What Is The Difference Between Vitamins And Minerals?


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

In this article the next questions are asked and answered:

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

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

First a few basics about nutrition. Proper and adequate nutrition is required to sustain life, yield energy, and assist with tissue growth and repair. A proper and nutritive diet includes six types of nutrients:

1) carbohydrates

2) fats

3) proteins

4) vitamins

5) minerals

6) water

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

Vitamins and minerals are regarded as micronutrients; required in lesser quantities (milligrams or micrograms/day). They do not provide energy, but they aid our bodies perform essential and important physiological processes. About 40 of these nutrients are essential for life because our bodies cannot synthesize enough to fulfill physiological requirements.

The significant difference between Vitamins and minerals

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

Minerals are clean inorganic elements (containing atoms of similar element), that signifies they are much more simple in chemical form as compared to vitamins. All vitamins are necessary or needed by our systems, while only some minerals are fundamental nutrients. Vitamins are prone to high temperature, light, and chemical agents, so cooking, food preparation, producing, and storage have 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 (like oxalates present in spinach as well as tea, and phytates found in legumes and grains), making them unavailable for the body to utilize.

Vitamins are either water-soluble (water is necessary for absorption 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 (riboflavin, thiamin, niacin vitamins B6 and B12, biotin, folate 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 categorized as major or macro- (calcium, phosphorus, potassium, chloride, sodium, magnesium, and sulfur), and trace or micro- (iron, iodine, zinc, selenium, chromium, 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 necessary minerals also play significant roles in the body.

Instead of counting on dietary supplements, unless necessary as a result of a deficiency, work to fulfill 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 should take in for good health because the body requires them but can't make them from other food components. The phrase refers to fatty acids needed 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 do not include any of them in our dietary habits then we may create health problems and diseases.

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