88 Fun Facts About Vitamin

Eight of the 13 essential vitamins share which letter of the alphabet?

B: eight separate compounds share the letter, and the gaps in their numbering, such as the missing B4, mark substances that were struck off once they proved not to be vitamins at all.

Which four vitamins are fat-soluble?

A, D, E and K dissolve in fat, so the body stores them instead of flushing the surplus out in urine, which is why heavy supplement doses can build up to harmful levels.

Who coined the word 'vitamine' in 1912?

Casimir Funk, a Polish-born biochemist working in London, built the word on vita, Latin for life, because he was convinced that diseases such as pellagra came from the lack of a vital trace nutrient.

Why did 'vitamine' lose its 'e' in 1920?

Because not all vitamins turned out to be amines: Jack Drummond proposed the trim once vitamin A looked amine-free, and in the same short note suggested simply lettering them A, B and C.

Without vitamin C the body cannot properly make which protein, so wounds stop healing and gums bleed?

Collagen is the body's scaffolding protein, and the enzymes that stabilise it need vitamin C; in scurvy the blood vessels and connective tissue weaken, so sufferers bruise easily and can lose their teeth.

Which Scottish naval surgeon ran a 1747 trial showing that citrus fruit could cure scurvy?

James Lind split twelve scurvy-stricken sailors into pairs and gave each pair a different remedy; within six days one of the two given oranges and lemons was fit for duty, in one of the first clinical trials.

The Royal Navy's adoption of citrus juice against scurvy gave British sailors which nickname?

Limeys: the Navy later swapped Mediterranean lemons for West Indian limes, which fight scurvy far less well, and the disease crept back on polar expeditions.

British wartime propaganda credited which vitamin A-rich vegetable with giving RAF pilots the power to see in the dark?

Carrots: the tale explained away night-fighter successes that really came from newly fitted airborne radar, though historians dispute whether it was ever meant to fool the Germans.

Lucy Wills cured anaemic pregnant women in 1930s Bombay with which salty spread, leading to the discovery of folate?

Marmite was the cheapest yeast extract she could find, and it both prevented and cured the anaemia; its unknown active nutrient was called the 'Wills factor' until it was identified in the 1940s as folate.

James Cook got his wary Endeavour crew to eat which vitamin C-rich food by serving it at the officers' table first?

Sauerkraut: the sailors refused it until Cook had it served daily to the officers and left it optional for everyone else, and within a week demand was so high he had to ration it.

Which disease of polished-white-rice diets is caused by a lack of thiamine?

Beriberi spread through Japan as polished white rice went from a luxury to the everyday staple: milling strips off the bran, and most of the grain's thiamine goes with it.

Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome, a brain disorder caused by a lack of thiamine, is most often linked to heavy use of what?

Alcohol does double damage: heavy drinkers tend to eat poorly and the drink itself hampers the gut's uptake of thiamine, and left untreated the confusion can harden into permanent amnesia.

Japan's navy all but ended a crippling disease in the 1880s by mixing which grain into the sailors' white rice?

Barley went into the rice after sailors rejected the bread that navy doctor Takaki Kanehiro had first prescribed; the sickness all but vanished, and he was later nicknamed the 'Barley Baron'.

Christiaan Eijkman's Nobel-winning work on polished versus unpolished rice used which animals?

Chickens in his Java laboratory went lame on leftover polished rice from the military hospital kitchen, then recovered when a new cook refused to hand over army rice for civilian birds.

Vitamin C taken with a meal helps the gut absorb far more of which mineral from plant foods?

Iron in plants comes in a form the gut absorbs poorly, and vitamin C eaten at the same meal boosts the uptake, while tea and calcium supplements do the opposite.

Why does the vitamin alphabet jump straight from E to K?

F to J were dropped or renamed: vitamin G became B2 and vitamin H became B7 once they were recognised as part of the B group, while others turned out to be false leads.

Vitamin K takes its letter from the German and Danish spelling of which word?

Coagulation: Henrik Dam noticed unexplained bleeding in animals on an experimental diet, traced it to a missing nutrient, and reported it in a German journal as the Koagulationsvitamin.

