I’ve always thought, as elements go, vanadium’s pretty sexy. It sounds vaguely threatening, in a menacing supervillain sort of way. I could see some mad scientist quite easily developing a vanadium ray that would destroy the sun or shoot the moon out of orbit or something. Yes, quite easily.
Anyways, my roommate brought home a vial of multivitamins the other day, and we were looking at the ingredient list to see what they were made of. To our surprise, each vitamin contained 1.25 micrograms of vanadium.
So what good does vanadium do for us? Will we develop X-ray vision? The ability to bend steel with our minds? I feel I should know before I order the teal spandex jumpsuit with matching “V” cape, not afterwards.
Well, aside from being named after the Norse Goddess of beauty and fertility, this site lists a few of the benefits vanadium might possibly provide, although they say that “Whether the element vanadium plays any nutritional, biochemical, or biologic role in the human is a question that has been extremely difficult to answer” and that there is no RDA for vanadium. It goes on to mention that vanadium deficiency has been shown to cause infertility in animals, and that (in experiments on animals) vanadium can mimic the effects of insulin and improve sensitivity to insulin in type I and II diabetes. Tests on humans, however, have not been conclusive, particularly since the dosages that may have beneficial effects also carry the risk of serious toxic effects.
Webelements.com notes that, in addition to being essential to sea squirts, “unless known otherwise, all vanadium compounds should be regarded as highly toxic.”