How Do Vitamins Affect the Body?

Video Transcript

"My name is Christine Marquette and I'm a registered and licensed dietitian with the Austin Regional Clinic and I'm going to talk to you about how vitamins affect the body. Vitamins are something that's actually required by our bodies that we have to get from foods or supplements. They're a particular item that our body just can not make. Our body can make a lot of things. It can make proteins, it can make fats, but it doesn't have the ability to make vitamins. There's a wide variety of vitamins. There's a class of vitamins called fat soluble vitamins meaning that our body will only absorb them if they're in a source that has fat in it and then there are the water soluble vitamins meaning that our body will only absorb them if they come in a source that has water in it. The main difference between these two classes of vitamins are how they are stored in the body. Fat soluble vitamins have the ability to be stored in our fat cells where as water soluble vitamins are actually excreted very rapidly, so we aren't able to actually store very large amounts of them, so we have to get the water soluble vitamins on a daily basis. They affect all of our body functions. They affect our rates of growth, cell division, our eye health, our skin health, gums, teeth, bones. They affect every part of our body. They're also heavily involved in our metabolic pathways. They act as catalysts, making sure that our metabolism is actually functioning properly so that we actually digest carbohydrates and proteins and fats on a reasonable level and that we actually excrete all the energy we can out of those foods that we're consuming. So vitamins basically affect every area of our body from how well we think to how we process foods, to how our skin looks, how our hair and nails look, how strong our bones are, how healthy our teeth and gums are. They're needed in every aspect of our bodies."