How essential are trace elements in our diet?

Inorganic, organic, chelated, elemental, ionic, colloidal, essential, trace - all these claims! What do we really need? Credentials in nutrition apparently mean very little when it comes to minerals. Much of what is written about minerals is speculative, market-oriented, or simply dead wrong.

A net search on minerals is an overwhelming assault on one's patience, time and credulity. How could all this stuff be right? Minerals come from mines right? Except when you're talking about nutrition. Then they come from food. At least they used to. When we still had some mineralised viable topsoil to grow market vegetables in that is! Four elements compose 96% of the body’s makeup: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. The remaining 4% of the body’s composition is mineral. There are several opinions about how many minerals are essential. The following table shows the ones that are not in dispute, in the first column. Macro means more than 100mg per day. Trace usually means we don’t know how much we need and it is a very small quantity.

Essential Minerals

Macrominerals

Calcium
Chlorine
Sodium
Potassium
Phosphorus
Magnesium
Sulphur

Trace elements or minerals

Chromium
Tin
Zinc
Vanadium
Copper
Silicon
Manganese
Nickel
Iron
Molybdenum
Fluorine
Iodine
Cobalt
Selenium

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 the 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 ones. 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.”

In the past few years, even mainstream medicine is beginning to acknowledge the incontrovertible importance of mineral supplementation. In an article appearing in JAMA, the top American medical journal, 24 Dec 1996, a controlled study of selenium use for cancer patients was written up. Selenium has been proven to be a powerful stimulator in antioxidant activity, by helping to neutralize free radicals, which are rampant in the presence of cancer. In this study, 1312 subjects were divided into groups. Some were given selenium; others the placebo.

Soon it was noticed that there was a decrease of 63% with prostate cancer, and 46% 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 in the foreseeable future.

There are six nutrient groups:

Water
Vitamins
Minerals
Fats
Protein
Carbohydrate

All 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 favour of vitamin research. By 1950, after about 14 vitamins had been discovered, attention returned once more to minerals when it was shown that they were necessary co-factors in order for vitamins read more