History of Vitamins (2 Minute Guide)

I hope you enjoy this quick guide 🙂

The chemical structures necessary for biological life that we call vitamins have an extremely interesting past. Half of what we now know was found through careful research; the remainder by looking at the public record. During this review, we’ll look at some of the key eras in which our understanding of vitamins developed.

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Egyptians

Pioneering scientists found that some foodstuffs could benefit diseases precipitated by inadequate vitamin levels. Historical Egyptians cured night blindness (a symptom of low levels of vitamin A) by feeding those affected pieces of liver. During the 1700s, scurvy (which indicates low levels of vitamin c) was treated with citrus fruits, which are excellent sources of vitamin C.

Vita, meaning life, and amine

During 1906, a scientist called Fredric Gowland Hopkins described a certain class of food that he decided was necessary for human health. The term vitamin was created out of this belief. It’s a combination of vita, meaning life, and amine, which was a compound believed to be common in all vitamins. This substance was incorrectly believed to be found in all vitamins because the scientist Cashmir Funk (yes, that’s his name!) believed that all vitamins had a nitrogen containing substance. This was later shown to be false, because vitamin C did not actually have any amines. So the ‘e’ at the end was left off. This removed the amine inference and gave us the word vitamin.

Thomas Osborne and Lafayette Mendel

The next major development in our understanding of vitamins was in 1913, when the scientists Thomas Osborne and Lafayette Mendel were at Yale. They found that butter had a fat soluble element that we would come to know as Vitamin A. Soon after, in 1916, Elmer V. McCollum discovered vitamin B, which is actually a complex of vitamins that work together.
Many of the vitamins that were isolated in the early 1900s were the result of animal experimentation.

Vitamin D and Rickets

Vitamin D was discovered by a scientist who was seeking to find a solution to rickets, a condition which is a result of too little vitamin D.
Vitamin C became the very first vitamin to be created in the laboratory in the year 1935.

Thirteen vitamins in total

There are thirteen vitamins in total that have been discovered. Four of them (Vitamins A, D, E and K) are soluble in fat, and 9 of them (all the B Vitamins and C) are soluble in water. Our body retains fat soluble vitamins while flushing out excess water soluble vitamins. For that reason, you should never exceed the RDA of Vitamins A, D, E, or K.

Discovery of Vitamin E and Vitamin K

The history of vitamins takes an odd leap between the discovery of Vitamin E and Vitamin K due to the fact that a number of vitamins were reclassified. This was because they resembled another vitamin. For example, there was once a Vitamin G. This element, with the scientific name Riboflavin, we now know as Vitamin B2 because of its relationship with the B-Complex group. Vitamin F was made of fatty acids, which were later classified again because, whilst essential to our body, they did not sufficiently fit the guidelines with which we classify vitamins.