UNKNOWN VITAMINS
- Madhukar Dama
- 2 days ago
- 6 min read
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🌿 1. INTRODUCTION: WHAT IF MOST NUTRIENTS DON’T HAVE NAMES?
We live in a world where food is measured in calories and health is measured in blood reports. The assumption is simple: if you eat all your vitamins, you’ll be fine. But what if that very list of vitamins is incomplete? What if the nutrients that matter most don’t even have names?
Unknown vitamins are not science fiction. They are real compounds, enzymes, cofactors, and molecules that exist in traditional, wild, or natural foods but remain unclassified, unstudied, and unacknowledged. They don’t fit into the scientific model of isolating and packaging. But their absence shows up as fatigue, infertility, chronic inflammation, slow degeneration, and subtle dysfunctions.
This essay explores why modern science misses these nutrients, how traditional cultures understood them, and why they matter more now than ever before.
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📜 2. HOW “VITAMIN” WAS DEFINED — AND WHY THAT DEFINITION IS TOO NARROW
The term “vitamin” was coined in the early 20th century when scientists began isolating compounds whose deficiency caused immediate, visible disease:
Vitamin C for scurvy
Vitamin B1 for beriberi
Vitamin D for rickets
Thus, a vitamin was defined as a compound that prevents a deficiency disease. This reactive model means only the absence of a substance that causes obvious pathology receives attention.
But what about nutrients whose absence causes no immediate disease but leads to subtle breakdowns? Delayed development? Premature aging? Mental fog? Hormonal confusion?
These are not classified as deficiencies, yet they are widespread. The definition of a vitamin, therefore, is too narrow for the complexity of human life.
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🏭 3. THE SCIENCE-INDUSTRY MODEL: WHAT CAN BE SOLD, STUDIED, OR STANDARDIZED
Modern nutritional science is tied to industry. To study a nutrient, you must isolate it. To recommend it, you must bottle it. To regulate it, you must define its dose. This system cannot handle unstable, food-bound, synergistic compounds that vary from soil to soil, season to season.
For example:
A living sprout contains hormonal signals, enzymes, and bioelectric activity that vanish the moment it's processed.
A sun-exposed leaf carries photo-reactive elements that do not exist in shade-grown variants.
Science rarely studies these. They are not sellable. Not profitable. Not easily replicated. Hence, they remain ignored.
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🔥 4. HOW MODERN LIFE KILLS UNKNOWN VITAMINS
Unknown vitamins exist in raw, wild, messy, untamed foods. Modern life sterilizes everything:
We polish rice and flour, removing outer layers rich in unknown nutrients.
We boil, freeze, refrigerate, and store foods, breaking fragile compounds.
We avoid bitterness, but bitter plants activate digestive secretions and hormonal responses.
We fear microbes, but healthy soil bacteria create bioavailable minerals and cofactors.
In trying to make food safe, stable, and marketable, we strip it of vitality. We kill what we don’t even understand.
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🧓 5. TRADITIONAL WISDOM KNEW WHAT SCIENCE STILL DOESN’T
Tribal, village, and forest cultures always had foods for fertility, eyesight, digestion, recovery, and mental sharpness.
They didn’t measure vitamin content. They watched life.
Goat liver after birth
Raw drumstick leaves for strength
Bitter neem flowers in spring
Wild amla for immunity
Unripe banana stem for kidney cleansing
These were not random. They were repositories of unknown vitamins — phytohormones, trace minerals, plant enzymes, and microbe-activated compounds.
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⚠️ 6. MODERN DEFICIENCY IS NOT DISEASE — IT’S DISCONNECTION
People today are not dying of scurvy or beriberi. But they are biologically falling apart:
Early puberty
Infertility without cause
Gut issues in children
Mood disorders with no trauma
Autoimmune dysfunction
Doctors call it stress. Lifestyle. Psychosomatic. But the truth is: the body is missing inputs. Signals. Catalysts. Nutrients that no pill can replicate.
This is not a lack of medicine. It is a lack of unclassified nutrition.
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🦠 7. THE MICROBIOME: YOUR INTERNAL NUTRIENT LABORATORY
Your gut is a factory. It makes nutrients that don’t come from your food but from the bacteria that digest it. These microbes:
Synthesize B-vitamins
Convert plant compounds into active hormones
Produce anti-inflammatory molecules
But:
Antibiotics kill them
Processed food starves them
Sanitation disconnects us from replenishing soil microbes
Result? Even if you eat good food, you can't extract everything from it unless your microbiome is alive.
