You probably know that vitamins are crucial to health and normal cellular function, and you likely also know that the way you get most vitamins is through consuming them in supplements or in food. Even though you need to digest most of the components of foods you eat, however, you don't need to digest vitamins.
Vitamins
Vitamins are one of the subcategories of micronutrients, which are components of food that you need in small amounts each day and which don't provide you with any energy, but which you need nonetheless to maintain normal cellular function. There are many different types of vitamins you require; you can obtain them from food and, in some cases, in other ways as well. For instance, you can either eat vitamin D or you can get it through exposure to sunlight.
Vitamins in Food
When you eat vitamin-containing foods or consume supplemental vitamins, you absorb the vitamins into your bloodstream from your small intestine. The small intestine is the same part of your digestive tract that absorbs the energy-providing nutrient compounds in your food, explains Dr. Lauralee Sherwood in her book "Human Physiology." You don't need to digest vitamins before you absorb them. This is because digestion refers to breaking larger molecules into smaller ones that the small intestine can absorb, and vitamins aren't large enough to preclude absorption.
Considerations
While you don't digest vitamins before you absorb them, you may need to digest the food in which they're contained. The process of digestion has two separate phases -- physical digestion and chemical digestion. While chemical digestion is the part that breaks molecules into smaller ones -- and which isn't required for absorption of vitamins -- physical digestion is the simple process of breaking larger chunks of food into smaller ones. This increases surface area and speeds absorption of nutrients. You absorb vitamins faster and more efficiently as a result of physical digestion of food, even though this process doesn't affect the vitamin molecules at all.
Enzymes
Because you don't need to digest vitamins, there's no reason to take them in tandem with supplemental digestive enzymes, despite many common misconceptions to the contrary. In fact, you not only don't need supplemental digestive enzymes to take up the vitamins in the supplements you take or food you eat, you don't even need your own digestive enzymes -- they're used for processing of the energy-providing nutrients, explain Drs. Reginald Garrett and Charles Grisham in their book "Biochemistry."
References
- "Human Physiology"; Lauralee Sherwood, Ph.D.; 2004
- "Biochemistry"; Reginald Garrett, Ph.D. and Charles Grisham, Ph.D.; 2007
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