Читать книгу They Are What You Feed Them: How Food Can Improve Your Child’s Behaviour, Mood and Learning - Dr Richardson Alex - Страница 85

Your child needs the full range of vitamins for her body and brain to function properly—and these can’t be absorbed without minerals to help them. Minerals also help build your body cells (bones, teeth, muscle, blood, soft tissue, nerves and so on) and are vital in other ways. Important in digestion and in the use of other nutrients, they’re also needed to catalyse (speed up) reactions such as hormone production, muscle response and nerve transmission. We can’t make minerals, so we must get them all from a healthy, balanced and varied diet. Junk food diets often don’t contain enough minerals to meet your child’s needs.

A table of essential minerals and some of their roles is in the Appendix (page 375). It’s not important to learn these, just to be aware of why minerals are so important to your child’s health. Here I’ll describe a few that are known to affect brains and behaviour, but may well be lacking from your child’s diet.