#280 How to Get Enough Minerals from Diet with Siim Land

Siim Land (0:00)

Inside Tracker is an at-home biomarker service that you can use to test up to 43 different biomarkers, like lipids, liver enzymes, inflammation, sex hormones and much more. The process is simple. You order the test kit to your home, use the little finger prick device to give your blood, send it back, and you get results to your online dashboard or app. You can get a 25% discount of all their tests if you head over to siimland.com forward slash inside tracker, that's in one word, and you can use the code siimland at checkout. That's siimland.com forward slash inside tracker, and the code is siimland. Welcome, everyone. We're going to just talk today about micronutrients and especially minerals. We're going to be focusing on the minerals because that's what I recently specialized in more, and the minerals themselves are pretty important for the entire physiological processes of the body as well. We'll begin with what are the micronutrients itself. You can change maybe to the bigger view of the slides and my face a smaller one. Yeah, like that.

Let's start with what are micronutrients. Well, there are different kinds of them, and they're opposed to the macronutrients or macros. The macros are the protein, carbs and fats, and the micros are the vitamins and minerals, as well as some of the phytonutrients and these other compounds inside, mostly like plant foods.

You can almost think that the vitamins and minerals are almost like the roots to your health, because they govern virtually all these different processes inside the body, like bone formation, energy production, cognition, digestion, sleep, immunity, insulin sensitivity, inflammation, antioxidant defense, and everything is kind of rooted in vitamins and minerals.

So, yeah, even like, let's go into a very detailed example, which you don't have to remember, you don't have to understand this picture, but it's just an example of how vitamins and minerals are involved with the most fundamental thing in life, which is energy production. So without energy, without ATP, you wouldn't be alive. And the vitamins and minerals are involved with all steps of generating energy inside a mitochondrial transport chain. And inside a mitochondria, the electron transport chain consists of multiple complexes. And you can see different vitamins and minerals are just involved with all these complexes, as well as like generating energy from different fuel sources, like amino acids, fatty acids and the glucose. You can see the red ones are the minerals that they're involved in these pathways. So these pathways, for example, beta-oxidation, burning fat, is dependent on different minerals, zinc, chromium, magnesium, as well as calcium. And the pathway of glycolysis, which is using carbohydrates for energy, is dependent on zinc, magnesium, chromium, calcium, manganese as well. And amino acids are dependent a lot on manganese as well as, you can just eventually go into the TCA cycle or the CREP cycle, which then enters the electron transport chain. And the last step of energy production is ATP synthase, where the ATP itself comes out. That is also dependent on magnesium and the calcium mostly. So if you were to be deficient in some of these minerals, then your energy production would be suboptimal. Or like your insulin sensitivity would be suboptimal. Your fat oxidation would be suboptimal. And eventually after a while, your body will start to show some signs of these deficiencies and maybe you have some poor health outcomes from that as well.

Another more easier to understand example comes from anthropology.

Weston A. Price was this dentist who went to these Aboriginal tribes to see why these children have really perfect teeth and perfect jaw lines and facial features compared to the Western children who had tooth decay and crooked teeth and those kind of things. And he came to the conclusion that it had to do with the content of their diet. So these Aboriginal people, they consumed a diet high in a lot of these fat soluble vitamins like A, D, E and K. And those are very crucial for the development of the face and jaw line and the teeth and the bones. So the Western children just ate the diet that didn't have these essential nutrients. And that's why also their physical development was suboptimal as a result of that. Another example would be just the production of glutathione. So glutathione is the body's master antioxidant. And it's very important.

The main building blocks of glutathione are cysteine, glycine and glutamate amino acids. But it's also these conversions of these amino acids into glutathione are also dependent on these minerals, magnesium, selenium, zinc. And then the recycling of glutathione is also dependent on the recycling of different minerals in different parts of the cycle.

And last example is melatonin, the sleep hormone. So tryptophan is one of the first building blocks of melatonin. Tryptophan can convert into 5-HTP, then serotonin and eventually melatonin. But these conversion pathways are also dependent on minerals, calcium, magnesium, iron, zinc, magnesium and magnesium and zinc.