Elemental Friends and Foes
Some elements are essential for your health, and some are extremely harmful. You need to obtain the right amounts of the twenty-five essential elements through a balanced diet, and to reduce your exposure to the harmful elements.
Eating a variety of foods helps to ensure that all the elements needed by your body are available. The required elements can be classified as major, lesser, or trace elements. An element is classified based on its percentage by mass in the body.
The six major elements are hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, and calcium. These six major elements account for almost 99 percent of your body mass. Nearly every compound in your body contains carbon and hydrogen, and many contain oxygen too. The compounds that control all the chemical changes that take place in cells contain nitrogen. Calcium is essential for healthy bones and teeth. Phosphorus is found in your DNA and in the molecules that transfer energy within cells.
The lesser elements are iron, potassium, zinc, sodium, sulfur, chlorine, and magnesium. For each lesser element, there is a recommended amount that needs to be taken in daily. These amounts vary from 15 milligrams for zinc to 400 milligrams for magnesium. Lesser elements help your body build tissues and maintain other cell processes. For example, nerves and muscles require magnesium to function properly.
The trace elements are vanadium, chromium, molybdenum, manganese, cobalt, copper, boron, tin, silicon, selenium, fluorine, and iodine. The quantities required are tiny, but trace elements perform important functions. For example, red blood cells would not mature without cobalt.