Sometimes I look at the back of my cereal box while I’m munching on my breakfast.
Once I’ve done the maze 10 times, I start getting bored, so I turn the box to the side to find something else to do.
I’m greeted with the number of calories, amount of sugar, and at the very bottom I see a list of a bunch of vitamins and minerals with numbers next to them.
It’s nice to know that my box of cereal has 50 percent of my daily value of iron, or a bunch of zinc, copper, and vitamin B, but that doesn’t really mean anything to me.
Or does it?
It does!
Because all of these vitamins and minerals have value and a job inside of my body.
For all the people that want to know what all of these vitamins and minerals are doing inside of the human body, you’ve come to the right place, because that’s what we will be learning today!
We will also be learning how to get these vitamins into our bodies. If you want or need a certain vitamin in your diet, you can make
recipes that include these foods!
All aboard the food education train… tickets please!
Exploring a list of vitamins
Vitamins are organic substances that come from living things like plants and animals.
Vitamins can be broken down very easily by heat, water, or age. This means you can lose quite a bit of nutrients when cooking.
All vitamins have important functions in the body.
Vitamin A - Retinoids, Carotene
Vitamin A has many benefits such as keeping your skin, tissues, and vision healthy. Despite many myths, vitamin A doesn’t actually improve vision, but will help protect you from vision loss.
You can get vitamin A from foods such as liver, eggs, fish, milk, carrots, sweet potatoes, and spinach.
Vitamin B1 - Thiamine
Thiamine is needed to help convert food to energy. It’s also useful for keeping your skin, hair, muscles, nervous system, and brain healthy.
You can get thiamine from foods such as pork, brown rice, soy milk, watermelon, or ham.
Vitamin B2 - Riboflavin
Like thiamine, riboflavin helps convert your food to energy, as well as helping with skin, hair, muscles, blood, and the brain.
You can get riboflavin from foods like milk, eggs, yogurt, cheese, meats, green leafy vegetables, and whole grains. You have a lot of choices when it comes to riboflavin.
Vitamin B3 - Niacin
So niacin is a lot like its brothers thiamine and riboflavin, in which it helps with converting food to energy. It also keeps blood cells, skin, the brain, and nervous system healthy.
You get niacin from foods like meat, chicken, fish, whole grains, potatoes, mushrooms, and, my personal favorite, peanut butter!
Vitamin B5 - Pantothenic Acid
Again, this vitamin helps convert food to energy. Who knew we would need this many vitamins to help us make energy from food? Pantothenic acid also helps the process of making fats, neurotransmitters, and hemoglobin.
You can get vitamin B5 from eggs, chicken, whole grains, mushrooms, avocados, broccoli, and tomatoes.
Vitamin B6 - Pyridoxine
Pyridoxine helps lower the risk of heart disease. It also aids in making red blood cells, sleep, appetite, and mood regulation through being a factor in serotonin production.
You can get pyridoxine from foods such as meat, chicken, fish, soy, bananas, watermelons, and potatoes.
Vitamin B9 - Folic Acid
Folic acid is an important vitamin for creating new cells. Folic acid can help prevent birth defects in children when taken during early pregnancy.
Folic acid is available in grains, cereal, spinach, turnips, broccoli, orange juice, and tomato juice.
Vitamin B12 - Cobalamin
Cobalamin does a couple of things in our bodies. It helps make our DNA! It aids in making red blood cells and protects our nerve cells. Cobalamin assists in breaking down amino acids and helps create new cells. A lack of this vitamin can cause memory loss, so it’s very important to have!
You can get plenty of cobalamin from animal products like meat, chicken, eggs, fish, milk, and cheese. Vegans, worry not, you can get this from some cereals and certain soy products. Vitamin B12 is also very abundant in energy drinks because a lack of it can make you feel tired, although there’s no evidence that Vitamin B12 will “pump you up” right away.
Vitamin C - Ascorbic Acid
You’ve probably heard that taking Vitamin C while you feel sick will help you get better faster. In the words of Dwight K. Schrute - FALSE! It will not make you feel better during sickness.
