Micronutrients
Micronutrients are dietary minerals, vitamins and phytochemicals needed by the human body in very small quantities.
Balanced nutrition means ingesting the right amounts of the right nutrients over time. No one food item has them all. There are no nutritional panaceas. Cycling our menus so that we won’t be eating the same meal two days in a row is a good way to start in our quest for balance.
The body needs vitamin D to absorb calcium. Without enough vitamin D, one can’t form enough of the hormone calcitriol (known as the “active vitamin D”). This in turn leads to insufficient calcium absorption from the diet.
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Vitamins are organic compounds required as a nutrient in tiny amounts by an organism. A compound is called a vitamin when it cannot be synthesized in sufficient quantities by an organism, and must be obtained from the diet. Thus, the term is conditional both on the circumstances and the particular organism.
Vitamins are classified as either water-soluble or fat soluble. In humans there are 13 vitamins: 4 fat-soluble (A, D, E and K) and 9 water-soluble (8 B vitamins and vitamin C). Water-soluble vitamins are easily absorbed by the body, which doesn't store large amounts. The kidneys remove those vitamins that are not needed. Fat-soluble vitamins are absorbed into the body with the use of bile acids, which are fluids used to absorb fat. The body stores these for use as needed.
- Iron is pervasive, but particularly rich sources of dietary iron include red meat, lentils, beans, poultry, fish, leaf vegetables, tofu, chickpeas, black-eyed peas, blackstrap molasses, fortified bread, and fortified breakfast cereals. Iron in low amounts is found in molasses, teff and farina. Iron in meat (haem iron) is more easily absorbed than iron in vegetables.
- Cobalt is essential to all animals, including humans. It is a key constituent of cobalamin, also known as vitamin B12. A deficiency of cobalt leads to pernicious anemia, a lethal disorder. Pernicious anemia is very rare, though, because trace amounts of cobalt are available in most diets. The presence of 0.13 to 0.30 mg/kg of cobalt in soils markedly improves the health of grazing animals.
- Copper is essential in all plants and animals. The human body normally contains copper at a level of about 1.4 to 2.1 mg for each kg of body weight. Copper is distributed widely in the body and occurs in liver, muscle and bone. Copper is transported in the bloodstream on a plasma protein called ceruloplasmin.
- In areas where there is little iodine in the diet, typically remote inland areas and semi-arid equatorial climates where no marine foods are eaten, iodine deficiency gives rise to hypothyroidism, symptoms of which are extreme fatigue, goitre, mental slowing, depression, weight gain, and low basal body temperatures.
- Manganese is an essential trace nutrient in all forms of life. The classes of enzymes that have manganese cofactors are very broad and include oxidoreductases, transferases, hydrolases, lyases, isomerases, ligases, lectins, and integrins.
- Dietary selenium prevents chemically induced carcinogenesis in many rodent studies. It has been proposed that selenium may help prevent cancer by acting as an antioxidant or by enhancing immune activity.
- Zinc is an essential trace element, necessary for plants, animals, and microorganisms. Zinc is found in nearly 100 specific enzymes (other sources say 300), serves as structural ions in transcription factors and is stored and transferred in metallothioneins. It is "typically the second most abundant transition metal in organisms" after iron and it is the only metal which appears in all enzyme classes.
Orange treePhytochemicals are chemical compounds that occur naturally in plants. The term is generally used to refer to those chemicals that may affect health. The healthiest phytochemicals found in plant foods are antioxidants, soluble dietary fiber and both hormonlike and sulfur compounds.
Phytochemicals have been used as drugs for millennia. For example, Hippocrates may have prescribed willow tree leaves to abate fever. Salicin, having anti-inflammatory and pain-relieving properties, was originally extracted from the white willow tree and later synthetically produced to become the staple over-the-counter drug called Aspirin. There is evidence from laboratory studies that phytochemicals in fruits and vegetables may reduce the risk of cancer, possibly due to dietary fibers, polyphenol antioxidants and anti-inflammatory effects.
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