1. Your body can’t make nutrient minerals on its own. You need to get them from outside sources, which mostly means eating the right kinds of food. Sometimes, if your diet isn’t enough or your body is having extra trouble, you may need some kind of supplement.
2. Plants take in minerals from the soil. Humans eat the plants, or animals eat the plants and we eat the animals. A diet rich in all necessary minerals will contain fruits, vegetables, meat, fish and dairy products. Some minerals are found in water.
3. There are five major minerals that are particularly important and that you need in large quantities. These are calcium, phosphorus, potassium, sodium and magnesium. Deficiencies in any of these minerals can cause significant problems.
4. This doesn’t mean that other minerals aren’t important. They’re known as trace elements and they’re only present in small amounts, but each has a very specific role to play. These minerals include iron, sulfur, chlorine, copper, cobalt, zinc, manganese, iodine, molybdenum and selenium.
5. Minerals have roles to play in everything from heart health, bone growth and keeping the digestive system working to activating other enzymes in the body and boosting your metabolism. You can’t miss any of them.
6. Of course, you also shouldn’t overdo it. Excess amounts of certain minerals can also cause health problems. You need to check your recommended range with your doctor (it may vary depending on factors like age or other medical conditions) and stick to that.
7. You may see other minerals like silicon and boron described as “essential”. They may have an important role to play in the body, but that doesn’t make them “essential” in the nutritional sense. Essential nutrients are those that the body can function without but that it also can’t produce, so we need external sources.
8. Minerals are essential nutrients. The other essential nutrients are vitamins, amino acids and fatty acids. All are required by the body and need to be absorbed from elsewhere. As with all nutrients, minerals are just one part of a balanced diet.
9. Oxygen, carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen are the most prevalent elements in the body, but as far as humans are concerned, they’re not nutrient minerals. We don’t need to get them exclusively from food.
10. You can measure the mineral quantity in your bloodstream through a simple blood test.
