Being able to change to adapt to an environment is usually an advantage, so it makes sense that organisms would not only evolve, but that evolving to evolve would make sense from the "selfish gene" perspective.

I mean, Milton Friedman died 20 years ago at the age of 94 so...