What Are Vitamins And What Are Minerals

Natural Energy Supplements are: Vitamins, Minerals and Essential Fatty Acids.

In this post the next questions are asked and answered:

- What are vitamins and what are minerals and what is the difference between vitamins and minerals?

- Is it beneficial to take lots of vitamins and or minerals?

First some fundamentals regarding nutrition. Proper and adequate nutrition is required to sustain life, provide energy, and assist with tissue growth and repair. A healthy and nutritive diet involves six classes of nutrients:

1) carbohydrates

2) fats

3) proteins

4) vitamins

5) minerals

6) water

Carbohydrate, fat, and protein are required in huge quantitities for our bodies (grams per day) and they add energy. Thus carbohydrate, fat, and protein are called macrontrients; we need more of them.

Vitamins and minerals are regarded as micronutrients; needed in lesser quantities (milligrams or micrograms/day). They do not provide energy, but they help our bodies carry out necessary and vital physiological processes. About 40 of these nutrients are essential for life because our bodies cannot synthesize enough to meet physiological requirements.

The difference between Vitamins and minerals

Vitamins ("vita" = life and "amine" = comprising of nitrogen) are organic (containing carbon, which is an element found in all living things) supplements, containing atoms of a number of different elements.

Minerals are clean inorganic elements (containing atoms of the very same element), that implies they are much more simple in chemical form than vitamins. All vitamins are essential or required by our body, while only some minerals are fundamental nutrients. Vitamins are vulnerable to high temperature, light, and chemical agents, so cooking, food preparation, producing, and storage have 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 (such as oxalates found in spinach and tea, and phytates found in legumes and grains), making them unavailable for the body to utilize.

Vitamins are either water-soluble (water is needed for absorption 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 (thiamin, riboflavin, niacin, vitamins B6 and B12, folate, biotin, and pantothenic acid); and, 4 different fat-soluble vitamins: vitamins A, D, E, and K. All these vitamins have unique roles and functions in our bodies.

Minerals are categorized as major or macro- (calcium, phosphorus, potassium, sodium, chloride, magnesium, and sulfur), and trace or micro- (iron, iodine, zinc, selenium, chromium, 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 essential minerals also play vital roles in the body.

Rather than counting on dietary supplements, unless necessary because of a deficiency, work to fulfill 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 must ingest for healthy body because the body requires them but can't make them from other food components. The term refers to fatty acids needed 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 lack any of them in our eating habits then we might create health problems and diseases.

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