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Human nutrition deals with the provision of essential nutrients in food that are necessary to support human life and good health. [1] Poor nutrition is a chronic problem often linked to poverty, food security , or a poor understanding of nutritional requirements. [ 2 ]
Essential nutrients for animals are the energy sources, some of the amino acids that are combined to create proteins, a subset of fatty acids, vitamins and certain minerals. Plants require more diverse minerals absorbed through roots, plus carbon dioxide and oxygen absorbed through leaves.
Selenium, which is an essential element for animals and prokaryotes and is a beneficial element for many plants, is the least-common of all the elements essential to life. [ 3 ] [ 63 ] Selenium acts as the catalytic center of several antioxidant enzymes, such as glutathione peroxidase , [ 11 ] and plays a wide variety of other biological roles .
In nutrition, the diet of an organism is the sum of the foods it eats. [9] A healthy diet improves the physical and mental health of an organism. This requires ingestion and absorption of vitamins, minerals, essential amino acids from protein and essential fatty acids from fat-containing food.
Food is usually of plant, animal, or fungal origin and contains essential nutrients such as carbohydrates, fats, proteins, vitamins, or minerals. The substance is ingested by an organism and assimilated by the organism's cells to provide energy, maintain life, or stimulate growth.
Biomolecules are an important element of living organisms. They are often endogenous, [2] i.e. produced within the organism, [3] but organisms usually also need exogenous biomolecules, for example certain nutrients, to survive. Biomolecules and their reactions are studied in biology and its subfields of biochemistry and molecular biology.
The term vitamin does not include the three other groups of essential nutrients: minerals, essential fatty acids, and essential amino acids. [2] Major health organizations list thirteen vitamins: [3] [4] [5] Vitamin A (all-trans-retinols, all-trans-retinyl-esters, as well as all-trans-β-carotene and other provitamin A carotenoids) Vitamin B 1
The most known chemical elements whose covalent combinations make up most biological molecules on Earth. [2] All of these elements are nonmetals.. In animals in general, the four elements—C, H, N, and O—compose about 96% of the weight, and major minerals (macrominerals) and minor minerals (also called trace elements) compose the remainder.