The topic of minerals is confusing: inorganic, chelated, elemental, ionic, colloidal, essential, trace. There are all these claims, but what minerals do we really need? Credentials in nutrition apparently seem to mean very little when it comes to minerals.
Much of what is written about minerals is speculative, market-oriented, or dead wrong. An Internet search on minerals is an overwhelming assault on one's patience, time and credulity.
Minerals come from mines, except when you're talking about nutrition, then they come from food, or at least they used to when we still had some viable topsoil.
Four elements compose 96 percent of the body's makeup: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen. The remaining four percent of the body's composition is mineral. There are several opinions about how many minerals are essential. The minerals in the first column of the following table are not in dispute. Trace usually means we don't know how much we need. (Note: "Macro" here means more than 100mg per day.)
| Essential Minerals | ||
| Macrominerals | Trace Minerals | |
| Calcium | Chromium | Tin |
| Chlorine | Zinc | Vanadium |
| Sodium | Copper | Silicon |
| Potassium | Manganese | Nickel |
| Phosphorus | Iron | Molybdenum |
| Magnesium | Fluorine | Iodine |
| Sulfur | Cobalt | Selenium |
Source: U.S. Department of Agriculture National Research Council.
The controversy primarily involves the second column -- trace minerals. Of the 14 trace minerals listed above, three or four may not have universal agreement as essential, but a majority of creditable sources admit that most of them are essential. Deficiency amounts have never been determined for most trace minerals, although several diseases have been linked with deficiencies of certain minerals. Conclusive evidence has not been found regarding the exact daily intake amounts necessary, since some of the actual requirements may be too small to measure; hence the name "trace." Other trace minerals still being studied as possibly essential or possibly contaminant include arsenic (true!), boron, cadmium, lithium, strontium, aluminum, barium and beryllium.
After this list, the marketplace takes over and science bows out. People talk about glacial milk, 88-mineral toddies, minerals from ancient lakes, a longevity of 150 years, calcium from pasteurized milk, "normal" doses of lead, eye of newt, etc., making unproven claims about this or that combination, trumpeting anecdotal cures for everything from cancer to hangnails. The purpose of these articles will be to try to sift through the debris and leave behind only the fundamental information which can be verified.
In the past few years, even mainstream medicine is beginning to acknowledge the incontrovertible importance of mineral supplementation. In an article appearing in the December 24, 1996 issue of JAMA, the top American medical journal, a controlled study of selenium use for cancer patients was presented. Selenium, as you remember, exudes powerful antioxidant activity, neutralizing free radicals, which are rampant in the presence of cancer.
In this study, 1,312 subjects were divided into groups. Some were given selenium; others the placebo. It was noted that there was a decrease of 63 percent with prostate cancer, and 46 percent with lung cancer in the selenium group. The results were so blatant that the designers actually terminated the study early so that everyone could begin to benefit from selenium.
This is just one example of the research that is currently being done on mineral supplementation. The problem is, if the results of studies economically threaten a current drug protocol, like chemotherapy, it is unlikely that an inexpensive natural supplement like selenium would be promoted by oncologists as a replacement any time soon.
There are six nutrient groups:
Water
Vitamins
Minerals
Fats
Proteins
Carbohydrates
All six groups are necessary for complete body function.
The necessity for minerals is a recent historical discovery, only about 150 years old. In the 1850s, Pasteur's contemporary Claude Bernard learned about iron. Copper came about 10 years later, and zinc about the turn of the century. With the discovery of vitamin A in 1912, minerals were downplayed for about 50 years in favor of vitamin research. By 1950, after about 14 vitamins had been discovered, attention returned to minerals when it was shown that they were necessary cofactors for vitamins to operate.
Minerals are catalysts for most biological reactions. The individual functions of minerals in the body were demonstrated:
Tim O'Shea, DC
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