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From A to K: Your Complete Vitamin Guide

You need vitamins like your life depends on it. Because it does. Vitamins—not the pills or gummies, but the actual molecules—are essential for human life. Your body needs vitamins to maintain your health. And there’s so many, you need a vitamins guide, too.

You’ve come to the right place. You’ll find the basics about these essential micronutrients. Learn what vitamins are and understand how they work in your body.

The simplest definition for a vitamin is “a substance that helps your body work properly.” They’re vital for your health. That’s where the “vita” in vitamin actually came from.

But that’s probably too basic. Minerals are essential for life. They help your body work properly, too. So, what sets a vitamin apart?

Vitamins are organic substances that act as coenzymes (non-protein parts of enzymes) and are important components of cellular chemical reactions. But they don’t provide energy the way carbohydrates do. And they aren’t building blocks like amino acids or fats.

Vitamins are all about getting a reaction. Remember, your cells are basically bags of chemical reactions. All the reactions require materials and machinery. Your cellular structures provide the machinery. Vitamins constitute an important part of the materials. They help enzymes spark a reaction—that’s what a coenzyme does.

Without vitamins, vital (there’s that word again) reactions don’t happen efficiently. Or they don’t happen at all. This throws off your metabolic processes—the same ones vitamins help regulate—which isn’t good for the maintenance of health. (And that’s putting it lightly.)

Since they’re so important, you’d think humans would have a long history of understanding vitamins. Nope. For thousands of years, people had no idea what vitamins were.

Sailors figured out a little citrus would stave off scurvy. But they didn’t know why. Eventually, researchers figured out that the absence of some substances had dire consequences for health. These substances were eventually isolated and identified. The mechanics of their cellular impact were mapped out.

When a new vitamin was discovered, it was assigned a letter. (The letters started at “A,” skipped a few—“F” to “J”—and eventually ended at “K.”) And today there are daily values to help you avoid deficiency, and information about optimal levels for health.

Now, science has shined a light on these essential substances, and showed how each play a different role in the body. Now you have the information you need to plot a course for your best health through diet and supplementation. Explore the essential vitamins and see why and how you they’re an essential part of your diet.