why do B vitamins have various numbers? Are they chemically related?
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Vitamins are biological molecules that are not able to be created by the human body and which you need in small quantities for proper health. Inorganic compounds like iron, calcium, etc. as well as macronutrients (proteins, carbs, fats, etc) are excluded.
The vitamins were classified by letter during the early 1900s, before we knew what the chemicals physically looked like. At first, we mainly figured them out by looking at the different diseases caused by deficiency (for example, scurvy is caused by lack of Vitamin C).
Over time, we discovered that some vitamins were actually multiple very different compounds, so we started creating sub-assignments under the letter. That’s how we got some of the B’s.
There were also some vitamins that we later discovered weren’t actual vitamins, or were so similar to other vitamins that they didn’t really deserve their own letter. Vitamin H was renamed to B7. Vitamin F ended up being a type of fat. That’s why there are so many weird holes in the vitamin naming system nowadays.
They are not particularly chemically related to each other, no. They were/are grouped together because there’s a lot of overlap in where they are found, and what they help the body do. Generally speaking, if you find one in nature in something that’s edible, you’re likely going to find the rest of them (or at least a few of the others). And they all help with metabolic processes that the body does. So they are found together and do similar things, but in terms of their actual chemical composition, they’re not related, no.
When vitamins were first being isolated, they didn’t realize what they called vitamin B was actually a mixture. As they started to actually isolate the compounds in the mixture, they were given numbers to differentiate them.
We used to think they were the same thing until we managed to separate them. Since the letters beyond B were already in use for other vitamins, we just added numbers for the newly separated vitamins.
For skipped letters and numbers, we called them vitamins until we later discovered that those chemicals do not meet our definition of vitamin
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