Nutrients

What's the difference between Vitamins and minerals?

Originally Published: November 08, 1996

          

 

Dear Alice,

What is the difference between vitamins and minerals? It seems like most Americans are taking a lot of vitamins more than they need to. Is it good to take a lot of vitamins?

 

Alice is glad you asked about this. Before getting to your questions, she wants to give you a brief overview of nutrition and diet. Proper and adequate nutrition is required to sustain life, provide energy, and help with tissue growth and repair. A healthy and nutritious diet involves six classes of nutrients: 1) carbohydrate; 2) fat; 3) protein; 4) vitamins; 5) minerals; and, 6) water. Carbohydrate, fat, and protein are the macronutrients [because our bodies require them in large quantities (grams/day)], which are also known as the energy-yielding nutrients, because they are broken down to provide the body with usable energy. Vitamins and minerals are the micronutrients [because our bodies need them in smaller amounts (milligrams or micrograms/day)], which do not yield energy, but rather help our bodies carry out necessary and important physiological processes. About 40 of these nutrients are essential for life because our bodies cannot synthesize enough to meet physiological needs (so our diet provides us with the bulk of these essential nutrients).

Vitamins are either water-soluble (water is required for absorption and are excreted in urine) or fat-soluble (requires fat for absorption and are stored in fat tissue). There are 9 different water-soluble vitamins: vitamin C and the eight B vitamins (thiamin, riboflavin, niacin, vitamins B6 and B12, folate, biotin, and pantothenic acid); and, 4 different fat-soluble vitamins: vitamins A, D, E, and K. Each of these vitamins have unique roles and functions in our bodies. For example, vitamin A promotes eyesight and helps us see in the dark, and vitamin K helps blood to clot.

Minerals are categorized as major or macro- (calcium, phosphorus, potassium, sodium, chloride, magnesium, and sulfur), and trace or micro- (iron, iodine, zinc, chromium, selenium, fluoride, molybdenum, copper, and manganese) minerals, the former needed in quantities of 100mg/day or more, and the latter required in much smaller, or "trace," amounts. These 16 essential minerals also play vital roles in the body, such as calcium in osteoporosis prevention and iron in (iron-deficiency) anemia prevention; and, they can be found in the body dissolved in body fluids as ions and/or are part of important compounds, such as calcium and phosphorus in hydroxyapatite found in bones and teeth. Other minerals, such as lead, are contaminant minerals and not nutrients because they can cause harm by disrupting normal bodily functions and processes, as in the case of lead poisoning.

Getting to your main question, vitamins and minerals are different. Vitamins ("vita" = life and "amine" = containing nitrogen) are organic (containing carbon, which is an element found in all living things) compounds (containing atoms of one or more different elements). Minerals are pure inorganic elements (containing atoms of the same element), meaning they are much simpler in chemical form than vitamins. All vitamins are essential or required by our bodies, whereas only some minerals are essential nutrients. Vitamins are vulnerable to heat, light, and chemical agents, so cooking, food preparation, processing, and storage must be appropriate to preserve vitamins in food. Minerals, on the other hand, are more stable to food preparation, but mineral loss can occur when they are bound to other substances in foods (such as oxalates found in spinach and tea, and phytates found in legumes and grains), making them unavailable for the body to utilize.

Alice suggests you read Vitamins for health? in her Fitness and Nutrition archives for answers to your other questions. Americans probably are unnecessarily consuming too much or many dietary supplements, which can also be very costly to keep up -- Alice has even heard people say that Americans have the most expensive urine in the world! Remember that we should not rely on dietary supplements, unless necessary (like in times of deficiency), to satisfy our body's nutritional requirements -- obtaining these nutrients from a varied and diverse diet with plenty of fresh fruits and vegetables is ideal (and not particularly difficult or impossible to do); and, phytochemicals and some, as of yet, unidentified nutrients which could have cancer-preventative benefits, among other things, are found only in foods.

Alice

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