Eli5 – How do we know what vitamins are in foods?
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We did a lot of work isolating them. The vitamins have letter names because we were just lazy about naming them. There’s the occasional skipped letters because we renamed certain ones after we learned they didn’t really qualify as vitamins (ie why we have vitamin K but no vitamin F-I). Vitamin B has multiple numbers (B2, B6, B12) because there were multiple things we thought were all vitamin B until we could isolate them from each other.
We can figure out if a vitamin is present in a food by attempting to isolate it. If we can, we can measure how much there is, if we can’t, it must not be present.
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