Vitamins

A vitamin is a small molecule that your body needs to carry out a certain reaction. Your body has no way to create vitamin molecules itself, so the vitamin molecules must come in through food that you eat. The word vitamin is derived from a combination of words — vital amine — and was conceived by Polish chemist Casimir Funk in 1912. Funk isolated vitamin B1, or thiamine, from rice. This was determined to be one of the vitamins that prevented beriberi, a deficiency disease marked by inflammatory or degenerative changes of the nerves, digestive system and heart.

Vitamins, which may be consumed from a wide range of sources, are important to the human body in a variety of ways. One of the main roles of vitamins is to act as enzymes, or coenzymes that work with other metabolic enzymes, to catalyze and aid in the completion of biochemical reactions. The specific reactions involved, however, are vitamin dependent, each molecule being associated with certain kinds of activities. Vitamin B1, for instance, is associated with the metabolism of carbohydrates, fats, and proteins, while vitamin B12 is believed to facilitate red blood cell production in humans and other higher animals. Some of the other aspects of health that vitamins are concerned in include the formation of proteins crucial for blood clotting (vitamin K), inhibition of oxidation in body tissues (vitamin E), and the production of collagen (vitamin C).

Your body prefers to extract the vitamins and minerals from whole foods and excretes excess vitamins and minerals from supplements via in urine or feces. Remember how you use nutrients is based on genes that are thousands of years old and depended on food, not pills. There is however research to support higher than normal intakes of some vitamins or minerals for specific disease prevention or treatment.

A good nutritious and well balanced diet cannot be replaced by mere vitamin supplements. While essential to life, the vitamins themselves do not provide any energy to the body. Vitamins are just one essential component of the human diet and the body requires a lot of other substances besides vitamins.

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