eli5: If vitamins are things considered essential to human life, why is salt not considered a vitamin?

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Salt isn’t regularly considered a spice, nor is it discussed as a vitamin like A, B, etc. But isn’t it necessary in small amounts for humans?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Salt would go under the essential minerals category. Vitamins used do be called “vital amines”, and refer to carbon-based molecules that are non caloric (not that they contain no energy, but that our body doesn’t metabolize them for energy) and which our bodies cannot synthesize while requiring these substances for health. Minerals don’t fall into this category. The term became its own thing rather than “vital amines” probably because it turns out there are substances that are not amines (that is, containing [the amine functional group](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amine) on the molecule) that are crucial for health that meet all the criteria I mentioned above.

(By that definition, technically speaking, Vitamin D is mis-named because our bodies can make it. Vitamin D appears to be a hormone our bodies use to regulate gene expression. It was likely classified before we figured out how our bodies make it.)

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