Vitamin Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
6correct to beat the crowd
88 free Vitamin trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Vitamins trivia for anyone who has ever wondered why the alphabet jumps from vitamin E to vitamin K, why British sailors were called limeys, or why a slice of polar-bear liver can kill you. This quiz covers all thirteen vitamins that human bodies need: the four fat-soluble ones (A, D, E and K) and the nine water-soluble ones (vitamin C and the eight B vitamins). The questions move through the deficiency diseases that revealed each vitamin (scurvy, beriberi, pellagra, rickets, pernicious anaemia), the scientists who chased them down (James Lind, Christiaan Eijkman, Casimir Funk, Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, Dorothy Hodgkin) and the odd facts along the way: bright yellow urine, egg-white injury, nicotinic acid renamed to keep bread from sounding like tobacco, and rice engineered to make beta-carotene. Questions run from easy to expert, and every answer was checked against a reference page and carries its source. If you enjoy this one, try our human body, chemistry and famous scientists quizzes next.
30 of 88 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Eight of the 13 essential vitamins share which letter of the alphabet?
B
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.
Q 02Which four vitamins are fat-soluble?
A, D, E and K
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.
Q 03Who coined the word 'vitamine' in 1912?
Casimir Funk
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.
Q 04Why did 'vitamine' lose its 'e' in 1920?
Because not all vitamins turned out to be amines
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.
Q 05Without vitamin C the body cannot properly make which protein, so wounds stop healing and gums bleed?
Collagen
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.
Q 06Which Scottish naval surgeon ran a 1747 trial showing that citrus fruit could cure scurvy?
James Lind
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.
Q 07The Royal Navy's adoption of citrus juice against scurvy gave British sailors which nickname?
Limeys
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.
Q 08British wartime propaganda credited which vitamin A-rich vegetable with giving RAF pilots the power to see in the dark?
Carrots
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.
Q 09Lucy Wills cured anaemic pregnant women in 1930s Bombay with which salty spread, leading to the discovery of folate?
Marmite
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.
Q 10James Cook got his wary Endeavour crew to eat which vitamin C-rich food by serving it at the officers' table first?
Sauerkraut
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.
Q 11Which disease of polished-white-rice diets is caused by a lack of thiamine?
Beriberi
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.
Q 12Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome, a brain disorder caused by a lack of thiamine, is most often linked to heavy use of what?
Alcohol
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.
Q 13Japan's navy all but ended a crippling disease in the 1880s by mixing which grain into the sailors' white rice?
Barley
Q 21Which oil were generations of northern European children spoon-fed to keep their bones from bowing?
Cod liver oil
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.
Q 22Which childhood bone disease, marked by bowed legs, results from a lack of vitamin D?
Rickets
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.
Q 23Which organ performs the final step that turns vitamin D into its active form, calcitriol?
Kidney
The liver first makes calcifediol; the kidneys hydroxylate it again, which is why kidney disease often brings vitamin D deficiency.
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'.
Q 14Christiaan Eijkman's Nobel-winning work on polished versus unpolished rice used which animals?
Chickens
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.
Q 15Vitamin C taken with a meal helps the gut absorb far more of which mineral from plant foods?
Iron
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.
Q 16Why does the vitamin alphabet jump straight from E to K?
F to J were dropped or renamed
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.
Q 17Vitamin K takes its letter from the German and Danish spelling of which word?
Coagulation
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.
Q 18Natto, a sticky Japanese breakfast dish unusually rich in vitamin K2, is made by fermenting what?
Soybeans
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.
Q 19Patients on which blood-thinning drug are told to keep their vitamin K intake steady?
Warfarin
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.
Q 20Weight for weight, which raw salad vegetable has more than twice the vitamin C of an orange?
Red pepper
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.
Q 24Human skin makes which vitamin for itself when sunlight falls on it?
Vitamin D
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.
Q 25Ancient Egyptian and Roman healers prescribed liver for which problem with a patient's sight?
Night blindness
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.
Q 26Eating the liver of which Arctic animal can cause acute vitamin A poisoning?
Polar bear
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.
Q 27Jaundice yellows which part of the body that the harmless orange tint from eating too many sweet potatoes leaves untouched?
The eyes
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.
Q 28'Golden Rice' was genetically engineered to produce which vitamin precursor?
Beta-carotene
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.
Q 29Vitamin B12 is made only by microbes, so which group is advised to take it as a supplement?
Vegans
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.
Q 30Which metal sits at the centre of the vitamin B12 molecule?
Cobalt
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.