Abstract
Water-soluble vitamins are a group of essential dietary components required in small quantities that are defined by their polar nature and are hence easily absorbed and available to tissues for immediate use. Being water soluble their excretion in urine is also efficient, making it difficult to store and retain surplus water-soluble vitamins for later use. Earlier many water-soluble metabolites were listed as water-soluble B complex vitamins, but as their synthetic pathways were elucidated, they are no longer considered as vitamins. These are now called the missing vitamins (Sect. 10.8). The B complex vitamins (thiamine, riboflavin, niacin, pantothenic acid, biotin, vitamin B6, folate, and vitamin B12) and vitamin C are now considered as the primary nine water-soluble vitamins.
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Malik, D., Narayanasamy, N., Pratyusha, V.A., Thakur, J., Sinha, N. (2023). Water-Soluble Vitamins. In: Textbook of Nutritional Biochemistry. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-4150-4_10
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