h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Entry: Vitamins! - A855065
Author: JustAnotherNumber - U206637

I hope the article was as informative as I meant it to be. I noticed three other "vitamins" articles, but none of them seemed to contain much real information, and none of them were in any stage of editing. So, tell me what you think...

This looks good. I didn't know much about vitamins, but I know a bit more now.

Would you like to put in a bit about overdosing on vitamins? I've heard that you can't get too much vitamin C, but that it is possible to take too much of the others, with harmful effects.

I've read that Polar Bear liver contain so much Vitamin A it's poisonous to humans... dunno if it's true though.

B6 (also known as piriton(sp?)) is given for women with pmt and has shown some benefits for people with neurological diseases, however over use can cause sensory loss and eventually permanent nerve damage.

How about mentioning RDA/I (reccomended daily allowance/intake) there should be something on the world health organisations website?

I don't know that this article is written with a go out and eat all the vitamins you can emphasis. Perhaps the possibility of poison is outside it's scope. If the author would like to include that feature:
All of the fatty vitamins can be deadly in overdose. More than 4-6g of Vitamin C can cause diarrhea. One of the B-complex vitamins can cause dangerous metabolic flushes, I forget which.

I smell an internal inconsistency in this article. It mentions that vitamins are the things you must eat that your body doesn't make, and yet Vitamin K has no RDA because it's made in the body. Why is K classed as a vitamin?

I know you need to do something to get D-go out in the sun, and then consume enough calcium that your body can metabolize it. For K, do we need to eat foods that have the right biota living on them already? Do we need to do something that those intestinal biota need to survive in order to get our K?

I find the IU for one of the vitamins to be peculiar, since everything else has a specific measure. Why is it written that way?

Hey-ho...

Since I am a chemist I think that this Entry lacks some depth. (The way we learn and think about Vitamins is totally different)... However , that might be just the geek inside of me. There are some oversimplifications in there, for example you don't need Vitamins for a better digestion - strictly speaking. Vitamins are mostly co-factors, or cooperating chemicals that work together with proteins....NNNNG!!! I'll stop here since I can feel the chemist resurfacing...

Maybe the title could be changed to something in the lines of "Nutrition Stuff on Vitamins", since the Entry is mostly about where to find them in your food, how much you need to eat and what is good for what. Maybe that approach would make my chemistry-geek-alter-ego more happy...

Well, it's just my 2p anyways...

HELL

Aha, one of those old vitamin articles is mine and never reached more than an embryonic stage.


One bit of info I wouldn't mind seeing is why there's gaps in the Vitamin B complex...
Reason? Best go and look it up but I know that some of the old molecules included in the original B complex are now known to be manufactured within the body. An example being the molecule inositol.

I too am in line with what Hell said above - also being a chemist However, I'm sure most people really don't care what the various vitamins specifically do within the cell. They are far more concerned with what their macroscopic effect on teh whol body is. Either treatment is suitable in my opinion

Like Hell I also didn't particularly like the innacuracy in this comment 'Vitamins are chemicals that your body needs in order to digest food properly'. Don't like it all. What they are is essential small molecules that perform functions within our cells that we need to eat in order for our bodies to function properly. Simpler organisms make them themselves but we have lost the ability as we can just as we don't need to - being capable of consuming them in adequate quantities. B-groups vitamins are almost exclusively enzyme cofactors. B-12 is a haem-like (as in the cofactor in the protein haemoglobin) molecule used in the building of some amino acids and nucleotides. Pryidoxine becomes the enzyme cofactor pyridoxal phosphate within the body - this is used in aminotransferase and racemase enyzme activities (don't worry about that too much ). Riboflavin becomes FAD (Flavin adenine dinucleotide) which is essential in the electron transfer processes occurring mostly in the cells' mitochondria. Folic acid is the starting block for a molecule called tetrahydrofolate which is also involved in amino acid biosythesis.
Retinol is the molecule that sits on the receptor molecules in our retinas that react to different wavelenghts of light.

