Vitamins Facts :: essays research papers

     VITAMINSVitamins, a group of thoroughgoing substances unavoidable in our diets in small amounts for growth and nutrition, ar usually prime in foodstuffs or taken as supplements. Yet vitamins probably accede a wider gap between myth and reality in the laymans arrest than almost any other area of our diet. Surveys have make up that part a majority of Americans do take vitamin supplements on a unconstipated or occasional basis for reason of health concerns, on that point exists colossal confusion about the actual purpose and benefits of this praxis ("Use of Vitamin and mineral Supplements in the United States," 1990161). Most people have a cognition that Vitamin C prevents scurvy, that Vitamin A is found in fish-liver oils, or that Vitamin D is found in dairy products many people believe that Vitamin E continue youth and prevents sterility, or that Vitamin C can present colds and cancer. Beyond this, however, there is still considerable ig norance and widespread myth.The reality behind the common practice of taking vitamin supplements is less dramatic, although vitamins do represent an important component of the indispensable human diet. The playscript vitamin was giveed from the Latin word for life, "vita," and the Greek word "amine", because 19th century scientists believed that they were formed only from amino acids. amino group acids are the twenty essential code elements which arrange themselves in vary sequences or chains to form complex proteins, the basic foodstuff of life. These organic acids (containing the essential ingredient NH2), in conjunction with the nucleic acids ( deoxyribonucleic acid material being still of the four bases adenine, guanine thymine and cytosine), "translate" the genetic instructions from the DNA of the chromosome to the RNA transcript, and in turn transfer these instructions from the transcript to proteins.If proteins are the building blocks of life, the n amino acids are the building blocks of proteins. Plant cells form amino acids from the compounds which the plant draws up from the ground, such as the nitrates and ammonia salts. Animals, however, cannot serve this conversion of simple inorganic substances to amino acids, so they must engross them in the form of food-- with herbivorous animals consuming plant proteins in vegetables and carnivorous animals consuming animal proteins in the bodies of their prey. Vitamins are essential aids in many body processes, converting food the energy, building and maintaining cells, and other functions.Vitamins can so be looked at as a crucial ingredient in a the long-term maintenance of health.