Minerals in vegetarian nutrition

Minerals are essential elements for our organism.

They must be considered for the conformation of a healthy nutritional plan. The interaction of these elements with most of the processes and functions of the human body, condition a strong need to constantly resort to the sources to obtain them. We must not neglect the nutritional balance if we do not want to suffer the consequences derived from the deficit of minerals.

With this in mind, we will proceed to explain the fundamental aspects that characterize them, their most important functions, benefits attributed to their consumption, among other issues. This subject will be of great importance to you if you wish to elaborate a quality diet, which brings benefits to your health.

Importance of minerals: Among the most essential minerals for our body are calcium, iron, phosphorus and magnesium. These fulfill extremely important cellular functions for our organs. That is why we must be careful not to exclude them from our diet. When defining the main functions that they perform in our organism, it is valid to clarify that these are determined depending on the mineral to which we make reference, however, we will outline in a general way some of them in order to demonstrate the necessity of these elements for our organism.

Some minerals such as potassium are dissolved in the liquids present in our body, they interact directly as natural regulators of osmotic pressure.

Some minerals such as calcium are essential components of the bone and teeth structures, the deficit of these can cause serious diseases in the bone structures of the body, being very detrimental to human health and the processes of development and growth of the body.

Sodium is of vital importance for the development and reconstruction of muscle tissues, and it is also an active component in the nervous system, participating in the structures and interconnections of the nervous functions in our body.

Zinc is active in the production of antioxidants. It has a significant influence on our immune system and promotes growth and development.

Iron is one of the most important elements in our body, it works as a constituent of hemoglobin, so the absence of it can cause serious health consequences.

These are just some examples of the essential minerals needed by the human body, as you can see, each one interacts in the main functions of this, so we must not neglect that these are included in its entirety, because the absence of any of them can seriously affect our health.

How to obtain minerals?

As in the case of vitamins, these can be obtained naturally by eating food or artificially through supplements.

In order to combine the increase of proteins with the satisfaction of the minerals demanded by our organism, we can turn towards the intake of foods of animal origin such as bone marrows which are rich in calcium and other minerals, and the intake of animal organs.

However, in the case of a practitioner of the vegetarian diet, the aforementioned sources would not be available to him, so we must turn to other alternatives. This can be linked to a vegetarian diet by consuming fresh vegetables, which are rich in various minerals such as potassium, calcium, sodium and magnesium.

To obtain iron, we can turn to products rich in vitamin C, since they increase the levels of iron absorption. With calcium we should not have any problem if we practice vegetarianism, since it can be incorporated into our diet through the consumption of dairy products. While zinc can be found both in soybeans and in various grains.