Natto, a sticky Japanese breakfast dish unusually rich in vitamin K2, is made by fermenting what?

Soybeans are cooked and then fermented with the bacterium Bacillus subtilis, and it is the microbes rather than the beans that make the vitamin K2.

Patients on which blood-thinning drug are told to keep their vitamin K intake steady?

Warfarin works by blocking the body's recycling of vitamin K, so a sudden change in leafy greens upsets the dose; it first went on sale in 1948 as a rat poison.

Weight for weight, which raw salad vegetable has more than twice the vitamin C of an orange?

Red pepper tops 120 mg per 100 g, and raw is the way to keep it: heat breaks the vitamin down, and cooking water carries more of it away.

Which oil were generations of northern European children spoon-fed to keep their bones from bowing?

Cod liver oil was a folk remedy long before anyone knew why it worked; in 1889 a surgeon added it to the diet of London Zoo's dying lion cubs, and the litters that followed thrived.

Which childhood bone disease, marked by bowed legs, results from a lack of vitamin D?

Rickets was so widespread in 17th-century England that much of Europe came to call it 'the English disease', a name that survives in several languages.

Which organ performs the final step that turns vitamin D into its active form, calcitriol?

The liver first makes calcifediol; the kidneys hydroxylate it again, which is why kidney disease often brings vitamin D deficiency.

Human skin makes which vitamin for itself when sunlight falls on it?

Vitamin D forms when the sun's ultraviolet B rays strike a cholesterol compound in the skin, which is why cloud, air pollution and high latitudes all cut the supply.

Ancient Egyptian and Roman healers prescribed liver for which problem with a patient's sight?

Night blindness is the first sign of vitamin A deficiency, and liver is where animals store the vitamin, so the remedy really worked, thousands of years before anyone could say why.

Eating the liver of which Arctic animal can cause acute vitamin A poisoning?

Polar bear liver holds so much vitamin A that a single meal can poison a person, which is why Inuit hunters traditionally leave it uneaten, along with the liver of the bearded seal.

Jaundice yellows which part of the body that the harmless orange tint from eating too many sweet potatoes leaves untouched?

The eyes stay white because the vegetable pigment lodges in the skin's tough outer layer, thickest on the palms and soles, whereas the bile pigment behind jaundice stains the whites of the eyes too.

'Golden Rice' was genetically engineered to produce which vitamin precursor?

Beta-carotene, which the body turns into vitamin A, gives the grain its yellow colour; the rice was engineered for regions where a shortage of that vitamin costs children their sight.

Vitamin B12 is made only by microbes, so which group is advised to take it as a supplement?

Vegans are advised to use supplements or fortified foods such as plant milks and nutritional yeast, because animal products are otherwise the only reliable supply of the vitamin.

Which metal sits at the centre of the vitamin B12 molecule?

Cobalt gives the vitamin its chemical name, cobalamin; no other vitamin is built around a metal, and cattle and sheep rely on gut bacteria to assemble it from traces of the element in their feed.

Who determined vitamin B12's structure by X-ray crystallography, winning the 1964 Nobel Prize in Chemistry?

Dorothy Hodgkin had already cracked penicillin, and she kept at insulin for 35 years, finally solving it in 1969, five years after the prize.

Pellagra, the disease of the 'four Ds', is caused by a deficiency of which vitamin?

Niacin deficiency brings diarrhoea, dermatitis, dementia and death; it reached epidemic scale in the American South in the early 1900s and faded once the vitamin was added to everyday foods.

Nixtamalization, the tortilla-maker's guard against pellagra, means soaking maize in what?

Limewater, an alkaline solution of mineral lime, is the traditional soak; it kept pellagra unknown in Mexico, but maize crossed the Atlantic without the technique and the disease followed it.

To prove pellagra came from diet, Joseph Goldberger induced it in healthy volunteers from which group?

Prisoners on a Mississippi prison farm ate a corn-heavy diet for months in exchange for pardons from the governor; when they sickened, Goldberger had his proof that food, not a germ, was the cause.

Why was the vitamin nicotinic acid given the new name niacin in 1942?

