Minerals, Vitamins, and the Lost Art of Being Well

Nutrition, like religion, is crowded with prophets and pamphlets. Everyone is selling salvation in capsule form, usually at a markup. Yet beneath the clatter of wellness jargon lies an awkward truth: we are underfed in an age of plenty.

Overfed and undernourished is the better-known phrase.

And the missing pieces are not protein shakes or moral fibre, but minerals and vitamins: small, dull things that quietly run the show.

Minerals, first. They are the body’s hired electricians: inorganic, unglamorous, and absolutely essential. You cannot make them. You must eat them. And lately, you don’t.

Once, the earth was thick with them. Dinosaurs, those famously steroid-free behemoths, grew to cathedral proportions on nothing but plants because the soil was rich, wild, and mineral-dense.

Today, our vegetables are polite, fast-growing, and hollow. They contain a fraction of what their ancestors offered. You can blame wind, rain, fertilisers, pesticides, monoculture farming, and the modern obsession with speed over substance.

Ninety-six percent of the human body is made of the usual suspects: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen. The remaining four percent is minerals. That four percent does everything important.

Enzymes, hormones, nerve impulses, energy production: all need minerals to function. Without them, vitamins are decorative. As one doctor expressed it with refreshing bluntness: vitamins without minerals are useless. The spark plug without the engine.

Plants once converted soil minerals into exquisitely absorbable forms. Now the soil is stripped, the plants are deficient, and we inherit the shortage. The US government noticed this in the 1930s and warned, accurately, that mineral depletion would lead to epidemics of degenerative disease within half a century.

They were not wrong. They were merely ignored.

Vitamins fare little better. Thirteen are required; only four are made in-house, and one of those needs sunlight, which we avoid like vampires. The water-soluble vitamins C and B wash straight through us unless constantly replenished. The fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E, K require fat, bile, and good digestion, none of which modern diets reliably provide.

Vitamin C, that old warhorse, remains indispensable. It supports immunity, fights infection, and is abundant not in oranges, but in obscure plants such as moringa and Australian plums that few people have heard of.

You can take it cheaply as ascorbic acid – your bowel will tell you when you’ve had enough – expensively as liposomal, or heroically via intravenous infusion.

Vitamin D, manufactured by sunlight and ruined by office jobs, is deficient in most of the world, including sunny countries. It regulates immunity, bones, mood, metabolism, and more besides. Sunscreen blocks its production. Sunglasses don’t help either. Cod liver oil does.

Vitamin K and K2 are crucial for bones, teeth, arteries, and facial structure. It directs calcium where it belongs and away from where it doesn’t. It lives in animal fats from properly raised animals. Nature, it seems, dislikes shortcuts.

The B vitamins fuel nerves, brains, blood, and energy. Miss them and you’ll know – fatigue, mood swings, memory lapses, mouth sores. They do not store well. You must keep eating them, or supplement.

Vitamin A, often misunderstood, works in tandem with Vitamin D and is essential for vision, immunity, skin, and hormones. Liver, egg yolks, butter. In other words, real food, unfashionable but effective.

Among minerals, magnesium calms nerves, relaxes muscles, aids sleep, and supports hundreds of biochemical reactions. Zinc governs immunity, growth, and cognition; a third of the world lacks it.

Iodine protects the thyroid and fends off environmental toxins that have no business in the body but insist on squatting there anyway. Iron, predictably, prevents anaemia and exhaustion, especially in women and children.

Supplementation, then, is no longer indulgence but insurance. But choose carefully. Many supplements are padded with industrial lubricants, whitening agents, sugars, and hydrogenated oils that sabotage absorption and immunity. Be careful with the discounted bulk vitamins on offer in large stores. They are often padded out with calcium carbonate – chalk.

Read labels. Avoid the chemistry set. Opt for whole food options.

In short: eat better, supplement wisely, distrust shortcuts, and remember that health is not built on novelty, but on what has quietly worked for millennia.

The body, like civilisation, runs on small things done properly.