for something so important to the body, why does our bodily unable to produce its own vitamins?

Question

for something so important to the body, why does our bodily unable to produce its own vitamins?

In: 0

Answer 1

Produce them from *what?*

Let’s imagine we had an enzyme that could produce, say, Vitamin A. Well, that enzyme has to produce Vitamin A *from some precursor*, because our bodies cannot just conjure the required atoms into existence. And that just moves the problem back one step – now we have to consume that precursor, so that precursor is now an essential vitamin.

Ultimately no form of life makes *everything* it needs to live – at some level *everything* has to get *something* from the environment around it, because the law of conservation of mass implies that everything we make has to be made of something else that already existed.