Micronutrients

Macronutrients get most of the attention because their effects are visible. Eat more protein and recovery improves. Adjust carbohydrates and energy shifts. The feedback is fast enough that people notice. Micronutrients don’t work that way. Their effects are slower, quieter, and easy to miss — until something is clearly off and you start working backwards trying to figure out why.

Micronutrients are the vitamins the body needs in small amounts to function properly. Small amounts doesn’t mean small importance. These are the compounds that keep your immune system working, your energy metabolism running, your bones strong, your mood regulated, and your sleep functional. They don’t provide calories or build tissue the way macronutrients do. What they do is make sure everything else works the way it’s supposed to.

Most people in good health, eating a reasonably varied diet, are getting adequate amounts of most micronutrients without thinking about it. The problem is that most people’s diets aren’t that varied. When the same foods show up week after week — and those foods tend to be processed, low in vegetables, and light on diversity — gaps accumulate quietly. The effects rarely announce themselves clearly. Low energy, getting sick more than you’d expect, skin that isn’t great, mood that’s harder to manage than it used to be — these are the kinds of things that get attributed to stress or sleep or just getting older, when micronutrient status is sometimes a meaningful part of the picture.

The vitamins covered in this section are divided into two practical categories. Fat-soluble vitamins — A, D, E, and K — are stored in the body, absorbed alongside dietary fat, and don’t need to come from food every single day. Water-soluble vitamins — C and the eight B vitamins — aren’t stored in any meaningful quantity and need regular replenishment through what you eat.

The goal of these pages isn’t to turn you into a nutritionist. It’s to give you enough understanding of what each vitamin does and where it comes from that you can make informed decisions about your own diet — and recognize when something might be worth paying closer attention to.

Reference Card

Pillar: Nourish Categories: Fat-soluble vitamins · Water-soluble vitamins Fat-soluble: A · D · E · K Water-soluble: C · B1 · B2 · B3 · B5 · B6 · B7 · B9 · B12

Fat-soluble vs water-soluble — what it means practically

Fat-soluble vitamins are stored in the body — you don’t need them every day, but they require fat in your meal to absorb properly
Water-soluble vitamins aren’t stored — they need to show up regularly in your diet, and excess is simply excreted

Considerations

Dietary variety is the most reliable way to cover micronutrient needs — the more different whole foods in your diet, the fewer gaps
Vitamin D, B12, and iron are the most commonly deficient across the general population and worth specific attention
Subclinical deficiency — low enough to affect how you feel and function, not low enough to produce obvious disease — is far more common than most people realize
A multivitamin is a partial safety net, not a substitute for dietary quality

Common myths

You’d know if you were deficient — subclinical deficiency often produces vague, easy-to-miss symptoms that get attributed to other causes
A multivitamin covers everything — formulations vary widely in what they contain and how well it absorbs; food first, supplement as needed
More of a vitamin is always better — fat-soluble vitamins accumulate in the body; more is not better beyond adequacy