What elements does a human body have? How much of each? Below we can see, ordered from highest to lowest, the mass of each of the chemical elements with a human body weighing 70 kg. If we didn’t have some of them, we would die. It is clear that this would happen if oxygen (the most abundant) or carbon disappeared from our body, but it would also happen if we eliminated, for example, the 5 milligrams that we have of the rare molybdenum, as it is essential to produce uric acid , the path that our body has to get rid of unwanted nitrogenous material. Or the also rare vanadium, of which we have a tenth of a milligram.
It may also surprise us to find that we also have silver and gold , albeit in almost negligible amounts: a few milligrams of silver and a few tenths of a milligram of gold. They do not play any role in the maintenance of our body, but if we sold them we would not get rich either: they would not give us a dime for them.
There are many elements that we can find in our body. Of some we only find minute traces, practically undetectable, and with such little-known names as dysprosium, erbium, gadolinium, holmium, lutetium … that enter our organism with water and food. Others, like lithium, of which we have 7 milligrams, we ingest it with potatoes and in much less quantity with oranges and lettuce. And what about cobalt, a tremendously important metal commercially as it is used in alloys for magnets, razor blades, ceramics, various catalysts in the chemical industry …? We could not live without it because it is at the very heart of vitamin B12 and is an example of one of the rarest examples of bonding in nature: that of carbon with a metal.
Of all the elements that we can find inside our cells, which are practically all that exist on the planet, we only need 25 for our body to function properly .
