It’s just dawned on me that after a life of being told to include enough vitamins in my diet that I haven’t a scooby what vitamins actually do. Can someone please why its important to have enough vitamins?
In: Biology
People used to not know why you needed to eat food other than to get energy, in the 1920s and 30s they discovered a bunch of specific things you need from food and vaguely labeled them all vitamins. This means that the label as a group is kinda flimsy and has a loose definition that kinda falls apart if you think about it too much. But the general idea is any chemical or group of chemicals that you’d die without that you get from food is a vitamin, except a bunch of things aren’t vitamins because they fit in some other category. Like we need salt to live but it’s a mineral we already knew about from before the 1920s so it doesn’t count and also we know the body can make vitamin D some but it still counts.
Basically the vitamins are real things you really need to not die, but the whole labeling thing is kinda iffy and arbitary. Like a ton of things are all vitamin A, vitamin B is a bunch of totally separate things, there is no vitamin F, the names are all a mess.
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