We have vitamin b6 and b12 but I’ve never seen others. I’ve seen vitamin A but never a number with it. How did we get here? Similarly, why aren’t other often grouped supplement ingredients labeled as vitamins? Thinking of Omegas, fish oil, niacin etc. did we run out of letters? Is there a characteristic needed to be called vitamin?
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To confuse people. Theres no such thing as a vitamin. Vitamin Z, what is that? Zinc? Its not a vitamin, its just Zinc. Vitamin K? No, its just potassium. Supposedly if your kidneys are functioning correctly there should be a trace amount of gold in your system. Vitamin G? Doctors are able to measure what elements and compounds should be in your blood. Vitamins are a marketing thing.
Also, I get the vital mineral part of it. I’m not saying these aren’t vital. But vitamin has sort have taken on its own meaning as something you need to supplement.
Vitamins are defined by the things we can’t live without. You’ve identified certain vitamins that are vital for humans to function that we can’t synthesize ourselves. Vitamin C for instance is a vitamin for humans, but not for cats because they can make it themselves.
I can answer one part of your question, why some things aren’t vitamins. vitamins are defined as small organic molecules that are necessary micronutrients for human health. Organic molecules meaning mostly made of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, with occasionally nitrogen, sulfur, or others. So, things that aren’t considered vitamins include A) macronutrients – things we need a large amount of (ie carbs, protein, and fats), B) minerals, like potassium, magnesium, zinc, etc, these are not organic molecules, and C) non-essential nutrients, like creating, taurine, etc.
Now there are some things that probably should be given a vitamin designation, but haven’t, like choline. It pretty much fits the criteria. And some vitamins have an alternate name, like niacin, which is one of the B vitamins (B3? don’t remember for sure)
A vitamin is an organic molecule that humans need a small amount of to survive, but can’t make themselves.
When they first started discovering vitamins, they just named them vitamin A, B, C, etc, all the way to M. But as they did more research, they realized that a lot of these vitamins were just different forms of vitamin B, so they changed the names to reflect that. Then they discovered that some are needed in large quantities, and that some weren’t essential, and that some were in fact produced within the body. So none of those fit that definition, and were cut from the list. After all the cuts and reclassifications, we’re left with the list you know today.
Since the rest of your questions have been answered, I’ll explain just the weird naming/numbering of the vitamins. In short, vitamins were discovered and named in the early 1900s. At that time, they were named vitamin A, B,C,D,E,F,G,H,I,J and K.
With more research and better techniques, a bunch of these vitamins were discovered not to be real things (or not important). Others (most notably vitamin B) were discovered to be not a single chemical, but a family of related chemicals.
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