Quantified Health Prize Deadline Extended

Of the entries that took the contest seriously, each clearly has something to contribute to the overall picture. They take different points of view, and I feel far more informed with all of them than I would have been with any one of them. In my mind, the contest was clearly successful.

We will award all five prizes as long as we have five entries. Period.

So far my public count is you, me, the scallop guy, and Gwern gave up. Low enough competition that more people should try making an entry with 20 hours of work.

I surprised myself by managing to submit an entry to the contest an hour or two before deadline.

I don't want to say it wasn't very good, but...well, I could either discuss all the minerals, discuss a mineral or two in suitable depth, or vastly exceed the recommended word count and the amount of time I could reasonably devote to this project. I won't say what I chose, since that might bias peer review, but looking at the peer reviews, it looks like many of the entries had very different interpretations on where to go with the question and a lot of it is going to be who was lucky enough to interpret it in the same way the judges do.

The ID numbers of the entries I was told to peer review are kind of obtuse. I guess I won't speculate on what they might mean about the number of entries publicly, lest giving secret peer-review information be against the rules or something. But I am very curious how many people entered. I told a friend to enter the contest with a single-sentence entry saying just "Minerals are good for you and you should eat more of them"; just in case the contest had fewer than five entries it would be the easiest $500 she ever earned. She quite properly refused.

Also, looking over my desktop today I realized there's like a 25% chance I accidentally turned in a super-rough-draft with a similar name to my final copy. So, um, if anyone got a paper for peer review where the references are things like [small-calcium-study] or [that-one-experiment-with-the-potassium] and there's no abstract or recommendations, let me know now so I can disqualify myself and avoid further humiliation.

They changed the deadline a while ago.

I'm not going to look until after the deadline; people are allowed to update their entries until then. Also, people are holding their entries until the last minute as you would expect.

We changed the deadline when we got feedback that the short deadline and timing around the holidays was discouraging participation.

Good advice, but you have to already know what a sane person eats to follow it. In a world with several major countries with a two-digit prevalence of obesity, I think lots of people don't.

Eat food like a sane person. If you don't have any underlying problem that prevents you from absorbing a specific nutrient you most likely don't need any supplementation. If you do think that you might have such a problem speak to a doctor.

Absolutely wrong. This mistaken belief comes from a boolean model for health - that is, that you are sick or healthy, rather than one of a million levels and variations of slightly-more or slightly-less healthy. It also fails to acknowledge all the widespread deficiencies, and the safe compounds we've discovered that provide health benefits but aren't found in food.

There's also the fact that taking supplements lets you optimize micronutrients and macronutrients separately. For example, if you want more vitamin C which is mostly in fruit, but don't want sugar which is also found in fruit, then it's easy. The same applies to things you want to avoid. Using supplements prevents there from being a tradeoff between micronutrient intake and other things you might care about.

That's obviously the default best recommendation unless someone finds serious evidence of a better way, but I'm pretty sure that the goal of the study is to see if there's already serious evidence of a better way out there.