Short Articles on Weight Loss

Why Dieters Should Not Lump All Vitamins and Minerals Together

Of course you need vitamins and minerals for successful dieting, but there's a trap in the way most people -- including most professionals -- think about this.

Most people, including most nutritionists, lump vitamins and minerals together and think of them as if they are just one single type of nutrient. They do this because they think of vitamins and minerals as being the nutrients that are all needed in very "small" quantities.

The problem with this is that it's not true for some of the minerals -- some minerals are needed in relatively large amounts.

There are thirteen vitamins and eight "trace" minerals.  These nutrients really are needed only in "small" quantities -- provided "small" is defined as being roughly in the microgram range per day. (In most cases, a few hundred micrograms.)

But there are also seven major minerals ("macrominerals").  The major minerals are mineral nutrients needed in much larger quantities: in most cases a thousand or more milligrams per day. (That is between ten and one-hundred times as much as the trace minerals.)

That's a big difference and it always causes big problems for dieters who don't know about it or don't know of a good way to handle it.

People often ask: "Why can't I just take a multivitamin tablet and get all I need?

That's the trap.

Multivitamin supplements can give you 100% of your needed amounts of the vitamins and trace minerals only.

They don't give you 100% of the major minerals.  (One reason is simply that the pill would probably be too big to swallow.)  That means you have to use other ways to make sure you get enough of them.

If you don't get enough of these major minerals your diet will become very difficult to stay on and will also fail to take off much weight.  (Note: The major minerals are potassium, sodium, calcium, phosphorus, magnesium, chlorine, sulfur.)

Your body must get adequate amounts of all needed nutrients from food (or supplements) because these nutrients are vital to life and health and cannot be made internally from anything else.

If your  body begins to run low on even one of the necessary nutrients it will always trigger some combination of hunger, cravings, aches, pains, low energy levels, or other symptoms that will make continuing your diet first difficult and eventually impossible to stay on.

It does this to "motivate" you to eat in order to get it more of what it must have to keep you healthy -- and also as a way to cope with its shortages until you do.

In other words, it's a sign that your diet isn't good enough.

As dieters, we therefore want to make sure we never run low on any needed nutrient.

With the vitamins and trace elements, that's easy -- because you really can just take a good multivitamin tablet daily and eliminate the problem.

But with the major minerals, you need additional methods.

The two additional methods are:  (1) use mineral supplements, and (2) use highly-concentrated natural foods that provide a lot of one or more major minerals, but not many Calories.