Vitamins And Minerals Benefits

 

Vitamins and minerals are essential nutrients because they fulfill hundreds of roles in the body. There is a fine line between eating enough of these nutrients (which is healthy) and eating too much (which can hurt you) and a healthy diet is the best way to get enough vitamins and minerals you need.

Necessary nutrients for your body

Every day, your body produces skin, muscle, and bone. It produces rich red blood that transports nutrients and oxygen to distant outposts, sending nerve signals that travel thousands of miles through brain and body pathways. It's also a chemical transmission that goes from one organ to another, giving you the instructions that will keep you alive.

But to do all this, your body needs some raw materials. This includes at least 30 vitamins, minerals, and nutrients that your body needs but cannot make itself in adequate amounts.

Vitamins and minerals are essential nutrients - because they work together, they fulfill hundreds of roles in the body. They help strengthen bones, heal wounds, and strengthen the immune system. They also turn food into energy and repair cellular damage.

Micronutrients play an important role in the body

Vitamins and minerals are often called micronutrients because your body only needs tiny amounts. However, not getting these small amounts almost guarantees illness. Examples of diseases that can result from vitamin deficiencies include:

Scurvy: 

Former sailors learned that living for months without fresh fruits and vegetables, which are a major source of vitamin C, causes bleeding and chewing lethargy.

Blindness: 

In some developing countries, people are still going blind because of vitamin A deficiency.

Rachitis: 

Vitamin D deficiency can cause rickets, a condition characterized by weak bones that can lead to skeletal abnormalities such as arched legs. Partly to combat rickets, the U.S. has been fortifying milk with vitamin D since the 1930s.

Just as key micronutrient deficiencies can cause significant damage to your body, getting adequate amounts can provide tremendous benefits. Examples of such benefits include:

Solid Bones: 

A combination of calcium, vitamin D, vitamin K, magnesium, and phosphorus protects your bones from fractures.

Prevents birth defects:

 Taking folic acid supplements early in pregnancy helps prevent birth defects in the brain and spine of offspring.

Healthy Teeth: 

Mineral fluoride not only helps with bone formation but also prevents tooth decay from starting or worsening.

The difference between vitamins and minerals

Although they are all considered micronutrients, vitamins and minerals are significantly different. Vitamins are organic and can be broken down by heat, air, or acid, while minerals are inorganic and stick to their chemical structure.

👉👉👉Why is this difference important to us? It means that minerals from soil and water can easily enter your body through the plants, fish, animals, and liquids you consume. But it's hard to transfer vitamins from food and other sources into your body because cooking, storage, and simple exposure to air can deactivate these more fragile compounds.

Interactions for good and bad

Many micronutrients interact. Vitamin D helps the body get calcium from food sources that go through the digestive system rather than the bones, and vitamin C helps absorb iron.

However, the interaction of micronutrients is not always cooperative. For example, vitamin C blocks the body's ability to absorb the essential mineral copper. Even excessive amounts of manganese can exacerbate iron deficiency.

A closer look at water-soluble vitamins

Water-soluble vitamins are packed into the watery portions of the food you eat and are absorbed directly into the bloodstream when the food is broken down during digestion or as a soluble supplement.
Since most of your body is made up of water, many water-soluble vitamins easily diffuse into your body. The kidneys constantly regulate the levels of water-soluble vitamins, causing the body to eliminate excess urine.

what they do

Although water-soluble vitamins have many functions in the body, one of the most important is to help release the energy in the food you eat. Others are to help keep tissues healthy. Here are some examples of how different vitamins can help you stay healthy:

Energy release: 

Many B vitamins are essential components of some coenzymes (molecules that help enzymes) that help release energy from food.

Energy production: 

Thiamine, riboflavin, niacin, pantothenic acid, and biotin are involved in energy production.

Build proteins and cells:

 Vitamins B6, B12, and folic acids metabolize amino acids (the building blocks of proteins) and cells help reproduce.

Creating Collagen: 

One of the many roles of vitamin C is to help make collagen, which holds wounds together, supports blood vessel walls, and forms the foundation of teeth and bones.
Contrary to popular belief, some water-soluble vitamins can remain in the body for long periods. You probably had a supply of vitamin B12 in your liver for several years. And even folic acid and vitamin C reserves can last longer than two days.

In general, however, water-soluble vitamins should be renewed every few days.
Just be aware that consuming large amounts of some of these micronutrients through supplements can be very harmful. For example, very high doses of vitamin B6 - multiplied by the recommended amount of 1.3 mg (mg) per day for adults - can damage nerves, causing numbness and muscle weakness.

Focus on fat-soluble vitamins

Instead of easily slipping into the bloodstream like most water-soluble vitamins, fat-soluble vitamins enter the bloodstream through the lymphatic channels of the intestinal wall.
Many fat-soluble vitamins pass through the body only when accompanied by proteins, which act as vectors, and fatty foods and oils are considered reservoirs of the four fat-soluble vitamins. Inside your body, fatty tissues and the liver act as the main gestation handles for these vitamins, which release them as needed.

 You can look at these vitamins as micronutrients that are released over time. You can consume it from time to time, perhaps at doses spaced several weeks or months apart quite than daily, as you continue to be full. Your body gets rid of the excess and gradually distributes it to meet your needs.

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what they do

Together, these four vitamins help keep your eyes, skin, lungs, digestive system, and nervous system in good shape. Here are a few other important roles these vitamins play:

💛Bone structure: Bone formation is impossible without vitamins A, D, and K.

