What actually are vitamin supplements? How can a vitamin which we can get from sunlight be recreated or captured in a powdery pill? Are vitamin supplements synthetic, or “real” products from nature?

Question

What actually are vitamin supplements? How can a vitamin which we can get from sunlight be recreated or captured in a powdery pill? Are vitamin supplements synthetic, or “real” products from nature?

In: 5

Answer 1

Vitamins are chemical substances just like all other matter. Synthetic vs natural only ever says something about the origin of a substance; for many things, like vitamins, it’s perfectly possible to recreate it in a test tube, so there is no real difference between the synthetic or natural versions. The result can be packaged into a pill, and nuances of bioavailability aside, that vitamin (say, C) will be used by your body no differently than if you’d gotten it from eating a bunch of citrus fruits.