Do you bite your nails?
You may be deficient in MINERALS
What are minerals?
Yes, nail biting often begins with boredom or impatience or fidgeting.
If you are among the millions who regularly bite their nails, you've probably said to yourself "I wish I could stop biting my nails!"
But often your body needs the minerals in the nail material that your body is recycling. So the reward-cycle begins and continues.
Studies show that the mineral content of hair or nails is similar to the mineral content of bone.
The human body, like everything else in nature, is made up of chemicals.
Since the trace minerals group includes over 50 chemical elements, scientists further subdivide this group into three categories, to separate the minerals that are important in health from others that are in our bodies just because they are in the environment and probably have no special role. The first category is the essential trace minerals. These are minerals that are required in the diet for full health, and when the intake is insufficient, symptoms of deficiency will arise. They include nine known to be essential: zinc, copper, selenium, chromium, manganese, molybdenum, iodine, fluoride, and cobalt. About 10 more minerals are thought to be essential but the full proof is not yet in; these are arsenic, boron, bromine, cadmium, lead, lithium, nickel, silicon, tin, and vanadium.
You will note in this list several minerals (arsenic, cadmium, lead) that are normally thought to be toxic. This leads to the second category of trace minerals, the toxic trace minerals. The term is used for minerals that give problems with toxicity at levels that may be encountered normally in the environment and for which health concerns are more likely to arise from too much rather than too little in the body. This category is fairly loose, changing from time to time, and includes aluminum, arsenic, cadmium, lead, mercury, and tin.
Actually, all nutrients are toxic if too much is ingested; how much is too much depends on the nutrient. For essential minerals like copper, there is a definite gradation for health; if the intake is below the requirement, illness due to deficiency will develop; as the intake goes up, health will improve until a plateau is reached, where small increases in intake will not make any difference to health; above the top safe level (the end of the plateau), increases in intake will cause toxic illness. In extreme cases, both deficiency at one end and toxicity at the other end of the spectrum may get so severe as to cause death. This pattern is seen for all nutrients, including, for example, vitamins, macro-minerals, and protein.
Some will cause debilitating disease. A classic example is vanadium which can cause manic depression.
The third category of nonessential trace minerals is everything else: all the other minerals that are present in the body but are not essential in the diet and are not thought to have any function, and that do not cause any concern over toxicity or deficiency. In practice, virtually everything is essential.
Biting your nails becomes addictive because of the reward process. You're probably deficient in minerals.
Find out more about minerals
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