Vitamins and minerals

Vitamins and minerals are involved in everything that takes place in the body, from building strong bones to helping regulate the uptake of oxygen in your blood. Although they don’t directly supply your body with energy, they are involved in many processes that produce energy as an end result.

In a healthy adult, vitamins are only needed in small amounts and for that reason are often referred to as ‘micronutrients’.

Vitamins

B-group vitamins and vitamin C are water-soluble. That means they cannot be stored in the body so you must have a regular supply on a day-to-day basis.

They can be quite easily destroyed during cooking and prolonged storage, so whenever you can, eat vegetables that are as fresh as possible, leave any edible skins on (vitamins are at their highest concentration just beneath the skin), steam or cook them in a small amount of water for a couple of minutes only and serve them as soon as possible after cooking.

Fat soluble vitamins A, D, E and K can be stored for some time by the body, so getting a fresh supply every day is not so essential.

Minerals are present in almost all foods and drinks, including water. They form an essential are part of many of the body’s cells. Not just in hard structures like bone, teeth and nails, but in other ‘soft’ organs and tissues too.

They play many different roles, many of them crucial to life itself, including the regulation of fluid and muscle contraction.

Because of the many different jobs they do around the body, some minerals - calcium and potassium for instance - are needed in greater amounts than others, such as iron, selenium and zinc.