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🌾 8. THE LOST SOURCES OF UNKNOWN VITAMINS
Unknown vitamins lived in:
Wild weeds and uncultivated greens
Fermented rice, kanji, idli batter
Raw dairy from grass-fed animals
Sprouted pulses soaked in clay pots
Seasonal wild fruits
Unboiled coconut water
Leafy tops of root vegetables
Sun-cured bitter leaves
These are not exotic. They are extinct from modern plates.
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🚫 9. WHY THEY WILL NEVER BE OFFICIALLY DISCOVERED
No clinical trial can test thousands of unstable, synergistic compounds in wild foods.
No pharma company funds research for things that can't be patented.
No regulatory body wants to acknowledge that unwashed leaves or fermented slurries might outperform capsules.
So they will never be studied. And never be taught. Because they exist only where control ends.
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🧭 10. CONCLUSION: UNKNOWN VITAMINS ARE THE REAL VITAL FORCE
You can take a multivitamin and still feel numb, lost, exhausted. Because real nourishment is not in tablets. It’s in the unnamed, unmeasured, unmarketed forces of nature:
In food that was not bred for yield
In soil that was not sterilized
In flavors that were not sweetened
In bacteria you were taught to fear
You don’t need more vitamins. You need to remember the ones you lost without knowing their names.
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🌀 11. WHY PERFECT DISCOVERY IS IMPOSSIBLE
No matter how advanced man’s tools become — microscopes, mass spectrometers, gene sequencers — there will always be a wall. Because:
> Nature does not operate in isolation. But science requires isolation to study.
The most vital forces in nature are:
Too unstable to bottle
Too interactive to isolate
Too living to reproduce in a lab
Too context-dependent to be “universal”
The moment you remove a compound from its ecosystem, you change it. The moment you test it outside a body, you lose half its behavior. The moment you standardize it, you kill its uniqueness.
Man’s mind wants to define. But nature only allows relationship, not definition.
That’s why the quest to fully map all nutrients — to define health in numbers — will never succeed.
Life is not built from identified parts. It is built from interactions so subtle, changing, and invisible that no method can ever measure them all.
You can discover vitamin C — but not the forest synergy that made it absorbable. You can name antioxidants — but not the living intelligence that told your cells when to use them. You can study microbes — but never fully understand their unspoken conversation with your nerves, blood, and moods.
> The unknown is not a gap in science — it is the limit of being human.
To accept this is not defeat. It is freedom.
It means the only real health system is one that respects the wild, the whole, and the uncontrollable — and leaves room for the sacred unknown.
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📚 REFERENCES
1. Albert Szent-Györgyi. "Bioenergetics and Vitamin Discoveries." Nobel Lecture, 1937.
2. McCance, R. A., & Widdowson, E. M. (1939). "The Chemical Composition of Foods." Medical Research Council.
3. Price, Weston A. "Nutrition and Physical Degeneration." 1939.
4. Gaby, Alan R. "The Natural Pharmacy." 2006.
5. Katz, D. L., & Meller, S. (2014). "Can we say what diet is best for health?" Annual Review of Public Health.
6. Sonnenburg, J. L., & Sonnenburg, E. D. (2015). "The Good Gut." Penguin Press.
7. Blaser, M. J. (2014). "Missing Microbes: How the Overuse of Antibiotics Is Fueling Our Modern Plagues."
8. Chopra, Deepak. "Quantum Healing." 1989. (on subtle biological signals)
9. Francis, A. et al. "Wild Edibles and their Nutritional Value in Tribal Diets." Indian Journal of Traditional Knowledge, 2010.
10. Fergusson, L. E. (2009). "Traditional Plant-Based Medicines in Developing Health Systems." WHO Bulletin.
11. Indian Council of Agricultural Research. "Nutrient Content of Indian Foods." 2012.
12. Journal of Ethnopharmacology: various studies on wild and tribal food sources.
13. FAO/WHO: Reports on biodiversity and the nutrition gap.
14. Bernard Jensen. "Foods that Heal." 1981.
15. Kothari, Ashish & Bajaj, Vibha. "The Politics of Sanitation: Losing the Microbiome." Down To Earth, 2019.
