Well? I have been told all of my life to get all of my vitamins, a,b,c through z. But just what the heck are vitamins?
Chemical compounds, like most everything else we need to survive. That’s about the extent of my knowledge - oh, and Vitamin C is REALLY hard to make using an atom model kit.
rolls eyes
As opposed to all of those things that are not chemical compounds?
What makes them special, why are they not considerd protiens or minerals?
Yeah, we could be eating elements. We need oxygen, you know.
They’re quite complex, AFAIK, and assumably that makes them special. That’s more than your average 10th grader would know, so don’t roll your eyes at me.
You know there’s this thing called the Internet where you can find stuff like this:
http://www.encyclopedia.com/articles/13531.html
vitamin, group of organic substances that are required in the diet of humans and animals for normal growth, maintenance of life, and normal reproduction. Vitamins act as catalysts; very often either the vitamins themselves are coenzymes, or they form integral parts of coenzymes. A substance that functions as a vitamin for one species does not necessarily function as a vitamin for another species. The vitamins differ in structure, and there is no chemical grouping common to them all
Not to say that we eat oxygen…
To qoute that famous person Benny Hill:
You can’t make a vitamin but you can make a hormone.
d
I think the key thing about vitamins is that they are necessary chemical compounds that (most) people can’t synthesize themselves. I bet that you need all kinds of chemical compounds that your body can manufacture itself.
Just a guess, as I’m not a doctor.
Actually, I’ve often wondered what people did, say, hundreds of years ago before we had vitamins. Presumably they were just as crucial to our bodies back then. Were humans’ diets less deficient in vitamins before we had french fries and wonderbread? Did it take years of people dying of strange deficiencies before we figured it out? And how did the ingenious lettering and numbering system come about?
Just makes me wonder what people did before we developed some of the things we have today that we know humans need to live. Like air conditioning.
A dim memory from some college class tells me the name comes from vital amines.
I believe that in the past, many people got their vitamins the same way most people do today - by eating a balanced diet including fruits and vegetables.
But yes, people frequently developed vitamin deficiencies. The example that comes to mind is “scurvy” which is caused by a vitamin C deficiency. I believe there was a time in which people didn’t have a good grip on what caused scurvy, and there were even theories that it was contagious.
The traditional story is that scurvy affected sailors in large numbers, and that it was a triumph of modern science that people figured out the cause. Another legend is that English sailors took to carrying limes on long voyages to help battle scurvy, and thus earned the nickname “limeys.”
Taking an intro biochemistry course has helped me answer a lot of GQ dealing with that subject.
sailor summarizes it best. Vitamins differ from proteins because they are not polymers of amino acids. Vitamins are not minearals because minerals are chemical elements (iron, magnesium, etc) and vitamins have a more complicated chemical structure and contain more than one element.
Vitamins are important because they are important cofactors in enzymatic reactions. Enzymes, which are protein catalysts, enable living organisms to run reactions that normally do not occur at the relatively “mild” conditions that life requires (every day we do the equivalent of burning paper–which is mostly cellulose, which is a polymer of glucose. We do it at 37C, whereas temperatures are a bit higher when flames are involved).
If I had my biochem notes or text with me, I could go into great detail about which vitamins help out which reactions. Alas, I do not. Suffice to say they’re important, and you wouldn’t be around long without them. Luckily, we only need them in small quantities.
Why? I just grabbed my model kit and put a vitamin C together as easy as anything.
Most vitamins are not synthesized in the human body. To the extent that the substance is not synthesized in the body is included in the definition, then vitamin D is not a vitamin. The precursor of vitamin D is found in the human body and with the use of sunlight, the body can manufacture vitamin D. Nonetheless, it is agreed that this is a vitamin.
Vitamin C is a vitamin. No one is going to dispute this. Or at least no one since Linus Pauling died. His theory was that vitamin C is a hormone. Most animals can synthesize this “vitamin,” and he maintains that Man was able to in the beginning. He stated that Man was initially a vegetarian, for the most part, and by eating all those nice fruit that contain vitamin C, we lost that ability. Why keep an energy demanding function when we don’t need it? Now we lost that ability but we don’t ingest enough vitamin C from natural sources anymore.
Extrapolating from the amount of vitamin C animals manufacture, Pauling said that Man needs several grams! (NB, grams not mg.)a day. I forget the exact amount, but it was enormous. He and the guy who isolated this vitamin, Dr. Svent-Gorgi (sp?) took 20 grams a day. (They died of C OD. 
).
Incidentally, British sailors were known as “limeys,” because they ate limes. They didn’t know about vitamin C but found that if they didn’t suck on limes, they’d develop scurvy. When vitamin C was isolated, it was called (and still is called) ascorbic acid.
The accepted definition is that it is a necessary substance for life that the body cannot synthesize. They form coenzymes with peptides for catalytic functions. A deficiency of one will result in certain pathological conditions.
Vitamin K is produced in the body, but not by us. By “friendly” bacteria.
Probably because I was in grade 7 and had no background on atomic shape other than H[sub]2[/sub]O 
Very minor nitpick: the Royal Navy used lime juice, not whole limes. The original term was lime juicer.
[monty-python]
Australian prisoner: You slimey lime!
English officer: That’s Limey slime to you!
[/monty-python]