Greens Powders

I'm sure you've heard of the guy who lost a few hundred pounds on a doctor supervised fast for months where he relied on water and vitamins. I assure you I don't think that's ideal or healthy, but personally, I would like a way to feel like I could do that temporarily (if short on money due to temporary emergency) with at least basic coverage for micronutrient needs--as in, not ideal or healthy, but no major deficiencies that would show up in the short or medium term.

That would be possible, but it would have to be formulated with that goal in mind. You would likely have a morning and night supplement to take, if not also a mid-day one. Definitely possible, though.

Regarding forgetting thiamine, my guess (and this might be truly naive) is that the amazing greens powder was intended as a supplement for a standard american diet, which they were assuming had sufficient thiamine, and not intended for someone who didn't have any other source of micronutrients. (That might be overly charitable, but I'm sure they would say their supplement isn't meant for weight loss, as all the others do, and maybe they'd mean it. I'm not trying to give them excessive credit, but trying to consider realistic possibilities. I'm not buying their product again regardless, as it's not what I was looking for.)

Could be. I just know how most brands work, and I bet they did not even think about it. When you contact a contract manufacturer, they offer you choices of pre-made mixes they have available. Most brands just pick and choose the mixes and decide on ratios, then do math to calculate what the nutrients are after the fact from the manufacturer COA of the mix. No actual chemistry is done to prove those numbers, though. It's very expensive to do.

The greens part: I was under the vague impression that there are many micronutrients not covered under the top-40 vitamins and minerals, which were considered important and to be available from vegetables. It was my (admittedly and embarrassingly fuzzy) hope that this product would cover some of those micronutrients in addition to the main RDA ones.

There are other nutrients that are good. However, if you are not standardizing to them, they might not even be in there. The cultivar, growing conditions, harvesting time, and extraction methods can lead to wildly different amounts of actives in the same species of plant. If I were making a real product for people for this purpose, I would have individual ingredients in there that are standardized to what I want. I would list those all separately. So let's say I wanted hesperidin. I would add that in pure, or I would add in a citrus extract standardized to a specific % content. Then let's say I also wanted luteolin, quercetin, kaempferol, and fisetin. I would add those in, or extracts standardized to them. Then you can know exactly how much of these micronutrients are in there. These mixtures just assume those nutrients are there. They don't standardize or prove it. So they will vary wildly. There is value in some of these micronutrients without RDAs, for sure. However, you have to standardize for them and prove they meet your specs.

I certainly take your point about the ideal quasi-fasting vitamin product not having a large market--although, on consideration, since variations on fasting have come into vogue, and I'm not aware of any supplement that does what you're talking about (the staggered administration so the nutrients don't conflict), you might end up with a niche product that actually does have a substantial market. But it's not something I'd make an investment bet on without a lot of evidence that the market's there.

We will do one at some point. I just have to be strategic about when. Sometimes I think products will do well, but they don't sell much at all. Other times I don't expect it to do much, and they take off like crazy. Doing things right in the way we do them just takes a lot of time, effort, and money. So we need to be strategic about it. I could go buy a premixed greens combo and throw it in a jar like everyone else, but that's not what we do.

1) are there any particular multivitamins you recommend or recommend-against? (The one I'm using now is Alive! Once Daily Men's Ultra Potency--I think because when I was looking around, it seemed to cover the bases and be cheap, not any more enthusiastic basis for thinking it's good.)

Nature's Way is a huge company that does hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue a year. So I never buy things from them if I can help it. Looking at that product specifically, they are using cheap non-bioavailable forms of things, and they have a ton on there with laughably low doses to just have it on their label. 5mg of rutin, 20mg of inositol, 20mg of choline bitartrate, etc. Those are all insanely low just so they can show them on the label. It's a dishonest marketing practice that needs to stop. It's called label dressing. So I would never buy from a company that does that.

The one I would probably suggest is the Thorne Multi-Vitamin Elite. They split it up into AM and PM, and use solid doses of bioavailable forms.

2) some multivitamins come in a liquid base and claim that they're much more efficiently absorbed that way; is that mostly bullshit? It seems to just depend on how much the solid tablets are broken down in digestion, and the assumption that they aren't broken down much and therefore not absorbed as much as pre-dissolved liquid vitamin forms.

Liquid forms are not inherently more bioavailable, no. That being said, if it is already in solution, that's one less step that needs to happen in your GI tract. However, some all vitamins are not soluble in the same solvents. So you can't make a single solution with everything you need. So unless you have two solutions with things split up, you are missing things.