in 1912 a Polish biochemist named
Casimir funk announced a discovery that
would change medical science forever
he'd isolated a substance that was in
brown rice but not white rice it turned
out to be the first known vitamin or
nutrient that humans need to stay
healthy but for the most part can't
manufacture inside our bodies more than
a century later our list of vitamins has
expanded quite a bit and let's face it
their names make no sense whatsoever
vitamin a b c d and e might seem logical
at first but don't get me started on the
fact that there are eight different B
vitamins that somehow number up to b12
and what's vitamin K doing all alone by
itself in the middle of the alphabet
well it turns out that like so many
other things in science the vitamins
names have a lot to do with history in
this case that history is chock-full of
mistaken assumptions and as we've
corrected those mistakes we ended up
with the alphanumeric soup that we call
vitamins today not all started with the
invention of the word vitamin itself for
long time scientists had known that
certain diet related deficiencies caused
a diseases like pellagra and scurvy at
rickets they also knew that eating
nothing but white rice led to a
condition known as berry berry which
caused weakness and weight loss and a
whole host of other unpleasant symptoms
and yet those who ate brown rice which
still has its husk but has a shorter
shelf life were totally fine but nobody
knew exactly what the difference was
Thun figured out that the husks in brown
rice contained a chemical with an amine
group he thought he'd discovered a whole
new class of amine containing compounds
that were vital to human life and he was
mostly right Phunk called these vital
amines vitamins and once scientists
realized that they didn't all have to
contain amine groups they just shortened
it to vitamins now it was super easy to
spot the difference between the first
two vitamins we isolated because one was
fat soluble meaning that it dissolved in
lipids while the other was water soluble
and dissolved in water the fat soluble
vitamin was discovered in milk and leafy
greens by a team of researchers led by
Elmer McCollum who called it vitamin A
and someone questionably he gave the
name vitamin B to the water-soluble
amine that funk had found in brown rice
even though he found it first
should have been a vitamin C was first
proposed in 1919 by that point it was
well established that scurvy
condition characterized by symptoms like
anemia swelling and ulcers was caused by
a nutritional deficiency scientists
figured that had to be a vitamin
involved even though they hadn't yet
figured out what it was made of so they
just named it after the next letter in
the alphabet C so far so good all the
vitamins go on an alphabetical order
scientists then learned that both
vitamins a and B consisted of multiple
variations and things started to go
downhill with the help of others
research McCollum eventually figured out
that vitamin A was actually made of two
substances and he was able to separate
them the one that prevented night
blindness kept the name vitamin A and he
called the other part vitamin D since
that was the next letter available 1920s
scientists showed that fresh yeast which
contained what they've been calling
vitamin B protected against both
pellagra and beriberi but after they
heated it up it didn't prevent pellagra
anymore so there had to be at least two
separate vitamins in there only one of
which was surviving the heat some people
started calling those vitamins F and G
others decided to name them b1 and b2
which became the more popular solution
at least until b2 also turned out to
contain more than one vitamin F that
things started getting Messier for
example for a while scientists thought
they'd isolated a new vitamin and gave
it the next name in the list before but
not only did b4 turn out to be made of
three different compounds adenine
carnitine and choline none of them are
actually vitamins because humans don't
need to get them from an outside source
to stay healthy that's why these days
there is no vitamin b4 but there are
ones with higher numbers because that's
just how new water soluble vitamins
started getting named now the next fat
soluble vitamin to be discovered was
given the next available letter in the
alphabet so it is now known as vitamin E
but the Germans who discovered vitamin K
didn't follow that logic at all the
vitamin helps blood clot faster and in
German that's called coagulation with a
k' so they named the new substance
vitamin k and in case you're curious
about the rest of the alphabet the only
letters that haven't had a proposed
vitamin named after them at some point
are o w XY and z so the vitamins may
look more like a randomly generated
password than a scientific list but at
least there are interesting reasons why
thank you for watching this scishow dose
which is brought to you by our patrons
on patreon
now patreon is a place where people can
go and give monthly to support stuff
they like so that it will continue to
exist if you want to help support the
show plus get access to cool
like blooper reels some of them
uncensored or our monthly Google hangout
just go to patreon.com/scishow and if
you just want to keep getting smarter
with us go to youtube.com/scishow and
subscribe