Questions and Answers about Vitamins

Vitamin Q A

by: News Canada

Q: My teenage daughter does not like milk and I'm afraid she isn't getting enough calcium. What can she do to ensure that she is getting enough?

 A brief history of Vitamins

The chemical compounds necessary for human life that we call vitamins have a very interesting past. Half of what we know was found through rigorous research; half simply by researching something else entirely. In this article, we’ll discuss some of the key periods of time in which our knowledge of vitamins grew.

-Early scientists discovered that certain foods could cure diseases which were caused by vitamin deficiencies. Ancient Egyptians cured night blindness (a symptom of a Vitamin A deficiency) by feeding those afflicted some liver. In the 1700s, scurvy (a symptom of a Vitamin C deficiency) was treated by a prescription of citrus fruits, which are some of the most Vitamin-C rich food on the planet.

-In the year of 1906, a scientist known as Fredric Gowland Hopkins isolated certain types of food that he deemed necessary for proper human health. The term vitamin was coined as a combination of vita, denoting life, and amine, which was a compound thought to be common in all vitamins. This compound was mistakenly thought of as common to all vitamins because scientist Cashmir Funk believed that all vitamins featured a nitrogen containing entity. This was later shown to be false, due to the fact that Vitamin C was not found to actually have any amines, so the last ‘e’ was dropped, taking away the amine connotation and leaving us with the word vitamin.

-The next big breakthrough for the world of vitamins occurred in 1913, when scientists Thomas Osborne and Lafayette Mendel were researching at Yale. They discovered that butter contained a certain fat soluble compound that we would come to know as Vitamin A. Vitamin B was isolated soon afterwards in 1916 by Elmer V. McCollum.

-Many of the vitamins were discovered in the early 1900s by scientists depriving animals of them. For instance, Vitamin D was discovered by a scientist who was trying to understand the disease rickets, which is a side-effect of a Vitamin D deficiency.

-Vitamin C became the first vitamin to be artificially synthesized in the year 1935.

- There are thirteen vitamins in all that we have discovered, with four of them (Vitamins A, D, E and K) being fat soluble and 9 of them (all of the B Vitamins and Vitamin C) being water soluble. The body stores up fat soluble vitamins while flushing out excess water soluble vitamins. For that reason, it’s important to not have too much of Vitamin A, D, E, or K.

-The vitamins take the odd leap between Vitamin E and Vitamin K due to the fact that a number of vitamins have been reclassified due to the fact that they bore a relation to another vitamin. For instance, there was once a Vitamin G. This substance, with the scientific name Riboflavin, has been renamed as Vitamin B2 due to its relation in the B-Complex. Vitamin F consisted of fatty acids, which were later reclassified due to the fact that, while essential to the body, they did not sufficiently fit the guidelines for which we classify vitamins.

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