Did you know

The reason that the set of vitamins skips directly from E to K is that the vitamins corresponding to letters F-J were either reclassified over time, discarded as false leads, or renamed because of their relationship to vitamin B, which became a complex of vitamins.

One form of vitamin D is synthesized in the skin with the help of the natural ultraviolet wavelength of sunlight.

Scientists found that Eskimos almost never contracted scurvy. Eskimos also hardly ate vegetables - which contain high amounts of vitamin C. However they did eat lots of raw meat. This led to some very interesting findings. One, that meat contains high amounts of vitamin C. And two, that its naturally high vitamin C content was often destroyed by the cooking process.

In 1884, Takaki Kanehiro, a British trained medical doctor of the Imperial Japanese Navy, observed that beriberi was endemic among low-ranking crew who often ate nothing but rice, but not among officers who consumed a Western-style diet. With the support of the Japanese navy, he experimented using crews of two battleships; one crew was fed only white rice, while the other was fed a diet of meat, fish, barley, rice, and beans. The group that ate only white rice documented 161 crew members with beriberi and 25 deaths, while the latter group had only 14 cases of beriberi and no deaths.