What Is The Difference Between Vitamins And 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 good to take lots of vitamins and minerals?

First a few basics regarding nutrition. Proper and adequate nutrition is required to sustain life, provide energy, and help with tissue growth and repair. A healthy and nourishing 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 huge quantitities for our bodies (grams per day) and they add energy. Therefore carbohydrate, fat, and protein are called 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 aid our bodies perform essential and vital physiological processes. About 40 of these nutrients are essential for life because our bodies cannot synthesize enough to meet physiological needs.

The 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) supplements, containing atoms of one or more different elements.

Minerals are clean inorganic elements (containing atoms of the very same element), which implies they are much more simple in chemical form as compared to vitamins. All vitamins are necessary or needed 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 need to be appropriate to conserve 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 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 needed for assimilation and are excreted in urine) or fat- soluble (requires fat for assimilation 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. 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, chromium, selenium, fluoride, molybdenum, copper, and manganese) minerals, the former needed 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.

Rather than relying on dietary supplements, unless necessary because of 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 human beings and animals should take in for healthy body 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 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 might create health problems and diseases.

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