I could go on if you like...

Anyway, good luck with the article. I can now shelve mine permanently with no regrets



Orcus

I think also that some vitamins may be made in the body but the process is too slow so we need to supplement the ammount of them by digesting them This is probably the case with Vitamin K but I'd have to look it up...

There is also Coenzyme Q for consideration. This now seems to be included in the viamins these days...

That and seleno-cysteine...



Hi Orcus, somehow I knew I was going to mee you here... Read you post above: "Simpler organisms[...]B-group [...] enzyme cofactors. B-12 is a haem-like[...]amino acids and nucleotides. Pryidoxine becomes the enzyme cofactor pyridoxal phosphate[...]aminotransferase and racemase enyzme activities"...

*Yes*! Thank god we are chemists.

See? That and the absence of 'cool' -tag formulae () led me to suggest a different title. This entry is not about the vitamins themselves, but the effect they have, where they can be found etc...

Apart from that I think the Entry is quite good.

HELL

a,e,d,k - There's a nice mnemonic for German speakers to remember those: "Edeka" (which is a supermarket chain)

Yo! Sir Bossel's back... Long time no see...

AEDK are the so-called 'fat soluble' vitamins - I learned that mnemonic in school too, but I always confused the water soluble with the fat soluble ones. I always had to remember an additional mnemo-byte 'Q: where can you buy butter (ie fat). A: EDEKA'

Cheers,

HELL

Oi! HELL posting at this time of day?? I hope you aren't in hospital!

Good Morning, Bossel ...

NO! It's just Anna's new laptop @ home.

HELL

I realize that I may have stumbled into some scientific waters above my head, but I was trying to write the article in the terms that the guide suggests; the language of an educated layman. The reason I wrote that the vitamins help the body fully digest food is that, for all practical and noticable purpose, that is what they do. Without them, we would not be able to either digest certain chemicals in our food or utilize chemicals vital to our survival that are already in our system.


I notice now that I probably was over-simplifying and in doing so probably misrepresenting some facts. I probably should take someone's suggestion and title the article something more to do with nutrition with vitamins as a sub-emphasis in the article. Unfortunatly, I haven't had the time to do so at this point...hopefully I will be able to effect the proper changes shortly.

Thanks for the help!

OOoh, sorry if I got scary there - keep up the good work!

Yeah sorry too... Did I also mention that I like the entry? check...

Yes. (uff - I wouldn't forgive myself otherwise)

Retitle the Entry and straighten that 'digestion' passage out and all's going good. Just that.

HELL

Made some changes...tell me how it looks now.

Looking good,

thanks for straightening those passages out.

One more minute thing: I didn't get the 'IU' from your footnote. You explain that IU is an (international) arbitrary unit. Well in that case I would get the impression that whenever I eat Vitamin D or E I should eat 30 of them... ('Units' *is* the darkest chapter in science.)

But then again I found this in the web:

"IU stands for International Units and is used for the measurement of drugs and vitamins. Webster's defines IU as: a quantity of a biologic (such as a vitamin) that produces a particular biological effect agreed upon as an international standard. What this means is that IU is dependent on the potency of the substance, and each substance would have a different IU to milligram conversion. For example, 1000 IU of Vitamin C would have a different weight than 1000 IU of Vitamin A."

I, personally, don't like this unit a bit... But, hey, that's life.

HELL

I was wondering whether each pill of any particular vitamin had it's own defined quantity of whole IU, or whether it was like the fiction of 'serving size' in the US of A, which is wholly arbitrary measurement on the part of the manufacturer. This is why I like Hell's version of the IU description, even though it's longer.

Firstly, I had to use IU for two of them because I couldn't find a gram reference (possibly my own shortcoming, or it may not be there, I dont know).

Secondly, I say (or hope I say ) that the pill's container should state the number of IU's that each pill constitutes. That number can be different for different pill manufacturers, so you have to determine the number of pills you must take yourself.