Compound Class

Vitamins

Organic micronutrients the body cannot make in sufficient amounts — the essential vitamins plants supply in the diet.

Overview

What Are Vitamins?

Vitamins are organic micronutrients the body needs in small amounts but cannot make, or cannot make enough of, on its own — so they must come from the diet.

They are grouped not by any shared chemical structure but by this shared quality of being essential, diet-derived and active in tiny quantities. Plants are the original source of most of them.

Water-Soluble & Fat-Soluble

The class divides on solubility, and that division governs both how vitamins are stored and how they behave in excess:

Water-soluble: the B-complex and vitamin C; poorly stored and topped up from food day to day
Fat-soluble: vitamins A, D, E and K; dissolve in the plant's oils and can be held in the body's fat

Surplus water-soluble vitamins are largely passed in the urine, whereas fat-soluble ones accumulate — which is why almost all vitamin toxicity concerns the latter.

Where Vitamins Occur

Green leaves, fruits, seeds and sprouted grains are among the richest plant sources, and a herb's vitamin content is often part of its nutritional, tonic reputation.

Leafy greens and nettle

vitamin K1, folate, carotenes

Rosehip, camu camu and acerola

vitamin C

Seeds, nuts and their oils

vitamin E

Sprouted grains and pulses

B-complex

Orange and red fruits

carotenoid provitamin A

Note that vitamin D and vitamin B12 are essentially absent from plants, which is why both are common gaps in plant-based diets.

Pharmacological Importance

Vitamins act as coenzymes and cofactors rather than as drugs: they enable reactions the body already runs rather than forcing new ones. Their therapeutic power is therefore greatest where a deficiency exists.

Several also have activity beyond that baseline role — vitamin C as a water-soluble antioxidant and collagen cofactor, vitamin E as the principal fat-soluble antioxidant, and vitamin K1 in blood clotting and bone metabolism.

Toxicity & Safety

At the levels found in food and herbs, vitamins are nourishing and safe, and deficiency rather than excess is the usual concern.

Toxicity is almost entirely a matter of concentrated supplementation, and even then chiefly the fat-soluble vitamins: vitamin A in particular can accumulate to harmful levels and is teratogenic in pregnancy at high doses. From plants, in short, vitamins are food; only isolated high-dose forms warrant real caution.

Constituents

All Vitamins

25 total Filter vitamins

Open in filterable index

Source Plants

Herbs Containing Vitamins

16 herbs

Plants in the materia medica documented to carry vitamins, with the compounds each one is listed for. The bar counts how many DISTINCT vitamins are on record for a plant, relative to the best-documented — it measures breadth of record, not potency, so a plant with one well-studied compound can outrank a richer source that has simply been analysed less. Where a measured concentration is on record it is quoted inline; most entries have none yet.