Everything You Need to Know About Vitamins

Vitamins are essential organic compounds that our body needs to develop and function normally.

Vitamins

are a group of substances that are necessary for healthy cell growth and development. They are required in small amounts, and most of them should come from food as the body doesn't produce them or produces very little. Fat-soluble vitamins are stored in fat cells and need fat to be absorbed.

Vitamins A, D, E and K are fat-soluble vitamins. The best way to get all the vitamins you need daily is to eat a balanced diet that includes a variety of fruits, vegetables, fortified dairy products, legumes (dried beans), lentils, and whole grains. In 1943, Edward Adelbert Doisy and Henrik Dam were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discovery of vitamin K and its chemical structure. In East Asia, where polished white rice was the common staple of the middle class, beriberi resulting from a lack of vitamin B1 was endemic.

It was decided to choose a name to dissociate nicotinic acid from nicotine, to avoid the perception that vitamins or foods rich in niacin contain nicotine, or that cigarettes contain vitamins. Each vitamin has several functions in the body, and deficiencies of different vitamins can harm health in different ways. Then, starting in 1935, commercial vitamin B complex tablets with yeast extract and semisynthetic vitamin C became available. The 1929 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Christiaan Eijkman and Frederick Gowland Hopkins for their contributions to the discovery of vitamins.

The European Union and the governments of several countries have established higher tolerable intake levels (UL) for those vitamins that have documented toxicity (see table). Many people in the United States take multivitamins and other supplements, although they may not be necessary or helpful, research shows. For example, humans need to get vitamin C from their diets, while dogs can produce all the vitamin C they need. The continued focus on a healthy lifestyle has led to an obsessive consumption of vitamins and multivitamins, the beneficial effects of which are questionable. Dietary supplements often contain vitamins, but they can also include other ingredients such as minerals, herbs, and botanicals.

Look for a supplement that contains only the vitamin or mineral you need without many other unnecessary ingredients. Vitamins are natural and essential nutrients needed in small quantities and play an important role in growth and development, wound repair and healing, maintaining healthy bones and tissues, for the proper functioning of the immune system and other biological functions. Funk hypothesized that other diseases such as rickets, pellagra, celiac disease and scurvy could also be cured with vitamins. The term vitamin was derived from vitamin, a compound word coined in 1912 by biochemist Casimir Funk while working at the Lister Institute for Preventive Medicine.