Vitamin C does help your immune system, though, just not the way people think. It may strengthen your immune system and help it prevent (again, prevent) illnesses, but will not cure any. However, it can reduce the time you have the common cold by about 8%.
Vitamin C will prevent you from getting scurvy. Yeah, the same scurvy that pirates used to get all the time because they didn’t get enough vitamin C.
Vitamin C does some other cool things like make serotonin and norepinephrine, supports blood vessels, and can protect against cataracts.
You can get Vitamin C from fruits, mostly citrus, potatoes, bell peppers, spinach, broccoli, tomatoes, and brussel sprouts.
Vitamin D - Calciferol
Vitamin D helps your body keep your calcium and phosphorus levels normal, which helps keep teeth and bones strong and healthy.
Many people, especially people who live in winter climates, are vitamin D deficient.
While vitamin D is mainly going to be created by your body through sunlight, you can still get it from milk, some cereals, and some fish like salmon.
Vitamin E - Alpha-Tocopherol
Vitamin E protects your cells by destroying unstable molecules that want to damage them. It may also play a role in preventing Alzheimer's disease.
Contrary to popular belief, Vitamin E doesn’t prevent wrinkles, but it does help keep your skin and hair cells healthy and happy.
You can get vitamin E from some nuts, green leafy vegetables, some salad dressings, and some vegetable oils.
Vitamin K - Phylloquinone, Menadione
Vitamin K mostly comes from the bacteria in your intestines, and is important to help your blood clot. Your blood needs to clot when it’s pouring out of you so that you don’t lose any more.
Foods that you can get Vitamin K are liver, eggs, spinach, broccoli, kale, and cabbage.
Biotin
Biotin helps the body create glucose, which is then converted into energy to help you do stuff like go up the stairs or scroll through your phone. Biotin helps keep your bones and hair healthy.
You get biotin from foods like meat, chicken, fish, cheese, milk, and some cereals.
Choline
Choline’s main benefit is making the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, which is important to help your brain function right. And if there is one thing I know about humans, it’s that we like our brains to work properly.
But, that’s not the only benefit of choline. It also helps with metabolizing and transporting fats around the body.
Lots of foods contain choline, but you’ll mainly get it from eggs, liver, salmon, peanuts, and milk.
Exploring a list of minerals
Minerals, unlike vitamins, are inorganic, which means they come from the earth. We get them through the plants and animals we eat or the water we drink.
Minerals aren’t easily broken down in heat, which means they are retained in cooking.
Only a few of the known minerals are actually needed by your body.
Calcium
Calcium is mainly known for keeping our bones and teeth strong, but it’s so much more!
Calcium plays a role in muscles, too, as it helps them contract and relax when needed. It also helps with blood clotting, which we know is a good thing, and contributes to maintaining a healthy blood pressure.
Calcium helps with hormone secretion, enzyme activation, and helps nerve impulses jump from one neuron to the next.
Most people know the best way to get calcium is through dairy products like milk, yogurt, and cheese, but you can get it from salmon, broccoli, kale, and tofu.
Chloride
Chloride plays a role in digestion because it is a part of your stomach acid. It helps maintain a healthy balance of fluids in the body.
Chloride comes from salt, hence the scientific name for salt being sodium chloride. Salt is in most processed foods, so it’s not too hard to find.
Chromium
Chromium is needed so that the body can get energy from glucose. Not only that, but it regulates normal blood glucose levels.
Chromium is in foods like meat, chicken, fish, eggs, cheese, potatoes, nuts, and some cereals.
Copper
Copper plays a role in metabolizing iron, another mineral our body needs. It also helps make red blood cells and keeps our immune system healthy. More than half of the copper you get from food is absorbed by the body.
You can get copper from foods like liver, nuts, beans, whole grains, prunes, cocoa, and black pepper.
Fluoride
Fluoride is important for keeping bones strong, and helps prevent dental cavities and delays them from getting worse. Fluoride can be harmful to children in larger amounts.
Fluoride can be found in water, toothpaste, fish, and certain tea.
Iodine
Iodine is a very important part of the thyroid. It produces hormones that play various parts in your body’s function. Thyroid hormones set body temperature and help nerve, reproduction, growth, and muscles function correctly.
