Where the did the word vitamin come from?

Answer 1

The discovery of the vitamins began with experiments performed by Hopkins at the beginning of the twentieth century; he fed rats on a defined diet providing the then known nutrients: fats, proteins, carbohydrates, and mineral salts. The animals failed to grow, but the addition of a small amount of milk to the diet both permitted the animals to maintain normal growth and restored growth to the animals that had previously been fed the defined diet. He suggested that milk contained one or more "accessory growth factors" essential nutrients present in small amounts, because the addition of only a small amount of milk to the diet was sufficient to maintain normal growth and development. An amine is any of a class of basic organic compounds derived from ammonia by replacement of hydrogen with one or more monovalent hydrocarbon radicals The first of the accessory food factors to be isolated and identified was found to be chemically an amine; therefore, in 1912, Funk coined the term

vitamine, from the Latin vita for "life" and amine, for the prominent chemical reactive group. Although subsequent accessory growth factors were not found To be amines, the name has been retained-with the loss of the final"-e" to avoid chemical confusion. The decision as to whether the word should correctly be pronounced "vitamin" or "veitamin" depends in large part on which system of Latin pronunciation one learned - the Oxford English Dictionary permits

both.

Answer 2

The word "vitamin" is a combination of "vital" and "amine," the latter being a chemical compound that was originally believed to be present in all vitamins. The term was coined by Polish biochemist Casimir Funk in 1912.