Understanding Vitamins
What are Vitamins?
Simply put, vitamins are organic compounds found in foods. These compounds are essential to our body and its function.
Vitamins were first discovered in the beginning of the 20th century by scientists who were able to extract them from food and find out what they do. Vitamins are found in plants and animals that we eat. Our bodies cannot make vitamins, so we need to ensure that we are getting enough in our daily diet or by supplementation.
Vitamins are considered micronutrients which means we do not need to have high doses of them like the macro nutrients protein, fat, carbohydrates. That being said, we need to have enough of each vitamin daily for our body to perform at its optimal level.
What Do Vitamins Do Exactly? Why do I need them?
Vitamins are required for almost every process that the body does on a daily basis. Processes like metabolism, energy production, detoxification and digestion, just to name a few, need individual vitamins or a combination of them in order to happen.
They also support our body when under stress, when we are sick, or we have increased metabolic needs from extra daily activities. They protect us from illness and disease. Without them our cognitive function decreases, our energy falters, and our body can’t send signals within itself when needed.
What happens when we don't get enough vitamins?
There was a scientist named Myron Brin who found that there are stages of vitamin deficiency. Each stage has increasing detrimental effects to the body.
The first stage is when you don’t get enough, but you really don’t notice even though your body is not functioning at its best.
We then move into what I call the “tugging on the sleeve stage” where our body is trying to get our attention but it is not loud and not yet creating major symptoms. You may feel a little bit more tired or notice you don’t have as much stamina as usual but there’s nothing serious.
Next, we come to what Brin called “physical impairment” stage which is when we start to see significant side effects of a vitamin deficiency that can affect not only physical Activity but also cause more mental side effects like irritability, decreased concentration, inability to handle stress, etcetera. This is where I say your body is starting to scream at you to get you to listen.
The final stage leads us from being low on a vitamin to an actual disease because of the vitamin deficiency. An example of this is when certain of our B vitamins are low we can actually be at a much higher risk for heart attack or stroke.
You might also find yourself craving sugar usually because of lack of energy, your immune system not functioning well so you find yourself getting sick more often and your metabolism slows causing things such as weight gain or insulin resistance when certain vitamins are low or not present.
Deficiency in any one vitamin can cause side effects, but most people don’t have just one vitamin deficiency. They often have many.
One of the things that I have noticed a lot in my practice is that often patients are given medications for side effects of a vitamin deficiency. These meds may or may not help the symptoms, but they definitely don’t help the bring vitamin levels up so the body still doesn’t have what it needs.
An example of this is vitamin B12 deficiency can cause tingling in the feet, hands, and/or tongue. The health care provider gives a medication to help with this neuropathy not even considering or knowing that they should check B12 levels first to see if that’s the issue. The problem with the scenario is that often the medication causes even more deficiencies by stripping or blocking vitamins.
Individual Needs
Like I talked about in my last post, a common problem in healthcare, and in government agencies, is that it is assumed that one patient is the same as everybody else. However, we have individual nutrient needs. The differences can be because of genetics, illness, gut health, environment, ethnicity, or other causes.
Over the decades since vitamins were discovered, U.S. government entities have tried to set guidelines of doses a person should have of nutrients whether from their diet or from supplements.
They were first set of standards are called the Recommended Dietary Allowances or RDAs. These are still listed on most supplement bottles. The current iteration of guidelines are called the Dietary Reference Intakes or DRI’s that took into account other factors that might affect dosing.
The problem with these guidelines is that they are basically set to keep a person from disease, not looking at what they need to function optimally. For example, the vitamin C recommendations are to prevent scurvy not necessarily considering what is needed for immune system function or the stress response. Both processes need Vitamin C to perform at their best levels.
These guidelines also don’t think about individual needs that can be affected by what medications they’re taking, whether they have a food intolerance, what is happening in our environment that interferes with levels in the food, and the other factors I talked about above. Often the doses listed in these guidelines are much less than are needed.
Lab Results
Anyone who knows me and my thoughts on nutrition knows how aggravated I get at the ranges that are listed on lab results as normal.
Most of the time these ranges vary widely so you don’t really know where they should be for your body to function at its best. In addition, most providers don’t pay attention to results unless there is a L or H next to them for Low or High. If a person’s level is within that range it is assumed that it is OK.
Have you ever had a provider tell you that your labs all look good while you still feel like crap???
I believe there are a lot of people now walking around with what I believe are vitamin deficiencies wondering why they don’t feel good. It’s because we are basing everything on the lab’s ranges rather than on what science shows the levels should be for the body to function Optimally.
My question always is this… Do you want your levels to be normal or do you want them to be optimal?
Why don’t we shoot for optimal?!
Types of vitamins
There are two types of vitamins that I want to talk about today and just explain the difference. Vitamins are either fat soluble or water soluble.
What exactly does that I mean?
The fat-soluble vitamins need fat in order to be absorbed. Because they are fat-soluble, they are easily stored throughout the body especially in the body fat and the liver. We have to be careful with the amounts we take especially as supplements because we can overdo it and cause issues. The fat-soluble vitamins are Vitamin A comma D, E, and K.
The water-soluble vitamins don’t need fat to be absorbed which means they can’t be stored in the body well. They travel through the bloodstream via the gut and the body utilizes them after absorption. Whatever is left is pushed out of the body through our urine. Taking large doses of these vitamins is basically useless because you’re going to pee out what your body can’t use soon after you take it.
The water-soluble vitamins include all the B vitamins and Vitamin C.
Dietary thoughts
I will be the first to tell you that I truly believe whenever possible the body should receive vitamins through the food we take in. The body understands how to break down, digest, and utilize vitamins from food. To make this happen, we have to eat the highest quality food we can.
A key point that I feel is missed way too often is the need to have a rainbow of color in our diet. I know that until I actually studied nutrition, I believed that you should have green at every meal. There wasn’t much else talked about but green. I’m not saying that green foods a bad idea but green vegetables do not have all of the vitamins we need in them.
We often get stuck in eating the same things over and over again. What ends up happening is the body doesn’t get the variety it needs to obtain all of the vitamins.
This is one of my frustrations with popular diets right now…we are missing a lot of nutrients because we are trying to stay away from foods that are high in one macronutrient or another. Or we eat too much of one and not the other.
Sooooo when you are looking at what to eat, make sure that you’re getting enough of every color throughout the week. Just look to the rainbow for the different colors.
Supplements
There are times that we are going to have to supplement our diets because we can’t get what we need from our food. This can occur for various reasons: the way we grow food here and the chemicals that are put on them or in them. Some of it is a particular diet. For instance, a person who is a vegetarian will not get B12 because B12 only comes from animals so they will need to take a supplement.
We will spend a lot of time on supplements as we move forward. We’ll talk about them under each vitamin.
I think this is enough information for today… I hope this helps as we start to venture into each of our vitamins.
Our first stop next time is Thiamine (Vitamin B1).
I can’t wait to share with you!
References for this article:
Bland, J. et al (2004). Clinical Nutrition. A Functional Approach
Merck Manual (2022). Overview of Vitamins
One Comment
Karen A. Unrue
I love the fact that you Treat the cause and not the number
We all know to Hydrate the day before we go in for “Sarah’s Labs” 😉
Thank You Sarah