Vitamin Supplements

If we go back to the distinction between living and nonliving material we can list many of the functions of the human body that make us different from inanimate objects. We can breathe, eat, drink, reproduce, maintain a constant body temperature and move around from place to place. All these things are accomplished by expending energy and this, in turn, comes from the way we make use of our food. The change from the food on our table to the raw materials and energy needed by the body to sustain life occurs in a sequence of chemical reactions which are called metabolic processes. First, we need to break down our food during digestion to smaller and smaller units so that they can be absorbed across the lining of the intestines and into the bloodstream. These units can then be used to build bone and tissues and replace used or damaged cells, or they can be broken down further and used as fuel to produce heat and energy. Read the rest of this entry »

There was a time, not so long ago, when people refused to believe in vitamins because they could not see them. We still cannot ’see’ them, in the strict sense of the word, but nowadays we treat them as one of the wonders of the twentieth century. The truth is that vitamins are not new. They have been in our food since the beginning of time. The only difference between then and now is that we have learned, it:^, the last seventy years, to isolate, analyse, extract and re-create them. We can put them back into our food, or manufacture them for use in medicines, cosmetics and cattle food. Finally, we can package and sell them without prescription as tablets, tonics and wonder foods. Read the rest of this entry »