What are Vitamins?

We need vitamins daily to keep us going and living a healthy life, without them diseases can easily attack your systems and no one wants to be sick. A vitamin is an organic compound required as a nutrient in tiny amounts by an organism, it is an organic chemical compound called a vitamin when it cannot be synthesized in sufficient quantities by an organism, and must be obtained from the diet. Vitamins are classified by their biological and chemical activity, not their structure and each vitamin refers to a number of vitamer compounds that all show the biological activity associated with a particular vitamin. Vitamers by definition are convertible to the active form of the vitamin in the body, and are sometimes inter-convertible to one another, as well. Vitamins have diverse biochemical functions and some have hormone-like functions as regulators of mineral metabolism or regulators of cell and tissue growth and differentiation. Vitamins A may also be less tightly bound to enzyme catalysts as coenzymes, detachable molecules that function to carry chemical groups or electrons between molecules. Although these roles in assisting enzyme-substrate reactions are vitamins’ best-known function, the other vitamin functions are equally important. Vitamins are classified as either water-soluble or fat-soluble, water-soluble vitamins dissolve easily in water and, in general, are readily excreted from the body, to the degree that urinary output is a strong predictor of vitamin consumption.

For the most part, vitamins are obtained with food, but a few are obtained by other means. The reason that the set of vitamins skips directly from E to K is that the vitamins corresponding to letters F-J were either reclassified over time, discarded as false leads, or renamed because of their relationship to vitamin B, which became a complex of vitamins.

Now that you have a bit of knowledge about vitamins and the importance role they play in your body, maybe you will start taking them for your own health.