Essentials Of Natural Energy Supplements Discovered
Natural Energy Supplements are: Vitamins, Minerals and Essential Fatty Acids.
In this article the next questions are asked and answered:
- What are vitamins and what are minerals and is there any difference between vitamins and minerals?
- Is it good to consume lots of vitamins and minerals?
First some fundamentals about nutrition. Proper and sufficient nutrition is needed to sustain life, yield energy, and assist with tissue growth and repair. A proper and nutritive diet consists of six types of nutrients:
1) carbohydrates
2) fats
3) proteins
4) vitamins
5) minerals
6) water
Carbohydrate, fat, and protein are essential in huge 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 regarded as micronutrients; needed in lesser quantities (milligrams or micrograms/day). They do not yield energy, but they help our bodies carry out necessary and vital physiological processes. About 40 of these nutrients are very important for life because our bodies cannot synthesize enough to meet physiological requirements.
The difference between Vitamins and minerals
Vitamins ("vita" = life and "amine" = comprising of 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 the very same element), which implies they are much more simple in chemical form than vitamins. All vitamins are essential or required by our systems, while only a few minerals are basic 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, however, are more stable to food preparation, but mineral reduction can occur when they are bound to different substances in foods (such as oxalates found in spinach and also tea, and phytates present in legumes and grains), making them unavailable for the body to utilize.
Vitamins are either water-soluble (water is required for digestion and are excreted in urine) or fat- soluble (requires fat for absorption and are stored in fat tissue). There are actually 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. All these vitamins have unique roles and functions in our bodies.
Minerals are categorized as major or macro- (calcium, phosphorus, potassium, chloride, sodium, magnesium, and sulfur), and trace or micro- (iron, iodine, zinc, chromium, selenium, fluoride, molybdenum, copper, and manganese) minerals, the former required in quantities of 100mg/day or more, and the latter required in much smaller, or "trace," amounts. These 16 essential minerals also play important roles in the body.
Rather than counting on dietary supplements, unless necessary due to a deficiency, work to fulfill your body's nutritional requirements by acquiring these nutrients from a varied and diverse diet with lots of fresh fruits and vegetables.
Essential fatty acids, or EFAs, are fatty acids that humans and animals should take in for good health as the body requires 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 essential 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 issues and ailments.