LET'S TALK ABOUT VITAMIN A!

I wish this post could focus on the importance of ALL of the vitamins and minerals, but that would be a very long and detailed post! However, I will give a little overview on the importance of vitamins before talking about Vitamin A. I know there is a lot of focus on carbohydrates, fats, and calories, but we tend to forget vitamins. Vitamins help drive many processes in the body that are important for the body to keep living. It is important to realize that without Vitamin K your blood could not clot,and without the B Vitamins the Krebs cycle, or our body's energy production cycle, could not happen. These are only a couple examples of how our bodies need vitamins to live. Now, let us focus on Vitamin A, which is a fat-soluble vitamin. Vitamin A is an umbrella term that covers a few different compounds. There are the retinoids, and the carotenoids, and I bet many people have heard of beta-carotene, which is a carotenoid. I will not go into much detail here, but just know that Vitamin A can be found in many different forms in food, and because of this it can take different pathways in the body. If you are trying to get more Vitamin A in your diet, it can be pretty easy to spot in the store because you can just look for the bright orange colored foods like sweet potatoes, pumpkins, or carrots. These are full carotenoids, which is what gives these foods their color. Now let's talk about why Vitamin A is important in the body. Vitamin A has many functions in the body and one of those is it's use in vision. When the body is deficient in Vitamin A it can cause night blindness, because the rod cells in the eyes require a retinoid to allow light to come in when there is only dim light. Another very important role of Vitamin A is called cellular differentiation. The main concept to understand is that retinoids are used to direct immature skin cells to become mature skin cells, and without retinoids these cells would stay immature. If this happens then the skin, and other places in the body, becomes drier because mature skin cells are mucous secreting cells. The mature cells create a healthier environment in the skin and the other places that these mature skin cells are found. These are the main two functions I wanted to focus on today with Vitamin A. I hope that this article helps people to realize how important Vitamin A and other vitamins are in the body.