Human body absorbs nutrients from food as it travels through the digestive system. Nutrients are essential for cell growth, maintenance and repair. Nutrients provide energy to enable your body to function efficiently. Nutrients, along with fiber and water, are essential to your good health.
Balanced intake of nutrients is essential to maintenance of good health due to the fact that nutrients work the most effective in combination.
The nutrients can be grouped into the macronutrients, carbohydrates, proteins, and fats ¡V and the micronutrients, vitamins, minerals, omega fatty acids, and phytonutrients.
What Do Micronutrients Do?
Vitamins and minerals themselves do not provide energy but regulate the absorption of nutrients and release of energy from food.
Vitamins are organic substances that work together with enzymes, which are proteins that act as catalysts to speed up biological reactions that take place in your body; hence, they are often referred to as co-enzymes. Vitamins often have other secondary functions such as antioxidative ability.
Your body produces a certain amount of vitamins, such as vitamins D and K, but most other vitamins come from your diet or supplementation.
Minerals are inorganic substances that originate from rocks and ores and enter the food chain through the soil.
We get minerals either by eating plants grown on mineral-rich soil or by eating animals that have fed on these plants.
Calcium, magnesium and phosphorus are the major constituents of bone.
Sodium and potassium maintain your body's ion balance.
Other trace minerals (selenium, chromium, iron, and manganese etc.) are needed for various physiological reactions taking place in the body.
Phytonutrients, also known as phytochemicals, are the compounds that act as a natural defense system in plants, and that often have certain beneficial effects on human health. They can function as co-enzyme factors, antioxidants, or hormone-mimics etc.
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