Micro-nutrients:
- Three Easy To Understand Types, Functions — What they do, or help your body do,
- Benefits They Provide
- and More Good News About Staying Young and Healthy Longer!
This IS worth reading ….
because your future better health and reduced health care expense depends upon what you know about keeping yourself healthy.
Micronutrients are one of the major groups of nutrients your body needs. They include vitamins and minerals.
I don’t expect you to memorize this, just get a feeling for it. In later articles you’ll remember what I said and there will be references back to this basic information to help you.
Vitamins are necessary for energy production, immune function, blood clotting, maintenance of every sort of tissue from eyes and teeth to nerves hiding in your feet. A great many activities cannot occur without vitamins. They make the catalysts for various chemical reactions necessary for life! Many diseases can be prevented with sufficient vitamin and mineral intake. It’s illegal for me to tell you what diseases, but believe me when I say I’m being truthful. Much of the developed world’s people look and are tired, sexless, dull of mind, feeling sickly all the time, lacking good eyesight, good hearing and good sleep because of their lack of vitamins.
Minerals play an important role in growth, bone health, fluid balance and hundreds of other processes. After a long study about minerals I began to wonder if they are MORE important than vitamins!
In this article and those that follow I will provide a detailed overview of micro-nutrients, their functions and implications of excess consumption or deficiency.
It IS worth your reading because your future better health and reduced health care expense depends upon what you know about keeping yourself healthy. You don’t have to memorize any of this, just see it once so you know there are real benefits to taking Micro Nutrient Supplements and of course keep this series of 10-lessons so you can refer to it any time.
These pages will also remain on my website so you can find them and reread them there any time, and even download them as a PDF to keep on your computer.
I hope it’s obvious to you, I’m doing everything I can to help educate you so you’ll have a Much Better Quality Of Life, feel energetic, happy, healthy, and perhaps have improvements in eye sight, hearing, and even some of the pleasures most of us knew in our youth but lost along the rocky road of life.
Types and Functions of Micronutrients
Vitamins and minerals can be divided into four categories: water-soluble vitamins, fat-soluble vitamins, macro-minerals and trace minerals.
Regardless of type, vitamins and minerals are absorbed in similar ways in your body and interact in many processes.
This is a good place to say — by law I cannot promise a cure for anything. However, you can infer from what you’re reading that a deficiency of a vitamin or mineral can cause tissues and related organs to function at less than optimal capability which may lead to premature aging, discomfort and illness. For an example, I cannot promise your eyesight will improve if you take more vitamin A, but it might! You’ll have to try it and find out what happens. I cannot promise your stomach troubles will clear up using digestive enzyme tablets but such problems may clear away, and often have for others. You’ll have to test for yourself and see what happens.
Water-Soluble Vitamins
Most vitamins dissolve in water and are therefore known as water-soluble. They’re not easily stored in your body and get flushed out with urine when consumed in excess.
While each water-soluble vitamin has a unique role, their functions are related.
For example, most B vitamins act as coenzymes that help trigger important chemical reactions. A lot of these reactions are necessary for energy production.
These are the water-soluble vitamins — with some of their functions:
- Vitamin B1 (thiamine): Helps convert nutrients into energy (7).
- Vitamin B2 (riboflavin): Necessary for energy production, cell function and fat metabolism (8).
- Vitamin B3 (niacin): Drives the production of energy from food (9, 10).
- Vitamin B5 (pantothenic acid): Necessary for fatty acid synthesis (11).
- Vitamin B6 (pyridoxine): Helps your body release sugar from stored carbohydrates for energy and create red blood cells (12).
- Vitamin B7 (biotin): Plays a role in the metabolism of fatty acids, amino acids and glucose (13).
- Vitamin B9 (folate): Important for proper cell division (14).
- Vitamin B12 (cobalamin): Necessary for red blood cell formation and proper nervous system and brain function (15).
- Vitamin C (ascorbic acid): Required for the creation of neurotransmitters and collagen, the main protein in your skin (16).
Very briefly then, these vitamins keep your energy up, your weight down, and help maintain strong comfortable joints, reduce inflammation and pain, perhaps prevent macular degeneration and other characteristics of aging eyes, extend your life span, help you maintain your strong sexual interest and abilities.
