This video is all about a very familiar topic, which is vitamins and minerals.
We’ve been told throughout our lives to eat certain foods because they will give us our necessary amounts of vitamins or minerals. So the obvious question is what are vitamins and minerals? The main idea is that there are certain things that your body needs in order to function properly, but your body cannot produce these things on its own.
To further classify these non-producible materials, we can divide them into organic or inorganic substances. Organic is simply a more complex way of saying that the substance has carbons involved in it. Most molecules in life fall under this category as the majority of materials in biological systems involve carbon. So if the things that the body is unable to produce are organic, they are classified as vitamins. Some of the most common vitamins that you may hear can be like Vitamin A, Vitamin D, Vitamin E, Vitamin K, Vitamin C, Vitamin B12, and many more. Even these vitamins can be further divided by the notation of whether they are soluble in fat or not. For example, Vitamins A, D, E, and K are fat-soluble, which means that they are able to dissolve in fat. However, Vitamin B12 and C are water-soluble, which means they are able to dissolve in water.
Fat-soluble vitamins are far easier to overdose on. Since they’re soluble in fat, they’re able to stay in your body for a lot longer than water-soluble vitamins. Since water-soluble vitamins are very easy to flush out of your system, it’s more common to have a deficiency in these types of vitamins. You might have had people tell you that you should eat carrots because they’re good for your eyes. And that is true, but the reason why it’s good for your eyes is that carrots contain a substance called beta-carotene. The “carotene” part of the word is not a coincidence, it literally comes from Latin for “carrot”. So carotenes are these pigment molecules that give the carrots their orange colour. Once beta-carotene is consumed by your body, it’s a precursor for vitamin A, which is essential for your eyes and many other functions in the body.
Oranges are fruits that are commonly known for being rich in vitamin C. Obviously, both carrots and oranges have dozens of different traces of vitamins and minerals, but these are just what they have the most amount of or are well known for. Vitamin C, as we talked about, is a water-soluble vitamin that is very valuable for the immune system. In a situation where you have a deficiency in vitamin C, you could develop a disease known as scurvy. This disease is not too common anymore, but hundreds of years ago, sailors would very often get scurvy because their diets were very limited and fruits and vegetables that contained vitamin C would go bad too early into the voyage. Due to this massive vitamin C deficiency, their collagen connective tissue would begin to break down. So it was a very horrible and painful disease that is luckily not very common anymore.
So what if there is something that your body needs, can’t produce, and is inorganic? Those are the things that we call minerals. What’s interesting is that most of the minerals that you’ll recognize are elements on the periodic table itself. They will be things like phosphorus, calcium, magnesium, potassium, iron, calcium, and many more. So all of these are also essential for your body. As we go further in our study of biology, you will see how phosphorus is very useful in molecules like ATP, which is the energy store. It’s even in the helices of DNA and RNA as we learned in the previous video. We’ll also see how calcium is useful not only for your bones but also for things such as muscle contractions, along with magnesium.
As we dive deeper into the functions of vitamins, we’re going to see them as coenzymes, things that help catalyze functions in the cell, and many other chemical reactions. Minerals are also going to be repetitively seen in things such as the powerhouse of the cell: mitochondria, the backbones of DNA and other nucleic acids, muscle contractions, and even in hemoglobin proteins. This is all really intriguing and exciting and they will all be introduced individually as we continue to venture into biology, and also branch out into other fields of science in the future, but for now, I thank you all for watching.
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