Although most vitamins are derived ultimately from plants, they are often consumed indirectly from higher up the food chain in foods of animal origin, including meat, dairy and eggs; sometimes in forms that have already undergone some form of initial tailoring for bioactivity. Alternatively, the enzymatic tailoring to achieve their bioactive forms, as described in Table 1, will be undertaken endogenously.
all vitamins list and their functions pdf download
Overall, the plethora of functions undertaken by B vitamins can generally be subdivided into their roles in catabolic metabolism, leading to the generation of energy, and anabolic metabolism, resulting in the construction and transformation of bioactive molecules.
The lack of demonstrable efficacy seen in multiple meta-analyses of supplementation trials involving this small sub-group of homocysteine lowering B vitamins has often prompted a counter commentary that persists with the notion that the underlying homocysteine hypothesis is likely to be correct, suggesting rather that the methodology or focus of the individual studies or meta-analyses are incorrect, and that future research should be directed towards sub-groups of the population more likely to benefit, in trials that employ more sensitive measures (e.g., [131]). This may prove a fruitful approach, but given the inter-related cellular functions of the B vitamins, a more rational approach to research must be to investigate the effects of supplementation with the full range of B vitamins, at doses well in excess of the current governmental RDAs. There is no compelling argument for restricting this research either to a small sub-group of three B vitamins or to the elderly groups of subjects usually employed in these trials. Certainly, the smaller body of research investigating multivitamins, which has largely been undertaken in healthy children and non-elderly adults, suggests significant benefits to brain function following supplementation with multivitamin products containing a full range of B vitamins at levels well in excess of their RDAs. 2ff7e9595c
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