Nutrition 101– Minerals
Nutritionists tend to throw terms like ‘carbs’, ‘vitamins’
and ‘minerals’ around like everyone knows what they are. But
many people, if asked, couldn’t actually tell you what a vitamin
is, or why your body needs them. Yes, organic food usually contains more
vitamins and minerals, but what does this actually mean for your health?
Well, welcome to this series of explanations of the most used nutritional
terms – what they are, what they do, and how to get them. This month:
Minerals
So far in this series we’ve talked about carbohydrates, protein,
fats and vitamins. They’re made from carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and
nitrogen, and these four elements make up some 96 percent of your body.
The remaining four percent is made from minerals. There are five minerals
we have relatively large amounts of, and they’re known as macro-minerals
– calcium, phosphorus, magnesium, sodium and potassium. They’re
the major constituents of bones and teeth, help muscle function and nerve
transmissions, and help control the water balance in your body. The remaining
elements generally help regulate body chemistry and are called trace minerals
because we need only traces each day. For example, a 70kg person needs
400 grams of carbohydrate a day but only 40 micrograms of chromium, which
is less than a millionth of the amount. But it’s no less important.
You know that calcium is needed for strong bones. But do you know much
about other minerals? Chromium helps regulate your energy levels. Cobalt
is the only mineral that’s part of a vitamin – B12, and is
essential for red blood cells, as is Iron. Copper’s toxic at high
levels but is also involved in the pigmentation of hair and skin. Iodine
is used by your thyroid to control metabolism and thus energy, so if you’re
low in Iodine you’ll gain weight and slow down mentally and physically.
Magnesium helps muscles relax and is vital for cardiovascular health.
Manganese helps liberate energy from food. Selenium is a powerful antioxidant
sometimes called the ‘anti-cancer mineral’. And Zinc powers
over 400 enzyme-dependent reactions in your body, an example of which
is your sense of taste – if you’re low in Zinc, your sense
of taste will be poor and you’ll probably strong tastes like salty
and spicy foods more than most people. These are just a few examples of
essential minerals and the many roles they play, working individually,
but also in combination with one-another.
Now that you can see just how important minerals are, you may be interested
to know that many people, and maybe even you, are probably deficient in
one or more of them. The reason is that minerals differ from vitamins
in one key respect – while plants and animals can make many of the
vitamins, they can’t make minerals. Minerals have to physically
be in the soil that plants grow in, have to be taken up by the crops that
we want to eat, and have to not be refined out of the food before we get
to eat it. But we know that the mineral levels in foods are declining.
This is partly because non-organic farming can deplete minerals from the
soil (or the chemicals added can hinder their uptake), and partly because
of the over-refining of food. For example, when you refine whole wheat,
sugar or rice into white flour, sugar or rice, some 80 percent of the
minerals are lost. A diet based on these refined foods will very likely
fail to provide enough minerals for good health. Whole grains, and whole
foods, are the answer.
So I mentioned that non-organic farming can deplete minerals from the
soil. Organic farming aims to return a wide spectrum of minerals to the
soil via manures and composts, also encouraging soil microorganisms that
can help liberate minerals from the soil and make them available to plants.
This is the why the underlying premise of organic fertilization is ‘Feed
the soil, not the plant, and healthy soil will produce healthy plants.’
The good news is that scientific studies over the last four decades have
confirmed that, on average, organic crops contain higher levels of trace
minerals than non-organic crops.
Examples of mineral-rich foods include dark green vegetables, red meat,
pumpkin seeds, wholegrains, molasses, and seafood.
Wishing you the best of health,
Shane Heaton
Nutritionist
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