Organic Living for All -- The Importance of Minerals

Minerals are naturally occurring substances that are neither animal nor vegetable, but are essential to the nutrition of humans, animals, and plants. Approximately 4% of the body's mass consists of minerals. They are classified as trace minerals (body requires less than 100 mg/day) and major minerals (body requires more than 100 mg/day). Minerals can be found in water and soil and, therefore, in plants and animals. Just like vitamins, minerals help your body grow, develop and stay healthy.

The body uses minerals to perform many different functions - from building strong bones to transmitting nerve impulses. Some minerals are even used to make hormones or maintain a normal heartbeat. Minerals serve three roles. They provide structure in forming bones and teeth, as well as help maintain normal heart rhythm, muscle contractility, nerve conductivity, and acid-base balance. By becoming part of enzymes and hormones that modulate cellular activity, minerals help regulate cellular metabolism.

When talking about nutrition, we talk about the minerals that come from food. At least, minerals used to come from our food (when we still had some viable topsoil), and are still supposed to come from that source. Four elements compose 96% of the body's makeup: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. The remaining 4% of the body's composition is minerals.

There are several opinions about how many minerals are essential. Without minerals, vitamins may have little or no effect. Minerals are catalysts - triggers for thousands of essential enzyme reactions in the body. No trigger - no reaction. Without enzyme reactions, the body does not function properly. Minerals trigger the vitamins and enzymes to act; that means digestion.

Mineral deficiency is a virtually undisputed fact. A 1936 source - Senate Document #264 - is scientific proof that dietary minerals were generally inadequate for optimum health back then: "...most of us are suffering from certain diet deficiencies which cannot be remedied until deplete soils from which our food comes are brought into proper mineral balance." "The alarming fact is that food...now being raised on millions of acres of land that no longer contain enough...minerals are starving us, no matter how much of them we eat." "Lacking vitamins, the system can make use of minerals, but lacking minerals, vitamins are useless."

Daily mineral requirements cannot be made in the body, and must be obtained in our diet. The daily requirements of minerals required by the body can no longer be obtained from a well-balanced diet. The soil is depleted, and we must add mineral supplements to get what our body requires. However, like vitamins, excess minerals can produce toxic effects.

  Macro/Major and Trace Minerals

There are two kinds of minerals: macro-minerals and trace minerals. Macro is a Greek word meaning "large" and your body needs larger amounts of macro-minerals than trace minerals. The macro-mineral group includes calcium, phosphorus, magnesium, sodium, potassium, chloride, and sulfur. A trace of something means that there is only a little of it. So even though your body needs trace minerals, it needs just a tiny bit of each one. Scientists aren't even sure how much of these minerals you need each day. Trace minerals includes iron, manganese, copper, iodine, zinc, cobalt, fluoride, and selenium.