Salt isn’t regularly considered a spice, nor is it discussed as a vitamin like A, B, etc. But isn’t it necessary in small amounts for humans?
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Too tired to read the comments I’m sure this answer is there hundreds of times:
Vitamins contain carbon atoms (and are therefore organic). Minerals don’t.
You’ve gotten your answers, but let me just point out that there is a flaw in your premise.
“Vitamins are essential to human life” does not mean “All things essential to human life are vitamins.” You’ve committed this fallacy in your reasoning.
To answer the other part of your question, yes, salt (or rather sodium and chlorine) is necessary for human life. So are many other elements: Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, Phosphorus, Potassium, Iodine, Nitrogen, Sulfur, Calcium, Iron, Magnesium, Sodium, and Chlorine are the ones I was taught in school. For the most part we get these elements from more complex molecules like vitamins and amino acids, and they tend to be pretty easy to come by. Iodine tends to be somewhat of an outlier and the diets of some groups historically had a deficiency of Iodine, which is why table salt in many countries is “iodized.” It’s been fortified with Iodine to help prevent Iodine deficiency.
Nutrition discusses “vitamins and minerals.” Salt is a mineral. It’s not a vitamin.
Salt is a rock. Absorbable potassium, magnesium, copper, iron, these are metals. We need them in our bodies, so we place them under the category of “minerals” when discussing nutrition.
Vitamins are organic chemicals found inside living things. You don’t dig for Vitamin K.
When we say take your vitamins, it is just shortening the original phrase. Take your vitamins AND minerals. Salt is a required mineral by the body, just like magnesium and iron for example.
So in short, while not a vitamin, it is a mineral and just as required for healthy bodily functions. Most multi-vitamins contain both vitamins and minerals.
It’s all for historic reasons.
Vitamines (Note the extra e) where what the first essential organic nutrients humankind discovered were called, because they initially thought they’d all have a chemical structure called an amine. Which they don’t all, so the E was dropped, but Vitamin had already been established.
So a vitamin is any organic molecule that a species has to take in with their diet. This varies between species, because after all being organic, some animal or plant or bacterium has to make them.
So vitamin c or Ascorbic acid is a vitamin in humans, but not in most other mammals who still have the gene that make the enzyme that converts glucose to Ascorbic acid/vitamin C.
So any organic molecule that is required in trace amounts in the diet, which cannot be made from other dietary components is called a vitamin.
But those are the only essential ingredients of a diet.
Various amino acids (the individual building blocks of protein) as well as fatty acids (building blocks of animal/vegetable fata and oil) are also essential. They cannot be made in our own body from say other amino acids or fats.
Carbohydrates/sugar is actually not directly essential because our bodies can break apart amino acids to create glucose molecules from them.
This is however not exactly healthy long term, but can be done.
And then you get the inorganic parts of a diet: stuff like the electrolytes you mentioned. Sodium ans chloride are essential in virtually every living thing.
But these inorganic compounds are considered minerals in nutrition.
And they are all by definition essential. Because you can convert sodium to potassium without a nuclear breeder reactor, because they are just atoms after all.
Of those minerals there are various that get used as electrolytes, like sodium, potassium, chloride.
But there’s also various metals that are absolutely essential for us, iron being a popularly known one, but zinc, copper, molybdenum, cobalt and even selenium are essential. That’s why they are listed in infant milk for example or liquid complete foods for cancer patients.
In any normal circumstances it would be extremely hard to become deficient in most of those, because they are present in most things we eat.
And then the weirdest part: vitamin B12 is a molecule that complains of organic parts surrounding a cobalt atom. So animals that produce their ‘own’ vitamin B12 (the bacteria in their gut produce it, they just are able to absorb it, humans large intestine is too small to absorb enough b12 from our bacteria) can still become deficient in vitamin B12 if the area they live in, the grass they eat is extremely poor in cobalt.
Tkdr; vitamins are just a subgroup of molecules of all the stuff essential to human life. They are those molecules that other bacteria, plants, or animals can themselves produce, and that we obtain in our diet by eating them. Some vitamins are only vitamins for humans, and some other substances like say taurine are vitamins for other animals but not humans. Because which vitamins a living being produces varies by species.
Nutrients are categorized in 6 different ways: Macronutrients (proteins, fats, carbs) and micronutrients (vitamins and minerals such as salt) and water.
All of these are considered essential. So while they technically they serve different functions for the body. Vitamins and minerals are usually still grouped together as micronutrients.
Salt is a spice. Also we do have a required amount, but (from memory) Bill Bryson said we get around 40x the required amount daily.
Does anyone here recommend Irish Sea moss, it claims to have 92 out of the 102 vitamins our body needs.
It’s not biology, it’s logic: if vitamins are essential it does not mean that every essential stuff is vitamin. E.g. water is essential, but not a vitamin. Neither salt.
Vitamins are biological compounds, i.e. they are carbon based and produced by lifeforms.
Salt is a mineral that naturally occurs, whether there is life or not. It‘s simply sodium and chloride.
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