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This is sort of like asking what the most important organ is, since there are lots of them that you would die without, in several cases in pretty short order.

Life is essentially based on carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, and phosphorus... but sulfur is also essential; your blood wouldn't be able to carry much oxygen without iron (or, potentially, some other metal; some gastropods use hemocyanin, a protein containing copper, to achieve this function); sodium and potassium are vital to certain cellular functions; chlorophyll, without which you'd have no food to eat or oxygen to breathe, contains a magnesium atom... the list of elements essential to life goes on and on; trying to pick out the five "most important" is, frankly, kind of silly. The list the paragraph starts with are the five most common elements in the human body (I think, I'm not sure if the fifth should be phosphorus or sulfur; phosphorus is in DNA, but sulfur is in proteins), but all the little trace elements are vital in some role.

Actually just checked, and it turns out number 5 is calcium (in order, by mass, the list goes oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium). But that's mainly in bones, and you could technically live without most of your bones. Phosphorus is actually sixth, followed by a virtual tie between potassium and sulfur.

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