What are vitamins, really? I mean molecularly, physically, how do they differ, who discovered they exist and how, etc.
In: Biology
‘Vitamin’ comes from a prefix meaning “life, alive” and a shortening of “amine”, because they were originally thought to include amino acids.
They’re organic substances that we need in small quantities for our life processes to function properly. We can’t make them so we must get them from our diets — if a given species can make a particular substance, it’s not considered a vitamin for that species. Many animals can make their own vitamin C, but humans can’t, so we consider it a vitamin.
Mere minerals don’t count as vitamins, although some vitamins contain very small amounts of special minerals. Vitamin B12, for example, is a complex molecule that contains a single atom of cobalt, a metal which is under most conditions mildly poisonous for humans.
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