Like vitamins, minerals are micronutrients, which our bodies require, in small but steady supplies. As micronutrients, the importance of minerals in our diet is far greater than the required amount indicates. Our material bodies are made up of more than 100 elements, which have been identified. Of these, four elements make up 96% of our bodies: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen,
Vitamins are essential for the body to be able to put the nutrients in food to use.
Because vitamins are not produced by the body, we have to get them through the food that we also eat! Our bodies only need a certain amount of vitamins, which can be provided by eating reasonable amounts of foods that contain those vitamins. This certainly makes more sense to me than eating all kinds of refined, vitamin-depleted foods and then guzzling vitamin supplement pills to make up for it. An easily burnable form of energy comes to us in the form of sugar or starch.
Carbohydrates have a very bad public image in that they are generally thought of as fattening. This is because most of the carbohydrate consumed in this country has been processed or refined, leaving an empty calorie. In their whole, natural, unadulterated state, all carbohydrates come packaged with vitamins and minerals, which make the energy in the carbohydrate digestible by the body. Through the process of photosynthesis, plants convert the energy of the sun, carbon dioxide from the air, and minerals and water from the earth into atomic bonds that are solid enough for teeth to sink into. We can consume these forms of energy directly, by eating plant foods, or indirectly, by eating animals that have eaten these plant foods.
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