Submitted 3 months ago by TachyonTele@lemm.ee to [deleted]
https://lemm.ee/pictrs/image/8781a4ed-5b40-4555-a9ac-ee6400d1e487.jpeg
A vitamin is any essential dietary component, which is organic (otherwise it would be a dietary mineral), and is not a fat, protein/amino acid, or carbohydrate (although carbohydrates are considered non-essential).
Vitamin D is conditionally essential. If you have enough sunlight, your body can synthesize it.
How does the body absorb the sun’s bananas though? Let’s see you weasel your way out of that, science nerd!
I actually can raise my hand for this one, the impact with the skin surface emulsifies the outer banana layer which is then readily absorbed by the pore system. Bananasplitsynthesis is a very well understood process.
I’ve heard somewhere that maybe initially vitamin the word comes from “vital amino acids” => vita(l)min(o)… and any substance from a living creature would include amino acids anyway because they have DNA RNA and such
Vita + amine, actually. Amines are compounds with an NH₂ group; amino acids are a subset of that.
The person who coined the term though he had isolated an amine that was effective against a certain disease. What he had actually isolated was neither an amine nor effective against that disease but was actually a different essential compound. (He was looking for what we now know as thiamine but had actually discovered niacin.)
The name “vitamin” stuck around despite the fact that most vitamins aren’t amines.
Didn’t explain it. Jus said “it’s something your body needs”
There was actually just a very detailed gastropod episode on this, but the tl;dl version is that a vitamin isn’t a specific thing the way a protein or a carbohydrate is. It’s anything that the body needs in small amounts that isn’t something else
Because that’s the definition: an essential organic compound that is not a mineral, fatty acid, or amino acid. It’s the “everything else” category for essential nutrients.
Brawndo, got it
Random interesting thing:
Birds also need sunlight to synthesize vitamin D, but their skin is blocked by their feathers. So the chemical precursors to vitamin D are in their “preening oil”, a substance they secrete from a gland and rub on their feathers with their beak, a activity called preening. The sunlight hits it and forms the vitamin D, and they end up swallowing enough of it the next time they preen. The preening oil also contributes to the feather’s waterproofing and keeps them flexible.
That’s pretty cool. Random interesting facts are the best.
Same person: “I never eat vegetables.”
i don’t need to know what a vitamin is in order to eat things that have vitamins. to be honest i don’t even really know what calories or protein are, but i probably still eat things that have them. and vegetables too.
I have to tell you what calories are, because it sounds so incredibly unhinged.
Calorie is a physical unit of energy. For food, calories are measured by removing all water from the food, turning it into powder, enclosing it in a metal container, submerging said container in water, measuring the temperature of the water, then setting the food on fire, which causes it to explode, and measuring the temperature of the water again.
By taking the difference between the temperature measurements, you can calculate how much energy the food released when exploded and that is the foods calories.
So calories basically tell you how explosive a food is.
What does that have to do with anything? Who knows.
seven_phone@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Bananas come from the sun, it’s simple.
TachyonTele@lemm.ee 3 months ago
Is light just really small bananas bouncing off of everything?
seven_phone@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Well that is a very simplified view of nature, in reality they do not always bounce and banana is just a catch all term for any elongated fruit.
DScratch@sh.itjust.works 3 months ago
And if you shine a beam of light through some slits, the banans split.
Iheartcheese@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Why do you think we measure things by light years?
KnowledgeableNip@sh.itjust.works 3 months ago
Yes, that is why the banana phone was such a revolutionary invention.
kwedd@feddit.nl 3 months ago
Only if it’s yellow light.
stebo02@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 months ago
i mean photons don’t really have a shape so… it can be if you want it to be
NaibofTabr@infosec.pub 3 months ago
/technicallythetruth
Zwiebel@feddit.org 3 months ago
They are constructed by the sun and made up of it’s dead breathren
pruwybn@discuss.tchncs.de 3 months ago
That’s why they’re yellow.