A person who has no sexual interest obviously has other health issues. I hope you’re beginning to realize, our health-care advertising has been separating everything. Leg pain is over there, headache pain needs a medicine over here and somehow they want you to believe none of it is related. IN FACT ALL OF IT IS RELATED!!! Everything works together! When I teach massage for back care I demonstrate over and over again, everything relates to everything else!
It’s the same with our nutrition. You can’t build a strong youthful body with poor nutrition and you cannot maintain a healthy, flexible, comfortable older body while ignoring good nutrition. A lack of vitamins B and C are more likely the cause of your friends admitting they are tired and achy than any other source!
As you can see, water-soluble vitamins play an important role in producing energy but also have several other functions.
Since these vitamins are not stored in your body, it’s important to get enough of them from food.
Sources and Recommended Dietary Allowances (RDAs) or Adequate Intakes (AIs) of water-soluble vitamins are (7) discussed in further reading. [These RDA’s are just enough to keep you alive and are NOT sufficient for optimal health.]
| Nutrient | Sources | RDA or AI (adults > 19 years) |
| Vitamin B1 (thiamine) | Whole grains, meat, fish | 1.1–1.2 mg |
| Vitamin B2 (riboflavin) | Organ meats, eggs, milk | 1.1–1.3 mg |
| Vitamin B3 (niacin) | Meat, salmon, leafy greens, beans | 14–16 mg |
| Vitamin B5 (pantothenic acid) | Organ meats, mushrooms, tuna, avocado | 5 mg |
| Vitamin B6 (pyridoxine) | Fish, milk, carrots, potatoes | 1.3 mg |
| Vitamin B7 (biotin) | Eggs, almonds, spinach, sweet potatoes | 30 mcg |
| Vitamin B9 (folate) | Beef, liver, black-eyed peas, spinach, asparagus | 400 mg |
| Vitamin B12 (cobalamin) | Clams, fish, meat | 2.4 mcg |
| Vitamin C (ascorbic acid) | Citrus fruits, bell peppers, Brussels sprouts | 75–90 mg |
All of these are water soluble. You need to intake them from food or supplements daily! You’ll need a WIDE variety of fresh vegetables (brightly colored vegetables) daily to balance these one against the other and make them useful. Obviously, many people don’t have that benefit, and that’s why they’re often sick!
Nutritional Supplementation is the answer. To the quip, “You should get all your vitamins from food;” My answer is, “Yes you SHOULD, but you don’t. Unless you raise your own vegetables in your own volcanic soil garden, you won’t ever get all that you need for optimum health.
Imagine we are together walking through a forest and there are live animals in the trees, flying around, deer, moose, foxes, we see and hear all sorts of creatures. We leave and six months later we return.
We have returned after something terrible happened, and the trees are standing but all the animal life is gone. That is what has happened to our farm soil. We “bombed” it with all sorts of chemistry. The bacteria and worms, and other insects in it are gone. It cannot produce what it did when it was “wild.”
America’s factory farms long ago pulled all the good nutrients out of the soil, then covered everything with pesticides. Now the once alive, black, moving soil is brown, dry, dead dust! Every older farmer knows this.
Your body is a solute body. It needs water and water soluble vitamins. Without them, you always feel painful, tired, weak, sickly, cold, sometimes shaky, scared, and perhaps having panic attacks, heart palpitations, painful joints, eye trouble, other organ dysfunctions….
Feeding your body more pharmaceutical products is like adding to water to clean it up. That’s the wrong approach entirely! A study of the early days of medicine indicates from the beginning they intended to cover symptoms, not find the cause of a disease and cure it! It’s little different now. In most cases, if your body gets healthy, it did so despite the medicines thrown into it.
In Lesson 4 I’ll discuss Fat Soluble Vitamins and bit more. We’re almost done with the basic foundation of knowledge about how YOU can be healthier and younger longer.
As you read other articles I can refer to vitamin charts and you’ll get a better understand in short articles how my recommendation can help you perhaps ameliorate one or several illnesses.
ameliorate … means to (improve/reduce/ cause to get better) and perhaps lead to what you might call a cure. Synonyms for ameliorate
verb make, become better
Please continue learning. You won’t find another nutrition teacher helping you this way and all of my effort is intended to help you be healthier (and reduce your health-care expenses) for life!
AIM2025 