The Importance of Vitamins A and D: Nutrients You Must Have

Pastured raw butter contain a combo of both A and D Photo by Megumi Nachev on Unsplash

With all the many vitamins available to us, you might wonder why I chose to focus on vitamins A and D in this particular article. Well, wonder no more. (Smile) These two power-packed vitamins are essential for our health, and they are abundant in the foods I discuss below. Before we get to that, however, let’s just chat a bit about vitamins in general and then turn our focus to vitamins A and D. In the kingdom of good-for-you foods, they are super winners.

Though you can find a trillion websites that offer detailed information about vitamins and their specific functions, this blog post is more about foods. Therefore I will be keeping more to the simple side of things rather than getting into a complicated discussion of what a vitamin is (and is not).  

The Basics about Vitamins

A vitamin is defined as “any of various organic substances that are essential in minute quantities to the nutrition of most animals [humans] and some plants, act especially as coenzymes and precursors of coenzymes in the regulation of metabolic processes but do not provide energy or serve as building units, and are present in natural foodstuffs or sometimes produced within the body.” (Emphasis mine.)