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Balancing Minerals

Balancing Minerals

The most important principle to remember is that more is not always better. The more of a supplement that you take, the more likely you are of disturbing your nutritional balance. All nutrients seem to interact with each other so the more of one that you take, the more that others get depleted.

The next most important principle is that minerals have a smaller toxic to benefit ratio than vitamins. What this means is that amount of a mineral which might be used for supplementation is not much lower than the toxic amount. For minerals the toxic level might be only 3 to 10 times the therapeutic amount. For example, selenium requirements are usually around 50 mcg per day and typical selenium supplementation amounts are 100-400 mcg per day. However, toxicity can result at around 1200-1600 mcg per day over an extended period. So if we take a safe amount of 400 mcg and a toxic amount of 1200 mcg, that is only a 3:1 ratio. It's important that you realize the importance of not taking too much.

The toxic to benefit ratio of vitamins is much higher. Our bodies have a much higher capacity to excrete unused amounts of vitamins than unused amounts of minerals. For example we might have a B vitamin requirement of 2 mgs, a supplemented amount of 100 mgs, and a toxic level of 10-50 grams. There is not the same danger of over supplementing vitamins as there is of over supplementing minerals. The one exception are the oil soluble vitamins: A, D, E, and K. These build up in the tissues and can cause problems. For example, we might take 5000 IU of vitamin A, but 100,000 IU over a period of months can cause severe headaches. In the arctic some people have died from eating the liver of animals because the vitamin A content was so high that the person's body couldn't eliminate it fast enough.

The third most important principle is to balance nutrients. Each nutrient needs to be present in just the right ratios (within a reasonable range) with the other nutrients. This is especially true of minerals and the B vitamins. You can get deficient in a mineral or vitamin even if you are supplementing it, if you are taking another mineral or vitamin which is the antagonist of the first.

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