Vitamins
and minerals in the diet
What should I know about
vitamins and minerals?
in a great land, people lived a good life. They worked hard
all day and were out in the sunshine a lot. They had quality
family and leisure time and ate yummy homemade food that
was all grown and produced locally in rich, fertile farm
land.
The people were very healthy in general.
They only needed one town doctor, who would come to your
house if you were too sick to travel.
There were no huge drug stores on every
block of town and there weren't health food stores with
rows of vitamins and minerals and other dietary supplements
either.
These people ate fresh, locally grown
food that did not require chemical pesticides or preservatives.
They got their vitamins and minerals in the diet!
Vitamin and mineral source
Food
is where vitamins and minerals come from. The body
cannot make vitamins and minerals for the most part, so
we need to obtain vitamins and minerals in the diet and
by helping it with supplements.
Vitamins were discovered as a
component of food in the first part of the 1900's.
Scientists and researchers discovered them by observing
that there were improvements (or declines) in the health
of humans and animals when certain foods were consumed on
a regular basis.
What do vitamins and minerals do?
Some vitamin and mineral
facts
Good health and vitamins and minerals
are needed by the body just as a fish needs water. The
main function of vitamins and minerals in the diet is to
help the body use the nutrients that it gets from protein,
carbohydrates, fat and water (the macronutrients).
Because the body needs vitamins and minerals
in order to function, but in small quantities, they are
called "micronutrients."
A vitamin benefits the body, as
do minerals, by assisting the body to convert food into
energy. That's a very, very simple explanation.
The number of processes that the body perfoms in order to
maintain itself is pretty mind boggling. The point is that
vitamins and minerals are required to perform these tasks.
Quality of vitamins and minerals in the
diet
The quantity and quality of vitamins
and minerals in the diet depends completely on the quality
of the food source itself. Vitamins and minerals
are found in both plant and animal foods.
Minerals in food come from the soil that
plants are grown in. Animals eat those plants and that's
where the minerals in animal food come from. If the soil
is used over and over and becomes depleted of minerals,
and synthetic* fertilizer and pesticides are used, plants
absorb these. We then eat things that don't have very many
minerals or vitamins - and also contain toxic stuff from
the synthetic pesticides and fertilizers.
* Synthetic means man-made, not natural.
Since vitamins are a natural part of food,
the quantity and quality of vitamins in food also depend
on the quality of the soil they are grown in, the way animals
are raised and how much processing the food has had.
The amount of vitamins and minerals in the diet
has virtually disappeared with the rise of mass food production
over the past several decades. It's not the purpose
of this article to go into the methods and practices of
mass food production and distribution - you can find information
for yourself if you're interested. It's enough to
say that you cannot get the nutrition your body needs from
commercially produced and processed food.
That is why organic food is in
great demand now - because the production of organic
food is pretty much like it was in "that great land not
so long ago" that I described earlier. We are becoming more
and more aware that many health problems can be traced back
to the poor nutritional quality of the food we've been eating.
"Organic" in this sense means
grown and raised without using synthetic fertilizers, pesticides
or hormones. It refers to allowing animals to roam
freely out in the open, fresh air instead of crammed into
pens, eating stuff I can't describe and other super gross
things. (I don't care for horror stories and to be honest
with you, I almost puked when I found out how animals are
raised for mass food production. So beware, it is pretty
freakin' horrible.)
It has been, and continues to be, validated
by food science research that there are significantly higher
amounts of essential vitamins and minerals in the diet when
you eat organic food compared to "conventionally" mass-produced
food.
And organic food tastes ohhhhhh, so incredibly
good!
Please visit this refreshingly
simple and informative site, Start Going Organic
if you want to try organic
food but aren't sure where to start!
Vitamin and mineral supplements
Because the food supply of today
contains less nutrition than it did even 50 years
ago, vitamin and mineral supplements are usually necessary
to make up for this deficiency.
I am not providing a chart or list of
vitamins and minerals and what they do for a couple of reasons.
- Vitamins and minerals work
as a part of a "nutrition team" - they aren't
separate from food and they don't work very well by themselves.
If you were to take just a vitamin B complex supplement,
for example, you could create an imbalance of the other
nutrients that your body needs and defeat the purpose!
This is not to say that individual supplements are bad
for you at all, just that they work best together.
- It would make for a long and boring
article on vitamins and minerals in the diet to attempt
to list them here. You can find all sorts of information
about specific nutrients on the Web.
It is far, far more important
to understand that your body requires them all, not
just some of them, to function properly and to be healthy.
The purpose of this article is
to increase the understanding that vitamins and minerals
are a part of food and that they assist the body
to break down and utilize that food. They are also not a
replacement for food and do not, by themselves, provide
energy.
Food sources, such as spirulina and chlorella,
are considered to have all the nutrients needed by the human
body. Thus, the best sources of vitamins and minerals in
the diet are found in these kinds of foods, since they are
nutritionally complete and have naturally balanced amounts
of nutrients. Because they are so intensely packed with
the nutrients that the body needs, they are often called
"superfoods."
If you are interested in further
information about vitamins and minerals in the diet and
nutrition, I suggest this site as a good starting place.
The
Weston Price Foundation: Vitamin Primer
I hope this information has given you
a good overview and better understanding of how vitamins
and minerals in the diet fit into the whole subject of good
health.
À santé! (A toast in French
meaning "To health!")
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and minerals in the diet
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