The Evolutionary Quirk That Made Vitamin B12 Part of Our Diet

Vitamins and other nutrients that we cannot make for ourselves are called essential. It’s a misleading term because “essential” most often means “important,” but in the world of dietetics, it denotes that we must obtain it in our diets. For example, vitamin Q, also called ubiquinone, is extremely important – it’s crucial for cellular respiration in the mitochondria – but it is not deemed essential because our cells simply make this biomolecule from already available parts.

Humans have a v