Is There Any Difference Between Vitamins And Minerals?
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In this post the next questions are asked and answered:
- Exactly 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 or minerals?
First some basics regarding nutrition. Proper and adequate nutrition is needed to sustain life, yield energy, and help with tissue growth and repair. A proper 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 essential in huge quantitities for our bodies (grams per day) and they add energy. Therefore carbohydrate, fat, and protein are known as 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 help our bodies carry out essential and vital physiological processes. About 40 of these nutrients are necessary 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 (containing carbon, which is an element present in all living things) supplements, containing atoms of one or more different elements.
Minerals are pure inorganic elements (containing atoms of similar element), which means they are much more simple in chemical form than vitamins. All vitamins are essential or needed by our body, 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 preserve 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 present in spinach and tea, and phytates found 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 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 unique roles and functions in our bodies.
Minerals are grouped 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 much smaller, or "trace," amounts. These 16 essential minerals also play important roles in the body.
Rather than relying 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 humans and animals must consume for healthy body because 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 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 routine then we might create health problems and ailments.
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