Exactly What Are Vitamins And What Are Minerals
Natural Energy Supplements are: Vitamins, Minerals and Essential Fatty Acids.
In this article the next questions are asked and answered:
- Exactly what are vitamins and what are minerals and what is the difference between vitamins and minerals?
- Is it good to take lots of vitamins and or minerals?
First a few fundamentals about nutrition. Proper and adequate nutrition is needed to sustain life, provide energy, and help with tissue growth and repair. A healthy and nutritive diet involves six types of nutrients:
1) carbohydrates
2) fats
3) proteins
4) vitamins
5) minerals
6) water
Carbohydrate, fat, and protein are required in larger quantitities for our bodies (grams per day) and they add energy. Therefore carbohydrate, fat, and protein are known as macrontrients; we need more of them.
Vitamins and minerals are considered micronutrients; needed in lesser quantities (milligrams or micrograms/day). They do not provide energy, but they help our bodies perform necessary and important physiological processes. About 40 of these nutrients are necessary for life because our bodies cannot synthesize enough to satisfy physiological needs.
The significant difference between Vitamins and minerals
Vitamins ("vita" = life and "amine" = comprising of nitrogen) are organic (containing carbon, that is an element found in all living things) compound, containing atoms of one or more different elements.
Minerals are clean inorganic elements (containing atoms of the very same element), which signifies they are much more simple in chemical form than vitamins. All vitamins are necessary or required by our systems, while only some minerals are basic nutrients. Vitamins are susceptible to high temperature, light, and chemical agents, so cooking, food preparation, producing, and storage need to be appropriate to conserve vitamins in food. Minerals, however, are more stable to food preparation, but mineral reduction can occur when they are bound to different substances in foods (like oxalates found in spinach and also tea, and phytates found in legumes and grains), making them unavailable for the body to utilize.
Vitamins are either water-soluble (water is required for assimilation and are excreted in urine) or fat- soluble (requires fat for digestion and are stored in fat tissue). There are 9 different water-soluble vitamins: vitamin C and the eight B vitamins (riboflavin, thiamin, niacin vitamins B6 and B12, folate, biotin, and pantothenic acid); and, 4 different fat-soluble vitamins: vitamins A, D, E, and K. Each of these vitamins have unique roles and functions in our bodies.
Minerals are grouped as major or macro- (calcium, phosphorus, potassium, sodium, chloride, magnesium, and sulfur), and trace or micro- (iron, iodine, zinc, chromium, selenium, fluoride, molybdenum, copper, and manganese) minerals, the former needed in quantities of 100mg/day or more, and the latter needed in much smaller, or "trace," amounts. These 16 necessary minerals also play vital roles in the body.
Instead of relying on dietary supplements, unless necessary due to a deficiency, work to satisfy your body's nutritional requirements by obtaining these nutrients from a varied and diverse diet with lots of fresh fruits and vegetables.
Essential fatty acids, or EFAs, are fatty acids that humans and animals should ingest for good health because the body requires them but can't make them from other food components. The term refers to fatty acids required for biological processes, and not those that only act as fuel.
In order to function properly, the body requires optimal quantities of all of the fundamental nutrients 60 minerals, 16 vitamins, 12 amino acids and 2 to 3 essential fatty acids. If we do not include any of them in our eating habits then we may create health problems and diseases.
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