The handful of vitamins most people take are a variety of gel capsules, powder-filled capsules, solid tablets, injections, dissolvable powders, etc. How does a vitamin start in its natural form and become the consumable form we buy by the bottle?
In: 3
Vitamins are just chemicals that your body needs in small amounts to run the chemical reactions inside it (EDIT: okay, one more requirement: they have to be things your body can’t make itself in sufficient amounts and therefore needs in your diet). You make a vitamin pill by putting an appropriate amount of those chemicals into some neutral gel, sugar compressed into a tablet, etc.
Some of these chemicals are easy to make in a factory directly, without living things involved (“total synthesis”). Others, like Vitamin C, are made industrially through microorganisms in factory tanks. Other chemicals are harder to make directly, and are extracted from living things that make a lot of them (vitamin D, for example, comes from precursors [in the wool of sheep](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanolin), then exposed to ultraviolet light to convert it into a form that’s useful to the human body).
There different techniques but one possibility is to take something that is rich in said vitamin (eg orange for vitamin c), dehydrate it and grind it thus becoming a powder that can then be used to make all kinds of medicine
Latest Answers