You might be asking yourself as we continue our newly launched series on essential minerals, “What is it exactly that makes essential minerals essential?” That’s easy. Essential minerals are essential, or crucial, for your health because your body cannot survive for the long-term without them. Because your body does not manufacture essential minerals on its own, it’s up to you to provide them to your body on a regular basis through ingestion (eating and drinking healthy food and fluids, respectively).
Between them, essential minerals virtually “team up” to provide support for a wide range of vital bodily processes. This includes building bones and teeth, assisting in the functionality of nerves and muscles, maintaining fluid balance, converting food into energy, and so much more. Imagine what your quality of life would be if lacking certain minerals indispensable to a particular function mentioned above.
We started this series about major essential minerals looking at calcium. This time we delve into a discussion about chloride, the second of seven essential major minerals to be featured in this series. Yes, we are presenting these in alphabetical order. Yet to come among major essential minerals are magnesium, phosphorus, potassium, sodium, and sulfur. Then we’ll tackle trace essential minerals and conclude with possible trace essential minerals.
Some Basics about Chloride Worth Knowing
Chloride is a mineral found in assorted foods – combined with sodium you get sodium chloride, which is salt – and it carries an electric charge. That last attribute classifies chloride as an electrolyte, which is the same status accorded sodium and potassium. As an electrolyte, chloride assists in such areas as modulating the amount of fluid and types of nutrients interacting with cells. It also is a “hands on” contributor several to regulating proper pH levels and activating stomach acid (hydrochloric acid) to assist in the body’s digestive mechanism.
Chloride’s Major Health Benefits and Activities
As a quick overview, chloride generates channels inside cell membranes to assist in completing various tasks. We’ve already mentioned some of the benefits, but let’s do a quick rundown to give you a convenient summation of the virtues of chloride:
- Helps control the amount of fluid in the body while also regulating a healthy volume of blood and blood pressure.
- Helps ensure the proper contractions of muscles as well as the heart, while boosting the transmission of nerve cells impulses between brain and body.
- Assists red blood cells in exchanging oxygen and carbon dioxide in the lungs and elsewhere.
- Helps stimulate the production of hydrochloric acid in the stomach to enhance digestion of ingested food.
Chloride’s role as a major essential mineral is a well-defined one and instrumental in a variety of important processes in your body. As always, be sure to discuss any interest you might have in adding a new natural remedy to your regimen, such as any that includes chloride as a component, with your personal physician or other healthcare professional.