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

In this article the following 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 a lot of vitamins and or minerals?

First a few fundamentals about nutrition. Proper and sufficient 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 required in larger quantitities for our bodies (grams per day) and they add energy. Hence 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 yield energy, but they help our bodies perform necessary and important physiological processes. Around 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" = containing nitrogen) are organic (containing carbon, that is an element found in all living things) compound, containing atoms of many different elements.

Minerals are clean inorganic elements (containing atoms of the very same element), which implies they are a lot more simple in chemical form as compared to vitamins. All vitamins are necessary or required by our systems, while only a few 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, on the other hand, are more stable to food preparation, but mineral reduction can occur when they are bound to different substances in foods (like oxalates found in spinach as well as tea, and phytates present 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 9 different water-soluble vitamins: vitamin C and the eight B vitamins (riboflavin, thiamin, niacin vitamins B6 and B12, folate, biotin, and pantothenic acid); and, 4 different fat-soluble vitamins: vitamins A, D, E, and K. Each of these vitamins have different 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 required in much smaller, or "trace," amounts. These 16 necessary minerals also play vital roles in the body.

Instead of depending 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 plenty of fresh fruits and vegetables.

Essential fatty acids, or EFAs, are fatty acids that humans and animals should ingest for good health as 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 needs 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 eating habits then we may create health issues and diseases.

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