It’s just dawned on me that after a life of being told to include enough vitamins in my diet that I haven’t a scooby what vitamins actually do. Can someone please why its important to have enough vitamins?
In: Biology
Vitamins are compounds the body needs, but don’t become us, or give us energy.
For example, you eat some bread. A lot of the carbohydrates in the bread eventually get broken down into sugars which get turned into energy. The plant proteins in the bread get turned into our own proteins and become part of our body.
The processes that keep us alive are very complicated chemical processes, and vitamins are essential components that help us do that chemistry. We need to eat them because either our body can’t make them itself, or is bad at making them.
Scientists who studied diets would look at what a recommended balanced diet looked like and then start removing different elements one by one. When an animal would start to demonstrate certain effects from the lacking diet (compared to those receiving a normal diet), it would be determined that the missing element be considered as essential.
One guy named Casimir Funk (one of those names stuck in my noodle) found that a certain type of chemicals called “amines” were essential…or vital. He named them “vital amines” or “vitamins”.
Although vitamins are no longer strictly amines, each one has a different role in the body (skin, bones, neural networks). A lot of foods may start with vitamins in then, but due to heating, mashing, etc in the food processing, they can become ineffective. Because a lot of food travels long distances to reach us, or is heavily processed, it is recommended to supplement our diets with vitamins and other elements.
TLDR: each one is different and does different things.
Enzymes are types of proteins that help with different chemical reaction and processes in our body. Some enzymes need “certain organic molecules” to be present or else they will not fulfill their basic functions and these molecules are called coenzymes. Essentially, vitamins can be enzymes, coenzymes, and other organic molecules our body uses to maintain normal/favorable conditions,
Edit: they are needed in fairly low quantities and most of them need to be acquired through diet, our bodies can only make a couple by itself
A few years ago, a surprisingly entertaining book came out called [Vitamania](http://www.catherine-price.com/home1) that talks through what all the different vitamins do, including when you don’t have enough of them and when you have too much of them. Each one operates a bit differently. A lack of vitamin C, for example, will cause scurvy, which is kind of common knowledge. What isn’t common knowledge is that scurvy is horrific, causing (among other things) every wound that you have ever had to re-open in your skin. When you have wounds that heal, the skin does not repair itself to create the same former skin structure but is instead essentially stitched together with stuff that needs vitamin C to remain operational. Deprive yourself of vitamin C, and all the stitchings come undone.
The other responses do a good job of directly answering your question, but I’ll also add this: For the average person with no health conditions, supplementing with vitamins (e.g. gummy vitamins, vitamin water, etc) has zero known benefit. All it will do is make your urine more expensive as you pee out those costly supplements.
Notable exceptions include women who are or may get pregnant (need folic acid), babies in areas with inadequate sun exposure (need vitamin D), and older people at risk of osteoporosis (need calcium and vitamin D).
More info:
[https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/05/180528171511.htm](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/05/180528171511.htm)
[https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/wellness-and-prevention/is-there-really-any-benefit-to-multivitamins](https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/wellness-and-prevention/is-there-really-any-benefit-to-multivitamins)
(Edited to add links)
People used to not know why you needed to eat food other than to get energy, in the 1920s and 30s they discovered a bunch of specific things you need from food and vaguely labeled them all vitamins. This means that the label as a group is kinda flimsy and has a loose definition that kinda falls apart if you think about it too much. But the general idea is any chemical or group of chemicals that you’d die without that you get from food is a vitamin, except a bunch of things aren’t vitamins because they fit in some other category. Like we need salt to live but it’s a mineral we already knew about from before the 1920s so it doesn’t count and also we know the body can make vitamin D some but it still counts.
Basically the vitamins are real things you really need to not die, but the whole labeling thing is kinda iffy and arbitary. Like a ton of things are all vitamin A, vitamin B is a bunch of totally separate things, there is no vitamin F, the names are all a mess.
Vitamin A is beneficial for vision, the immune system, and general organ health. However, if you ever find yourself in this kind of situation: don’t eat polar bear liver. It contain’s too much Vitamin A and you’ll essentially overdose on it.
Every vitamin does something completely different but I’ll try to be as broad as possible.
Organic molecules are molecules that have a backbone of carbon chains, and our body is full of them. Some of them are extremely common in our body such as triglyceride which is the molecule that makes up most of our body fat. However, there are also some organic molecules that exist in extremely minute amounts in our body but are extremely crucial ingredients in our bodily functions. We call these molecules vitamins. And since this definition can encompass so many different kinds of molecules, asking what they do in general is a difficult question to answer. Vitamin B12 for instance is involved in the production of DNA and amino acids (the stuff that makes up proteins) and a deficiency can lead to a reduction in red blood cells.
The key thing to note about vitamins though is that they work best when there are a very specific amount of them in your body, and this amount is always is very very small. Which is why you have to take them in specific dosages at regular intervals like medicine. Too much of a certain vitamin can lead to health problems in the same way that too little of one can.
I hope that helps.
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