What are vitamins? Most people think pill. Thinking pill brings to mind confusing images of medicine and drugs. Though vitamins can do and certainly often do the work of both medicine and drugs, they are neither.

Quite simple vitamins are organic substance necessary for life. Vitamins are essential to the normal functioning of our bodies and save for a few exceptions cannot be manufactured or synthesized internally. Necessary for our growth, vitality and general wellbeing, they are found in minute quantities in all natural foods. We must obtain vitamins from these foods or from dietary supplements. What we have to keep in mind is that supplements which are available in tablet, capsule, liquid. powder and injection forms, are still just food substances and unless synthetic are also derived from living plants and animals. It is impossible to sustain life without all the essential vitamins.

What are vitamins?

A lot of people think vitamins can replace food. They cannot. In fact, vitamins cannot be assimilated without ingesting food. There are a lot of erroneous beliefs about vitamins and I hope to clear up most of them.

Vitamins are not pep pills and have no caloric or energy value of their own.

Vitamins are not substitutes for protein or for any other nutrients, such as minerals, fats, carbohydrates, water or even for each other.

Vitamins themselves are not the components of our body structures.

You can not take vitamins, stop eating and expect to be healthy.

How they work

If you think of the body as an automobile combustion engine and vitamins as spark plugs, you have a fairly good idea of how these amazing minute food substances work for us. Vitamins are components of our enzymes that act like spark plugs, energize and regulate our metabolism, keeping us tuned and functioning at a high level of performance. But a deficiency in even one vitamin can endanger the whole human body.

Should you take vitamins.

Since vitamins occur in all organic material, some containing more of one vitamin than another and in greater or lesser amounts you could say that if you ate the “right” foods in a well balanced diet, you would get all the vitamins you need. And you , would probably be right. The problem is, very few of us are able to arrange this mythical diet. According to Dr. Daniel T. Quigley, author of The National Malnutrition, “Everyone who has in the past eaten processed sugar, while flour, or canned food has some deficiency disease, the extend of the disease depending on the percentage of such deficient food in the diet.” In the October 2002 Journal of the American Medical Association reported a research study stating categorically that every adult should take a multiple vitamin, since it is impossible to obtain all the nutrients needed in our body daily food intake today.

What are nutrients?

They’re more than vitamins, though people often think they are the same thing, Carbohydrates, proteins (which are made up of amino acids), fats, minerals, vitamins, and water are all nutrients absorbable components of foods and necessary for good health. Nutrients are necessary for energy, organ function, food utilization and cell growth.

The difference between Micronutrients and Macronutrients.

Micronutrients, like vitamins and minerals, do not themselves provide energy. The macronutrients carbohydrates, fat and protein do that, but only when there are sufficient micronutrients to release them. The amount of micronutrients you need for proper health is vastly different, but each is important.

How nutrients get to work

Nutrients basically work through digestion. Digestion is a process of continuous chemical simplification of materials that enter the body through the mouth. Materials are split by enzymatic action into smaller and simpler chemical fragments, which can then be absorbed through walls of the digestive tract and open ended muscular tube, more than thirty feet ling, which passes the body and finally enter the blood stream.

Information found from the Vitamin Bible, author Earl Mindell, R,p.h, Ph,D with Hester Mundis