Vitamins, vitamins, and more vitamins
“Why are there so many different types of vitamins?” you may ask. “And why are there more than one type of B vitamin? And how is vitamin D different from vitamin D3?” these are all valid questions for which the deep answer is that there are many different types of vitamins because of the beauty (and hodgepodgeness) of human evolution. Humans evolved over millions of years and if you count when we were not primates then over billions of years since all life on earth descended from a single life form. In fact, we are more closely related to certain microbes than those microbes are to other microbes. That is because we are eukaryotes, organisms with cell nuclei, like some bacteria, plants, and like fungi but other bacteria are prokaryotes, which do not have a cell nucleus. However, this cell difference does not directly nor indirectly explain why there are so many different types of vitamins and why we need to take multivitamin supplements to stay healthy.
Why is there vitamin D and vitamin D3?
Vitamin D3 is a subset of regular old vitamin D. Vitamin D can be obtained in a myriad of ways, such as via eating fish, taking vitamin D supplements, or eating other foods loaded with rich amounts of vitamin D that we can consume easily. In this way, vitamin D can be obtained just like vitamin A, B, C, E, and other vitamins and minerals. However, vitamin D3 is obtained when our skin is exposed to the Sun. It takes only 10 minutes of sun exposure for a patch of skin to produce all the vitamin D3 that it can in a day so there is no need to get sunburned to get vitamin D.
Why are there so many B vitamins?
Imagine if you thought that a group of things were really the same thing. For example, pretty much every single N*SYNC song sounds the same. So let us pretend for a moment that you are a human being who is an avid N*SYNC fan. This being the 1990′s, you bought every single CD and you also bought a few cassette tapes because your car does not have a CD player in it and when you go jogging your CD player’s ESP does not work very well. But then imagine that somebody told you, a few years after you started liking N*SYNC, that they actually have different songs and each song is not identical. This is what happened with B vitamins: When “vitamin B” was discovered in the 1920′s, researchers and scientists thought that it was only one vitamin, but they discovered pretty quickly that it was really a group of vitamins. The name “vitamin B” stuck to this day, though sometimes we hear the more accurate term “B vitamin group” of vitamins.
This is a guest post by Murray Newlands. Murray is the CEO and Founder of Influence People, a San Francisco-based online marketing consultancy. Murray has written many books, and most recently wrote What is Personal Branding? with Jim Kukral. Murray is also an avid blogger who writes on many topics, like credit reports, health and fitness, and making money at home.
Vitamins, Vitamins, and more Vitamins
December 23, 2011
Vitamins