As i said, vitamins are essential nutritional molecules not made in our body, and they are required in small quantities. If the intake is inadequate, this can lead to vitamin deficiencies.
Our story starts in 1880 when Dr. Kanehiro Takaki reported that beriberi can be prevented by dietary changes (at that moment the beriberi was widespread amongst Japanese sailors). In the same time, in Dutch Indies, in Indonesia, their investigators found out that the rice bran prevents the disease, while the white rice it is make it happen. Dutch physician Christian Eijkman managed to produce a model of the disease in chicken, and they realise there is something responsible for this changes, and they called Thiamin - Vitamin B1. They realised that even very low quantities of thiamin can cure the disease.
Not much later after this, the accidental discovery of scurvy on guinea pigs allowed the isolation and identification of the ascorbic acid - vitamin C. Until then scurvy was a big problem for sailors at sea. The deficiency theory as a cause of these diseases was the final result of the animal studies regarding the guinea pigs. Polish biochemist Casimir Funk, working on the isolation of the anti-beriberi factor, discovered that this compound is an amine. He realised that similar compounds are responsible for pellagra, scurvy and rickets, and called them vital amines, or as they were shortened after, vitamines. Even if his theory was wrong, the name remained, and by international agreement, any organic compound required in small amounts for health reasons is called now a vitamin.
It was a paradigm shift for that era to recognize that poor nutrition ca cause diseases, and this revolutionized the medicine of the 19th century. The researchers were working alone, not knowing much about the progress made by others, Hopkins from Cambridge tested on rats in 1912, and found that a pure diet of protein fats and carbohydrates got them sick, but if you add just a 1/3 teaspoon of milk to this diet, every problem is solved. In the same time, in 1911, Hart and collaborators, at the University of Wisconsin, made similar observations with corn in cattle. In 1913 Mccollum and Davis proved the existence of an essential factor in butter and egg yolk, and in 1916 they proposed the names Fat soluble A (butter) and Fat soluble B (in milk whey). They found that at least one of these factors are soluble in water, and another is soluble in fat. In 1920, Drummond proposed to name them vitamin A,B,C, combining McCollum's nomenclature of A,B etc with Funk's vitamin.
Took a lot of research (1920-1930) to realise that the water soluble vitamin B is in fact a mixture of different unrelated vitamins, and the term vitamin B complex started to be used. The 8 B complex vitamins are soluble in water, contain nitrogen in their chemical structure and can be stored in large amounts in liver.
Naming the vitamins using letters, usually in the order of discovery, was a messy business initially. Vitamin B become B1, B2 and so on. Now the letter system may refer to a group of chemical compounds, closely related. Like for example when you say vitamin A - they are a group of several chemically related compounds, with a similar activity. All those similar substances are called vitamers.
Next post will be about the chemistry of minerals.
Yours truly,
George
Why not...
...have fun and win rewards on blockchain games (Splinterlands - Hearthstone-like card game) (Axie Infinity - NFT battle)
...use the world best cryptocurrency exchanges: Binance, Coinbase and Kucoin.
...get the higher rewards for your investments using Blockfi and Celsius.network, use referral 1235256530 for $20 bonus.
The most lucrative faucets that I use: ZEN, ZEC, PIVX, LTC and few others.
Get ETH while writing on Publish0x blog, using the Brave browser - Presearch search engine to maximize your BAT income.
Check my Lbry.tv channel in here. I am also writing on Read.cash (Bitcoin Cash rewards there).
Disclaimer: This text also can be re-published on my personal blogs, such as this one.
