Minerals - Important For Your Body

Minerals are elements your body requires. An element is a basic substance that cannot be broken down into anything simpler. Iron and calcium are two examples of elements.

The word mineral is also used when describing rocks. Rocks are made of minerals, and rock minerals are made of elements joined together. Calcite is a rock mineral made of the elements calcium, carbon, and oxygen.

The minerals your body requires are elements joined together inside rock. Your body does not use the rock. Your body uses elements such as calcium, iron, and magnesium after those elements are released from the rock.

Your body cannot make a mineral, so every mineral your body requires has to arrive from outside your body.

Soil is mostly rock that has been broken down. Rock is broken down into smaller and smaller pieces by water, wind, heat, and cold. This process is called weathering. Water dissolves the elements out of those pieces, and plant roots pull those dissolved elements out of the soil.

When you eat a plant, you receive the minerals that plant pulled up from the soil. When you eat an animal, you receive the minerals that animal received from the plants the animal ate.

Every mineral in your body came out of the ground.

Minerals dissolve in your body

Your body is mostly water, and minerals are dissolved in the water throughout your body. Water pulls a mineral apart into individual atoms, the same way water pulls salt apart. Salt water tastes salty because the salt is still there.

Each of those atoms carries a small electrical charge. An atom missing an electron carries a positive charge. An atom with an extra electron carries a negative charge.

Your body uses those charged atoms to do work.

What minerals do

Minerals do work in your body that no other nutrient can do.

Minerals build structure

Your bones are built on a soft mesh made of protein. The minerals calcium and phosphorus attach to that mesh and make the bone hard. Without the minerals, your bones would bend. Together, the minerals and protein make your bones hard and flexible at the same time.

Your teeth are built from the same materials bones are built from, in different proportions. Bone holds a large amount of protein mesh with minerals attached. The outer layer of a tooth is almost entirely mineral with very little protein.

That outer layer is called enamel. Enamel is the hardest material your body makes.

Bone is broken down and rebuilt by your body throughout your life. Enamel is not. Enamel is made once, and the cells that build enamel finish their work and are gone before your tooth comes in. So enamel can never be rebuilt.

Minerals carry electrical signals

Nerves carry every message in your body, including the messages that become your thoughts and your feelings. Every thought you have and everything you feel is minerals moving across the boundaries of cells.

Here is how that works.

A nerve cell is one long cell. A single nerve cell can run from your big toe to the base of your spine. Sodium sits in the fluid outside that cell, all along its length, and potassium sits inside the cell. There is more sodium outside the cell than inside, and more potassium inside the cell than outside.

When you step on a sharp rock, the pressure on your toe opens small gates in the boundary of the nerve cell, and sodium rushes in.

That sodium rush causes the next gates along the cell to open, and sodium rushes in there. Potassium moves out of the cell as the sodium moves in. The opening of the gates and the rushing of the sodium continues along the whole length of the cell in a chain reaction. The signal travels from your toe to your spine in less than a hundredth of a second.

When the signal reaches the end of the nerve cell, calcium rushes into the cell. The calcium causes the cell to release a chemical into the small gap between the endpoints of two cells. The chemical crosses the gap, and the chain reaction begins in the next cell.

Your body then pushes the sodium back outside and pulls the potassium back inside, so the first cell is ready to send another signal.

Minerals move your muscles

Releasing and removing calcium in your muscle cells is how your body turns a muscle on and off. Calcium is stored inside your muscle cells in a separate compartment. When calcium is released from that compartment into the cell, your muscle contracts. When calcium is pulled back into the compartment, your muscle relaxes.

Magnesium powers the pump that returns the calcium back into storage. Without enough magnesium, the calcium returns slowly and muscles stay contracted longer. This is why low magnesium can cause cramps.

Your heart is a muscle. Every heartbeat is calcium released and calcium pulled back. Your heart cannot take a break from this the way your other muscles can.

Minerals carry oxygen

Hemoglobin is the protein in red blood cells that carries oxygen from your lungs to the rest of your body. Iron sits at the center of hemoglobin holding the oxygen. Without iron, hemoglobin cannot carry oxygen.

When there is not enough iron in your body, your body builds fewer red blood cells and delivers less oxygen. Feeling tired can be a first sign that your body requires more iron. 

Your body holds only a small amount of iron, and your body reuses that iron. When a red blood cell wears out, the iron from that cell is recovered and used to build a new one.

Iron from animal food is absorbed more easily than iron from plants. Eating a food with vitamin C along with plant iron increases how much of that plant iron your body absorbs.

Minerals switch enzymes on

Your body runs on enzymes. An enzyme is a substance that causes a change to happen. Digesting food, building new cells, and repairing damage all happen because enzymes make them happen.

Many enzymes cannot work until a mineral is attached to the enzyme. Magnesium does this for hundreds of different enzymes. Zinc does this for hundreds more.

The enzyme is built by your body. The mineral that switches the enzyme on comes from the food you eat.

Minerals work together

Calcium, magnesium, sodium, and potassium all work together to move signals through your body and to move fluid in and out of your cells. 

Eating a range of real food is how your body receives a wider variety of the minerals your body requires. Minerals are in leaves, roots, seeds, nuts, beans, fish, eggs, meat, and water.

Soil that is rich with minerals grows plants that have minerals. This is one reason why where your food comes from matters.

If you are increasing the nutrient dense food you eat, be aware minerals are in real food.

Stacy 🌺

Information about how the body works in this post comes from my learning and research.

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I share my experiences and my perspective. Eating and healing look different for everyone. If you are struggling with food or your relationship with your body, please find support. You don’t have to do this alone.