: if Potassium, Calcium, Sodium and Magnesium are metals. How are some foods rich/contain such metals?
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You might actually find tiny bits of metallic metal in your food, however, typically it will be in the form of salts. Metals are very prone to forming salts when they react with other things. This unbalances the electric charge of the salt and makes it extremely easy to dissolve in water.
Foods contain salts of those metals. That is, positively charged metal ions bound to negatively charged ions (usually chloride).
These ions are extremely important to the functioning of your body. The movement of sodium, calcium, and potassium ions is how your body generates electrical charges that allow for signals that control your nerves and muscles, for example.
We rarely encounter them in food as pure metals…they’re always combined with other atoms into molecules.
Potassium/calcium/sodium/magnesium are insanely reactive as pure metals, they’ll grab on to whatever else they can find to form other molecules.
The metals are ionized and bonded to nonmetals to form salts. It is these salts that are present in the foods.
Because they aren’t in metal form. They’re in ion form. The ions dissolve in water. Because foods are in part, water, they can have the ions dissolved in them.