What are vitamins and minerals? Vitamins and minerals are micro-nutrients, which means they can be found inside of macro-nutrients (protein, fat, and carbs). Vitamins and minerals are an important part of your diet because they work to allow the body to perform specific functions that are necessary for your health and survival.

How Many Vitamins Does Your Body Need?

Your body requires 13 vitamins (and 22 minerals) in order to function properly. If any one is missing in your diet for very long, it can create a dietary imbalance. Dietary imbalances can lead to medical problems and illnesses, which can be severe in some cases if they are not corrected by adding the proper nutrient back into the diet.

Examples of illnesses that are caused by dietary imbalances and deficiencies are:

Scurvy - An immune weakness caused by a lack of Vitamin C. Symptoms include weakness, irritability, slow or poor healing, skin that is easily bruised, bleeding from the gums or fingertips, and swollen gums.

Rickets - A weakening of the bones caused by a Vitamin D deficiency. Rickets can result in deformities of the bones that may even result in permanent disfigurement.

Beriberi - A deficiency in thiamine, also known as Vitamin B1. Symptoms of beriberi include fatigue, irritability, muscle aches and pains, loss of appetite, paralysis in the extremities, and heart complications. If left unchecked, complications from beriberi can even lead to heart failure.

Essential vitamins include Vitamins A, B1, B2, B3, B5, B6, B7, B9, B12, C, D, E, and K. Vitamins fall into two main categories - fat soluble and water soluble. Fat-soluble vitamins include Vitamins A, D, E, and K; water-soluble vitamins include the B vitamins and Vitamin C. Since water-soluble vitamins dissolve easily in water, they are easily absorbed and excreted from the body, preventing toxic build-up of these vitamins.

However, fat-soluble vitamins are absorbed with the help of (you guessed it) fats, which also means they are much more likely to be stored rather than excreted. For this reason, persons taking fat-soluble dietary supplements should be careful they take them in safe amounts.

Recommended Daily Allowances of Vitamins and Minerals

The Recommended Daily Allowances of vitamins and minerals, also known as the RDA, are dietary standards set by nutritional experts that list the average daily requirements for vitamins and minerals. The RDA amounts are really geared toward what a healthy person needs, and are often modified by doctors and dietitians to meet the special needs of people with illnesses. For example, persons with fatigue are sometimes given injections of large amounts of vitamin B12, which is thought to increase energy metabolism in the cells of the body.

Can You Get All The Vitamins You Need From Your Diet?

Expert opinions are mixed on this topic. Most medical doctors and dietitians will tell you that you can indeed get all the nutrition you need simply from eating a healthy, balanced diet. However, many alternative and holistic health care professionals claim that our food is not as nutritious as it once was, and that dietary supplements are necessary if you want to get complete nutrition.

So who is right? The answer is probably somewhere in the middle. While eating a healthy, balanced diet should suffice for the nutritional needs of most individuals, how many of us actually eat healthy, nutritionally balanced meals all the time? With the busy schedules that the average person faces, eating meals on the go and even skipping meals on occasion, it makes sense that supplementing your diet with a quality multi-vitamin offers a sort of "nutritional insurance" for your body.