To avoid a link with tobacco: the vitamin was about to be added to everyday foods, anti-smoking campaigners warned it would foster the cigarette habit, and American doctors coined a new word from 'nicotinic acid'.

Excess of which vitamin famously turns urine bright yellow?

Riboflavin takes its name from flavus, Latin for yellow, and the body cannot store a surplus, so whatever a vitamin pill oversupplies is flushed straight out in colour.

Avidin, a protein in raw egg whites, blocks absorption of which B vitamin?

Biotin is gripped so tightly by avidin that it passes through the gut unabsorbed; cooking breaks the grip, so it takes a long diet of raw egg whites to cause a deficiency.

The B vitamin once labelled 'vitamin H' is said to take the letter from the German words for which two things?

Hair and skin, Haar und Haut in German, is the usual account: Paul Gyorgy used the label for the factor that cured rats of the fur loss and rashes brought on by raw egg white.

The word 'folic' in folic acid comes from the Latin word for what?

Leaf, folium in Latin: the name was coined in 1941 because the vitamin abounds in green leaves, and the team that first isolated it worked from spinach.

Folic acid supplements in pregnancy reduce the risk of which kind of birth abnormality?

Neural tube defects such as spina bifida arise so early, often before a woman knows she has conceived, that health agencies advise folic acid for anyone who could become pregnant.

'Tocopherol', the chemical name of vitamin E, comes from Greek words meaning what?

To bear offspring, from the Greek tokos and pherein: the vitamin was found in 1922 as the missing factor without which pregnant rats could not carry their young to a live birth.

Which Hungarian biochemist won the 1937 Nobel Prize for work on vitamin C?

Albert Szent-Gyorgyi first isolated the substance from adrenal glands and named it 'hexuronic acid'; only later did he and Joseph Svirbely show it was the long-sought cure for scurvy.

Which of these animals, like humans, cannot make its own vitamin C?

Guinea pigs share humans' broken gene for making vitamin C, as two Norwegian doctors found by accident: they fed the animals a grain diet while studying another disease and got scurvy instead.

Which double Nobel laureate popularised megadoses of vitamin C against the common cold in 1970?

Linus Pauling's 1970 book urged huge daily doses, but trials since have found that regular supplements do not stop people catching colds and only slightly shorten them.

To prevent birth defects, many countries require folic acid to be added to which staple food?

Flour: the United States made folic acid compulsory in bread flour and other refined grain products in 1998 and saw fewer babies born with spina bifida, and many other countries have adopted the measure.

Vitamins C and E are both antioxidants, protecting cells by neutralising unstable molecules known as what?

Free radicals set off chain reactions that damage cells: vitamin E breaks the chain inside fatty membranes, and vitamin C then restores the spent vitamin E so it can work again.

Laetrile, a discredited cancer remedy sold as 'vitamin B17', is extracted from the kernels of which fruit?

Apricots: their kernels contain amygdalin, which is no vitamin at all and releases cyanide in the body, so the 'B17' label was pure marketing and users have been poisoned.

The body can make niacin from which amino acid, found in turkey, milk and eggs?

Tryptophan is converted by the liver, about 60 mg yielding 1 mg of niacin, so a protein-rich diet can make up for a shortfall of the vitamin itself.

Britain's wartime tale that carrots gave RAF pilots night vision hid which secret technology?

Radar was newly adopted, and the carrot myth was spread as propaganda to explain how British pilots could fight in the dark.

Which potassium-rich fruit lends its name to an informal unit for comparing tiny doses of radiation?

Banana equivalent dose is the unit, because a trace of the fruit's potassium is naturally radioactive. Eating one adds no lasting dose, as the body keeps its potassium level steady.

Which cartoon family's characters have been sold as chewable children's vitamins since 1968?

The Flintstones vitamins left Betty Rubble out for more than twenty years. She joined the line-up in 1995, after a fan campaign and a telephone poll, replacing the family car.

An iron ingot dropped into Cambodian cooking pots to boost dietary iron is shaped like which animal?

Fish are a symbol of good luck in local folklore, so villagers were willing to cook with the ingot. They had already rejected a plain disc and one shaped like a lotus flower.