💛 Eye Protection: Vitamin A also helps maintain healthy cells and protects your vision.

💛Body Support: Without vitamin E, your body will have difficulty absorbing and storing vitamin A.

Body Protection: Vitamin E also acts as an antioxidant (a compound that helps protect the body from damage caused by unstable molecules).

Because fat-soluble vitamins are stored in the body for long periods of time periods, toxic levels can build up. This is more likely to happen if you take supplements. It is very rare to get so many vitamins from food alone.

A focus on essential minerals

The body needs and stores relatively large amounts of key minerals. These minerals are no more important to your health than micronutrients; they are only present in your body in large quantities.
Key minerals pass through the body in different ways. Potassium, for example, is quickly absorbed into the bloodstream, where it circulates freely and is excreted by the kidneys as a water-soluble vitamin. Calcium is similar to a fat-soluble vitamin in that it requires a carrier for absorption and transport.
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 what they do

One of the main tasks of a key mineral is to maintain the proper balance of water in the body. Sodium, chloride, and potassium lead the way. The other three major minerals, calcium, phosphorus, and magnesium, are important for bone health. Sulfur helps stabilize protein structures, including some of the structures that make up hair, skin, and nails.

Having too much of a key mineral can lead to another deficiency. These types of imbalances are usually the result of an overload of supplements rather than food sources. Here are two examples:

💧Excess salt: Calcium binds to excess sodium in the body and is excreted when the body feels the need to lower sodium levels. This means that if you eat too much sodium through table salt or processed foods, you may run out of needed calcium while your body gets rid of excess sodium.

💧Excess phosphorus: Similarly, excessive phosphorus intake can interfere with your ability to absorb magnesium.

Focus on Rare Metals

 These trace elements are just as important as essential minerals like calcium and phosphorus, each of which makes up more than one pound of your body weight.

what they do

Rare minerals perform many tasks. Examples:
Iron is known to carry oxygen throughout the body.
Fluoride strengthens bones and prevents tooth decay.
Zinc helps clot blood, is essential for taste and smell, and stimulates the immune response.
Copper helps in the formation of several enzymes, one of which helps in the metabolism of iron and the formation of hemoglobin, which carries oxygen in the blood.
Other trace elements have equally vital functions, such as helping to prevent damage to body cells and forming key enzyme parts or improving their activity.
Rare metals interact with each other, sometimes in ways that can lead to imbalances. Too much of one can cause or contribute to a lack of the other. Here are some examples:

☝Too much manganese can exacerbate iron deficiency, and too little can also cause problems.

☝When the body contains too little iodine, thyroid hormone production is slowed, causing laziness and weight gain as well as other health problems and the problem worsens if the body also contains too little selenium.

☝The difference between "enough" and "too much" micronutrients is often negligible. In general, food is a safe source of micronutrients, but if you are taking supplements, it is important to make sure you are not exceeding safety levels.

A closer look at antioxidants

An antioxidant is a general term for any compound that can resist unstable molecules, such as free radicals, that damage DNA, cell membranes, and other parts of cells.
The cells in your body naturally produce many antioxidants to patrol. The foods you eat and perhaps some of the supplements you take are another source of antioxidant compounds. Carotenoids (such as lycopene in tomatoes and lutein in cabbage) and flavonoids (such as anthocyanins in blueberries, quercetin in apples and onions, and catechins in green tea) are antioxidants. Vitamins C and E and the mineral selenium also have antioxidant properties.

Why free radicals are bad for the body

Free radicals are a natural byproduct of energy metabolism and are also generated by UV rays, tobacco smoke, and air pollution. It has lost a whole bunch of electrons, which makes it unstable, so it steals electrons from other molecules, damaging those molecules in the process.
Free radicals have a reputation for causing cellular damage. But it can also be beneficial. When immune system cells assemble to fight off intruders, the oxygen they use circulates an army of free radicals that destroy viruses, bacteria, and body cells damaged by the oxidative burst. Vitamin C can neutralize free radicals.

How Antioxidants Can Help

Antioxidants can neutralize thieves like free radicals by ceding some of their electrons. When a vitamin C or E molecule makes such a sacrifice, it can allow a critical protein, gene, or cell membrane to escape damage. This helps to break a chain reaction that can affect many other cells.

It is important to understand that the term "antioxidant" reflects a chemical rather than a specific nutritional property. Each nutrient with antioxidant properties also has many other aspects and must be considered individually. Context is also important - in some places, for example, vitamin C is an antioxidant, in others, it may be a pro-oxidant.

Articles and advertising have presented antioxidants as a way to slow aging, prevent heart disease, improve poor eyesight, and reduce cancer. Laboratory studies and many observational experiments (e.g., asking people about their eating habits and supplement use and then monitoring their pathological patterns) Have noted the benefits of a diet rich in certain antioxidants and, in some cases, antioxidant supplements.

But the results of randomized controlled trials (in which people received a specific nutrient or placebo) did not support many of these claims. A study combining the results of 68 randomized trials with more than 240,000 participants found that people who received vitamin E, beta-carotene, and vitamin A were more likely to die than people who received a placebo. There seems to be no effect of vitamin C tablets and a slight reduction in selenium mortality, but more research is needed on these nutrients.

These results show several general benefits for antioxidants in pill form. On the other hand, many studies show that people who consume higher levels of antioxidants in food have a lower risk of developing many diseases.
In conclusion, a healthy diet is the best way to get antioxidants.