It’s so important that in some countries they put it in drinking water to prevent iodine deficiencies.
Iodine comes from foods like seafood, iodized salt, and certain processed foods.
Iron
Iron helps the hemoglobin in the red blood cells carry oxygen throughout your body. It’s also used in the body for chemical reactions. Iron aids in creating amino acids, collagen, neurotransmitters, and certain hormones.
Studies show that many women are iron deficient.
You can get iron from red meat, eggs, poultry, fruits, green vegetables, and certain grains.
Magnesium
Magnesium is needed for many different chemical reactions in the body. It aids calcium in muscle contraction, blood clotting, and regulation of blood pressure, and is very important in building teeth and bones.
Your body will tap into the reserves of magnesium in your bones if there is a deficiency in the body.
Magnesium comes from spinach, broccoli, cashews, sunflower seeds, whole-wheat bread, and milk.
Manganese
Manganese helps form bones and helps metabolize amino acids, cholesterol, and carbohydrates. Too much of it can contribute to liver damage.
It comes from fish, nuts, legumes, whole grains, and some teas.
Molybdenum
This mineral is an important part of certain enzymes. One of the main enzymes is responsible for helping get rid of a severe form of neurological damage in infants that can lead to early death.
Molybdenum comes from foods like legumes, nuts, some grains, and milk.
Phosphorus
Phosphorus does quite a few things in the body, considering it’s one of the five elements that makes up your DNA and RNA, along with carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and hydrogen. On top of that, it helps protect bones, turns food into energy, and plays a role in helping carry nutrients in and out of cells.
Sometimes certain drugs can bind with phosphorus and cause a deficiency in the body. This can lead to weakness, pain, and even bone loss.
Since this mineral is such an important part of the human body, it’s no surprise that it can be found in many different foods. Some of them are milk, other dairy products, meat, fish, eggs, poultry, liver, green peas, broccoli, potatoes, and almonds.
Potassium
Potassium is another important mineral that can be found in the human body. This mineral helps the body balance fluids, keep a steady heartbeat, and send nerve impulses to the brain. Potassium is needed for using your muscles, and keeping a low blood pressure.
You can get potassium in meat, milk, fruits like bananas, oranges, cantaloupe, honeydew, and grapefruit, and vegetables like cooked broccoli and spinach.
Selenium
Selenium helps destroy unstable molecules that can damage cells, and contributes to regulating the thyroid hormone.
You can find this mineral in liver, seafood, walnuts, and some grain products.
Sodium
Many people are probably more familiar with sodium than most other minerals on this list, and that’s because it’s extremely important for the human body. You literally can’t live without it.
It helps balance fluids in the body, send nerve impulses to the brain, regulates blood pressure, and is needed to contract muscles.
Although studies show that most Americans consume about 4,000-6000mg of sodium per day, you should really aim for about 2,300mg of sodium per day.
Sulfur
Sulfur doesn’t sound like anything you’d want in your body, but nature made humans need this mineral. It helps strengthen the structures of certain proteins, leading to healthy hair, nails, and skin.
Sulfur is found mostly in protein rich foods like meat, seafood, poultry, and nuts.
Zinc
Zinc is important for the human body to form certain enzymes, proteins, and new cells. It also plays an important role in releasing stored Vitamin A from your liver. Zinc is important for a healthy immune system, taste, smell, and even healing wounds.
A note for vegetarians. Studies show that you absorb less zinc, and it’s recommended to get twice the recommended requirement of zinc from plants.
You can get Zinc from certain cereals, red meats, poultry, oysters, beans, and nuts.
Summary
As you can probably tell by now, the human body needs many, many, many different vitamins and minerals to keep it healthily chugging along.
Even missing just one or two on this list can cause problems in your daily life.
Most people have no trouble getting what they need from the foods that they eat, but once in a while we find ourselves deficient in one of these vitamins or minerals, but now you know what types of foods to eat to get enough of the vitamin or mineral.
And as always, share this with someone that you think could benefit from this!
Disclaimer: Most of this information came from Harvard’s studies.
