Military to Civilian Fitness

As I mentioned in a previous blog post, I am taking a nutrition class in college right now. This week we talked about vitamins. We learned about all the different vitamins and what they do. For example, Vitamin D comes from sunshine and it helps with the absorption of Calcium. We also learned about Vitamin A and the B Vitamins, which I thought were interesting enough to share

The B Vitamins have gone through many different names. Originally all the different B Vitamins were thought to be the same thing. It was simply called “Vitamin B”. This is understandable though, because they all come from dark green leafy vegetables (like spinach). After more studying, scientists found out that Vitamin B wasn’t one vitamin, but a dozen different vitamins that had a lot of similarities. They named them accordingly: Vitamin B1, B2, B3, etc. Recently though, they decided that was too confusing and gave them each their own names, and they also realized that they had doubled a few of them up. Now they are known as Thiamin, Folate, Riboflavin, and a few others. That makes it a lot less confusing! I’ve always wondered what was going on with Vitamin B, but now we all know!

We also learned about Vitamin A in my class. One of Vitamin A’s pro-vitamins is Carotene, also known as Carotin and Beta-Carotene. I’m not sure which name is the most up to date, but they all work!

Carotene, and all of its other names, comes from the fact that it comes from carrots! You can also get Carotene from a few other sources like sweet potatoes, squash and dark green leafy vegetables. So what is it that carotene does for you?

In class I learned that it does a variety of different things. As we all know, it’s good for your eyes! It is also an anti-oxidant, which means it prevents cancer. It also boosts your immunity!

There are a few problems that can come from not getting enough carotene. One that we discussed is Night Blindness. That doesn’t mean you have a hard time seeing at night when first going outside. Everyone is like that. It’s when your vision is bad enough that you can’t see your hand in from of your face and you’re dangerous when driving. This happens to a lot of the elderly because they don’t eat as many vegetables due to the difficulty of chewing them.

In contrast, you can also get too much carotene. One of the symptoms is that your skin turns orange. You are what you eat! However, if you eat a lot of carrots and have orange skin, that is okay. There aren’t any other things that happen when you eat too much (as far as scientists know).

Anyways, that’s about it! Vitamins are interesting and boring at the same time. But they are important for your health, and if you aren’t getting enough of them you might be in trouble. But don’t get too much, or you’ll turn orange!