Which English spa town gave its name to the magnesium sulphate crystals used as bath salts?

Epsom, in Surrey, had a bitter saline spring from which the salt was produced. The water rises where the porous chalk of the North Downs meets impervious London clay.

George Wald shared a Nobel Prize for discovering how vitamin A serves which of the senses?

Sight depends on vitamin A, which Wald identified in the retina while working in Germany on a research grant. He shared the 1967 prize with Haldan Hartline and Ragnar Granit.

Which leafy green's fame as an outstanding source of iron has been called an academic urban legend?

Spinach is no better a source of dietary iron than many other vegetables. Popeye himself said in a 1932 strip that he ate it because it was full of vitamin A.

Potassium iodide tablets are given out after nuclear accidents to shield which gland from radiation?

Thyroid tissue soaks up iodine, so saturating it with the stable kind keeps the radioactive form out. The tablets proved their value after the Chernobyl disaster in 1986.

A compound of the trace mineral selenium is the active ingredient in shampoos for which complaint?

Dandruff shampoos such as Selsun Blue rely on selenium disulfide, which works as an antifungal against the Malassezia fungi that live on the scalp.

Which mineral, the most plentiful in the human body, is stored almost entirely in bones and teeth?

Calcium makes up about a kilogram of an adult's weight, with 99% of it in the skeleton and teeth. The rest helps blood to clot and muscles to squeeze and relax.

Grand Rapids, Michigan, hosted a landmark trial of adding which mineral to the public water supply?

Fluoride was added from 1945 to test the hypothesis that it would prevent cavities. After 11 years, the decay rate among the city's children born since had dropped by more than 60%.

One ounce of which tree nut supplies around ten times the recommended daily value of selenium?

Brazil nuts average 544 micrograms of selenium an ounce, against a daily value of 55. The amount varies considerably from one batch of nuts to the next.

Which Alpine country, where goitre was once endemic, became the world's first to iodise its salt?

Switzerland adopted iodised salt across its cantons from 1922, in the world's first food fortification programme. Michigan copied the Swiss practice two years later.

Sodium, potassium and chloride are grouped under which name, familiar from sports-drink labels?

Electrolytes are substances that conduct electricity as dissolved ions. Commercial solutions replace them for athletes and for sick children who have lost fluids.

Which collective name do nutritionists use for vitamins and minerals together?

Micronutrients are needed in amounts generally under 100 milligrams a day, while macronutrients such as protein and fat are eaten by the gram.

Which part of a hen's egg holds all of its fat and all of its vitamins A and E?

Yolk contains all of an egg's fat and cholesterol and nearly half of its protein, so the vitamins that dissolve in fat end up there too.

Most of the three to four grams of iron in an adult's body is found in which protein?

Haemoglobin, packed into red blood cells, uses that iron to carry oxygen from the lungs to every tissue in the body.

Isotretinoin, a drug closely related to vitamin A, treats severe cases of which skin condition?

Acne that resists antibiotics can be treated with the drug, sold as Accutane. It so closely resembles a natural vitamin A derivative that it causes birth defects if taken in pregnancy.

Which shellfish packs more zinc into a serving than any other food, including red meat?

Oysters top every table of zinc content, yet beef supplies about 20% of the zinc Americans get from food, simply because far more of it is eaten.

A shortage of zinc, a mineral needed by hundreds of enzymes, can interfere with which two senses?

Taste and smell both suffer when zinc runs short. The mineral also supports healthy growth through pregnancy, infancy, childhood and adolescence.

Which popular drink contains substances that bind dietary iron, so that the body cannot use it?

Black tea taken with a meal locks up some of the food's iron. Citrus fruit, strawberries and tomatoes do the opposite and increase absorption.

The WHO advises two doses of vitamin A for young children with suspected cases of which disease?

Measles hits hardest in malnourished children who are short of vitamin A. The first dose is given immediately on diagnosis and the second on the following day.

Pagophagia, a compulsion that often signals iron deficiency, is the craving to chew what?

