Medical News

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

In this post the following questions are asked and answered:

- Precisely what are vitamins and what are minerals and is there any difference between vitamins and minerals?

- Is it good to consume lots of vitamins and minerals?

First some basics regarding nutrition. Proper and sufficient nutrition is necessary to sustain life, yield energy, and help with tissue growth and repair. A proper and nutritive diet includes six classes of nutrients:

1) carbohydrates

2) fats

3) proteins

4) vitamins

5) minerals

6) water

Carbohydrate, fat, and protein are essential in huge quantitities for our bodies (grams per day) and they add energy. Hence carbohydrate, fat, and protein are named macrontrients; we require more of them.

Vitamins and minerals are considered micronutrients; required in lesser quantities (milligrams or micrograms/day). They do not provide energy, but they aid our bodies carry out essential and vital physiological processes. Around 40 of these nutrients are very important for life because our bodies cannot synthesize enough to satisfy physiological needs.

The main difference between Vitamins and minerals

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

Minerals are pure inorganic elements (containing atoms of similar element), which means they are much more simple in chemical form as compared to vitamins. All vitamins are essential or needed by our body, while only a few minerals are essential nutrients. Vitamins are susceptible to high temperature, light, and chemical agents, so cooking, food preparation, producing, and storage need to be appropriate to preserve vitamins in food. Minerals, however, are more stable to food preparation, but mineral reduction could occur when they are bound to different substances in foods (such as oxalates present in spinach and tea, and phytates present in legumes and grains), making them inaccessible for the body to utilize.

Vitamins are either water-soluble (water is required for assimilation and are excreted in urine) or fat- soluble (necessitates fat for digestion and are stored in fat tissue). There are actually 9 different water-soluble vitamins: vitamin C and the eight B vitamins (thiamin, riboflavin, niacin, vitamins B6 and B12, biotin, folate and pantothenic acid); and, 4 different fat-soluble vitamins: vitamins A, D, E, and K. All these vitamins have different roles and functions in our bodies.

Minerals are classified as major or macro- (calcium, phosphorus, potassium, chloride, sodium, magnesium, and sulfur), and trace or micro- (iron, iodine, zinc, chromium, selenium, fluoride, molybdenum, copper, and manganese) minerals, the former required in quantities of 100mg/day or more, and the latter needed in smaller, or "trace," amounts. These 16 essential minerals also play significant roles in the body.

Rather than depending on health supplements, unless necessary due to a deficiency, work to satisfy your body's nutritional requirements by acquiring these nutrients from a varied and diverse diet with lots of fresh fruits and vegetables.

Essential fatty acids, or EFAs, are fatty acids that human beings and animals must take in for healthy body as the body needs them but can't make them from other food components. The phrase refers to fatty acids required for biological processes, and not those that only act as fuel.

To be able to function properly, the body requires optimal quantities of all of the basic nutrients 60 minerals, 16 vitamins, 12 amino acids and 2 to 3 essential fatty acids. If we lack any of them in our dietary habits then we might create health issues and ailments.

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