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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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.
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