Vitamins

Vitamins, essential organic substances, play an important role in maintaining health through their involvement in basic bodily functions. Although the human body only needs vitamins in small amounts, their absence leads to significant health problems. In general, vitamins can be divided into two groups, fat-soluble and water-soluble. While the fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E and K are stored in fatty tissue, the water-soluble vitamins C, B1 B2, B3, B5, B6, B7, B9 and B12 are more easily excreted. The latter support vital functions in the energy balance, nervous system, cell metabolism and immune system. A balanced diet with a variety of fruit, vegetables, whole grains, pulses and healthy fats generally provides people with a sufficient amount of vitamins. However, various factors such as age, lifestyle, illness or medication can limit the supply of essential nutrients.

The analysis of vitamins in food is therefore particularly interesting for consumers, but equally challenging for researchers. The Chair of Analytical Food Chemistry is primarily concerned with water-soluble vitamins from the B complex. Highly precise and sensitive modern analytical methods are used to determine pyridoxine (B6), folates (B9) and cobalamin (B12). Vitamins are generally only present in low concentrations in food and are often unstable. It is therefore necessary to develop analytical methods that combine a gentle extraction procedure with high detection sensitivity and are able to compensate for unavoidable losses during sample preparation. Stable isotope dilution analyses are therefore particularly suitable for the analysis of vitamins in food and biological samples, which is why our focus is on these methods.