Ice cravings have been seen to fade once iron supplements are given. The name comes from the Greek pagos, meaning frost, and phago, to eat.

Haemochromatosis, an inherited iron overload, is treated with a modern form of which old practice?

Bloodletting, renamed therapeutic phlebotomy, is the mainstay treatment. Drawing about as much as a donor gives removes excess iron, and regular sessions can prevent the late damage.

Too much sodium, eaten mostly as table salt, is linked in some people to a rise in which vital sign?

Blood pressure and blood volume are both controlled with the help of sodium. Most of it reaches the diet as sodium chloride, and processed meats and canned soups carry plenty.

Which mineral, vital to DNA and bone, did alchemist Hennig Brand discover by boiling down urine?

Phosphorus turned up in 1669 while Brand was hunting for the philosopher's stone. It was the first element to be discovered that had not been known since ancient times.

Pantothenic acid, also known as vitamin B5, owes its name to a Greek word meaning what?

From everywhere, or from all quarters, is the sense of the Greek pantothen, chosen because the vitamin occurs in almost all foods. Deficiency is very rare in humans.

Which Japanese soybean food is the richest known natural source of vitamin K2?

Natto is made by fermenting soybeans with a strain of Bacillus subtilis, and it is the bacteria that produce the vitamin.

Vitamin A's co-discoverer Elmer McCollum started America's first nutrition colony of which animals?

Rats that had stopped growing in his feeding trials recovered when given a little extract of egg or butter. The colony, begun in 1908, was the first in America used for nutrition research.

Hydroxocobalamin, an injectable form of vitamin B12, doubles as an antidote to which poison?

Cyanide is converted by the drug into cyanocobalamin, a far less toxic form of the vitamin. It is first-line therapy, and is approved for victims of smoke inhalation.

Heavy recreational use of which inhaled drug can damage nerves by inactivating vitamin B12?

Laughing gas, or nitrous oxide, inactivates the vitamin, so chronic abuse can cause a deficiency and neurological damage. It is also the gas in whipped-cream canisters.

Vitamin B6 is prescribed to protect the nerves of patients taking isoniazid for which disease?

Tuberculosis treatment with isoniazid can drain the body of vitamin B6 and injure the peripheral nerves. Supplements in the pyridoxine form are given to those most at risk.

Intrinsic factor, the protein the body needs to absorb vitamin B12, is produced in which organ?

Stomach cells produce it, and its discoverer William Castle showed that its absence is what causes pernicious anaemia.

Most animals make their own vitamin C through a chain of enzymes starting from which simple sugar?

Glucose is the starting material, but in humans the final enzyme in the chain is highly mutated and does not work. All of the vitamin therefore has to come from food.

Leafy greens supply magnesium because every molecule of which plant pigment contains the mineral?

Chlorophyll was found to hold magnesium in 1906, the first time the element had been detected in living tissue. Most dietary magnesium comes from dark green, leafy vegetables.

Which Australian bush fruit holds some of the highest vitamin C levels of any natural source?

Kakadu plum has been recorded at up to 5,300 mg per 100 g, against about 50 mg for oranges. It has been a traditional bush food and medicine for centuries.

Which English biochemist shared a 1929 Nobel Prize with Christiaan Eijkman for work on vitamins?

Frederick Hopkins had argued that food contains unknown 'accessory food factors' that are needed for health, the substances later renamed vitamins.

Kayser–Fleischer rings, seen around the cornea in Wilson's disease, are deposits of which metal?

Copper was shown to be in the rings in 1934, after doctors had first blamed silver. Wilson's disease is a rare inherited disorder that leaves the metal in the brain and other organs.

Vitamin E was first isolated in pure form at Berkeley in the 1930s from which plant oil?

Wheat germ oil yielded the pure compound to Herbert Evans and Gladys Emerson in 1935. The vitamin had been discovered in 1922 and was first synthesised in 1938.

The 2016 World Food Prize honoured an orange-fleshed, vitamin A-rich variety of which staple crop?

Sweet potato bred with orange flesh was hailed by the prize as the single most successful example of breeding extra nutrients into a staple crop. The varieties are also hardy and high-yielding.