Vitamins
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Inside the human body millions of chemical reactions are taking place, all the time. Everything you eat affects what happens inside your body – for better or worse.
Vitamins are essential; they’re only needed in small amounts but without them your body simply won’t work properly. Vitamins are broadly divided into two groups: fat-soluble and water-soluble.
Fat-soluble vitamins can be stored in the body – a mixed blessing. It means that you don’t need to eat foods containing them every day but, if they’re eaten in very high amounts, they build up in the body and can become harmful.
The fat-soluble vitamins are A, D, E and K.
Water-soluble vitamins can’t be stored by the body so foods containing them should be eaten every day. If they’re eaten in very high amounts your body gets rid of them in your urine. Unfortunately, water-soluble vitamins are easily destroyed by cooking and by exposure to the air.
The water-soluble vitamins are vitamin C and the B vitamins.
The group of eight B vitamins do similar – but not identical - jobs in the body. They often work together and they’re used in lots of systems in the body, like making new blood cells and helping to convert food you’ve eaten into energy.
These vitamins are so important that very serious problems can result from not eating enough of them.
When they were discovered they were named using numbers - B1, B2 and so on. As more research was conducted and more vitamins were discovered, this became confusing and the system was abandoned. You may see either name used, so here’s the full list:
