Trace Minerals
Needed in under 100 mg a day, several of them in micrograms. Trace minerals are mostly catalytic rather than structural: they sit in the active site of an enzyme or at the centre of a hormone, so a small shortfall can stop a specific reaction while everything around it looks normal.
That is also why the margin matters. Several of these — iron, copper, selenium, iodine — have a genuinely narrow window between too little and too much, and the symptoms at both ends can resemble each other.
Table of Contents
Trace Minerals on This Site
- Iron — Oxygen transport in haemoglobin. The world's commonest deficiency, and dangerous in excess because the body has no route to excrete it.
- Zinc — Insulin storage in the beta cell, immune function, wound healing; long-term high doses cause copper deficiency.
- Copper — Iron metabolism, connective tissue crosslinking and mitochondrial energy production — the mineral zinc supplementation most often displaces.
- Iodine — The element thyroid hormone is built from. Both deficiency and excess cause thyroid disease.
- Selenium — Glutathione peroxidases and the deiodinases that activate thyroid hormone; the therapeutic window is one of the narrowest here.
- Manganese — Superoxide dismutase in the mitochondrion, and bone matrix formation.
- Chromium — Proposed to amplify insulin signalling. The early enthusiasm has not held up under later review.
- Molybdenum — Cofactor for sulfite oxidase and xanthine oxidase; deficiency is essentially unknown on ordinary diets.
- Cobalt — Relevant to humans only as the cobalt atom at the centre of vitamin B12.
- Boron — Affects calcium, magnesium and vitamin D handling, and sex hormone levels; not formally essential, and hard to be short of.
- Silicon — Connective tissue and bone matrix formation; the evidence is suggestive rather than settled.
- Strontium — Chemically follows calcium into bone, which is the basis of its use and of the caution around it.
- Vanadium — Genuinely insulin-mimetic in animal models, with a narrow gap between the doses that act and the doses that harm.