Student Excerpts: Vitamins, the Sun and Hormones

The following is an excerpt from an assignment by Student Vanessa Nixon Klein. She makes a good point that some vitamins are more than just "vitamins". In this case they act as hormones as well. This is true in the case of many vitamins - and in many cases we have only just begun to scratch the surface of what a vitamin is and how it works.

>William B. Grant, PhD is one of the top vitamin D researcher in the world. In a 2004 interview with Dr. Joseph Mercola, he explains the role of Vitamin D in our bodies in the following manner, “ When produced in the skin or ingested, it is a "vitamin" or "prehormone"and essential for life. Just as cholesterol is metabolized into testosterone, precholesterol is turned into cholecalciferol (vitaminD), which is metabolized into what now is looking more and more like a hormone [25(OH)D]. In turn, this is metabolized in the kidneys or other organs into an even more potent hormone [1,25(OH)2D].

Vitamin D is an essential part of the endocrine system as it controls several of the adrenal hormones, growth of cells, production of enzymes and has other direct genomic functions. The key difference in definition is that hormones have DNA receptor sites, and vitamin A is in that family as well as vitamin D, and vitamins are parts of coenzyme systems (not genomic). In a way, vitamins A and D are both vitamins and hormones."