What are vitamins & minerals?
"Essential substances that enable your body to do the jobs it needs to do, for you to stay alive and thrive"
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Vitamins and minerals are nutrients that your body needs in small amounts (micronutrients) in order to work properly. On the whole, your body can’t make them which means you have to get them from the food you eat.
The first part of this two part blog post series will introduce you to:
the different vitamins and minerals
why you need them
where you can find them
In our next post we will look at the importance of getting the right balance of these essential nutrients.
What are Vitamins?
Vitamins are organic compounds, which means they come from living things like plants and animal products. There are 13 different vitamins and they are all essential for the healthy growth, repair and functioning of your body. Each vitamin plays a unique role, and a deficiency in any one can lead to health problems.
The 13 Essential Vitamins
With the exception of Vitamin D, the 13 essential vitamins can only be obtained from the food you eat. They act as important cofactors that enable many physiological functions in the body (i.e. put simply this means that they are essential substances that enable your body to do the jobs it needs to do, for you to stay alive and thrive. ). The 13 vitamins are divided into two sub-types; water-soluble and fat-soluble.
Water-soluble Vitamins
These include Vitamin C (ascorbic acid) and the B Vitamins which are all absorbed directly into the bloodstream during digestion and are quickly available for your body to use. You can’t store large amounts, so any not used are excreted in the urine. This means they need to be consumed regularly and that deficiencies can happen quite quickly if you aren’t getting enough from your diet. B12 is the only water-soluble vitamin that the body can store, which it creates a reserve of within the liver. This means that it can take up to 7 years before you may notice signs of B12 deficiency.
Vitamin C is probably the most infamous of all vitamins - the deficiency of which was recognised way back in 1753 as sailors were dying in large numbers at sea, from a disease called Scurvy. The medical community eventually recognised that a dietary deficiency was causing the disease, and that citrus fruit (containing Vitamin C) rapidly solved the problem.
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