Trace Minerals
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.
Read the deep dive →Zinc
Insulin storage in the beta cell, immune function, wound healing; long-term high doses cause copper deficiency.
Read the deep dive →Copper
Iron metabolism, connective tissue crosslinking and mitochondrial energy production — the mineral zinc supplementation most often displaces.
Read the deep dive →Iodine
The element thyroid hormone is built from. Both deficiency and excess cause thyroid disease.
Read the deep dive →Selenium
Glutathione peroxidases and the deiodinases that activate thyroid hormone; the therapeutic window is one of the narrowest here.
Read the deep dive →Manganese
Superoxide dismutase in the mitochondrion, and bone matrix formation.
Read the deep dive →Chromium
Proposed to amplify insulin signalling. The early enthusiasm has not held up under later review.
Read the deep dive →Molybdenum
Cofactor for sulfite oxidase and xanthine oxidase; deficiency is essentially unknown on ordinary diets.
Read the deep dive →Cobalt
Relevant to humans only as the cobalt atom at the centre of vitamin B12.
Read the deep dive →Boron
Affects calcium, magnesium and vitamin D handling, and sex hormone levels; not formally essential, and hard to be short of.
Read the deep dive →Silicon
Connective tissue and bone matrix formation; the evidence is suggestive rather than settled.
Read the deep dive →Strontium
Chemically follows calcium into bone, which is the basis of its use and of the caution around it.
Read the deep dive →Vanadium
Genuinely insulin-mimetic in animal models, with a narrow gap between the doses that act and the doses that harm.
Read the deep dive →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.