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Essentials Of Natural Energy Supplements Revealed
Natural Energy Supplements are: Vitamins, Minerals and Essential Fatty Acids.
In this post the following questions are asked and answered:
- Precisely what are vitamins and what are minerals and is there any difference between vitamins and minerals?
- Is it beneficial to consume lots of vitamins and or minerals?
First a few fundamentals about nutrition. Proper and adequate nutrition is needed to sustain life, provide energy, and aid in tissue growth and repair. A proper and nourishing diet involves six types of nutrients:
1) carbohydrates
2) fats
3) proteins
4) vitamins
5) minerals
6) water
Carbohydrate, fat, and protein are essential in larger quantitities for our bodies (grams per day) and they add energy. Therefore carbohydrate, fat, and protein are called macrontrients; we require more of them.
Vitamins and minerals are considered micronutrients; required in lesser quantities (milligrams or micrograms/day). They do not yield energy, but they aid our bodies carry out necessary and important physiological processes. About 40 of these nutrients are very important for life because our bodies cannot synthesize enough to meet physiological requirements.
The significant difference between Vitamins and minerals
Vitamins ("vita" = life and "amine" = containing nitrogen) are organic (containing carbon, which is an element present in all living things) compound, containing atoms of a number of different elements.
Minerals are pure inorganic elements (containing atoms of similar element), that means they are a lot more simple in chemical form as compared to vitamins. All vitamins are necessary or needed by our systems, while only a few minerals are fundamental nutrients. Vitamins are prone to high temperature, light, and chemical agents, so cooking, food preparation, producing, and storage must be appropriate to preserve 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 (such as oxalates present in spinach as well as tea, and phytates present in legumes and grains), making them inaccessible for the body to utilize.
Vitamins are either water-soluble (water is required for digestion and are excreted in urine) or fat- soluble (necessitates fat for absorption 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, biotin, folate and pantothenic acid); and, 4 different fat-soluble vitamins: vitamins A, D, E, and K. Each of these vitamins have unique roles and functions in our bodies.
Minerals are grouped as major or macro- (calcium, phosphorus, potassium, chloride, sodium, magnesium, and sulfur), and trace or micro- (iron, iodine, zinc, selenium, chromium, fluoride, molybdenum, copper, and manganese) minerals, the former needed in quantities of 100mg/day or more, and the latter needed in much smaller, or "trace," amounts. These 16 necessary minerals also play important roles in the body.
Rather than counting on dietary supplements, unless necessary as a result 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 must ingest for healthy body because the body needs them but can't make them from other food components. The term refers to fatty acids needed for biological processes, and not those that only act as fuel.
To be able to function properly, the body needs optimal quantities of all of the fundamental 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 might create health problems and ailments.
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