Do Vitamins Exist?
An Essay
The Chemist’s Admission
Dr. Tom Cowan wanted to answer a simple question: How do we know vitamins exist in living beings?
In a January 2026 webinar, Cowan described going to the original papers on vitamin isolation. The methodology follows a consistent pattern: researchers take a sample (animal fat, cod liver oil, blood), add chemicals to it, wash it repeatedly with solvents like acetone, heat it, process it further, and eventually produce a “relatively pure chemical.” They then analyze this end product and declare they have isolated the vitamin.
Cowan asked a question that should be obvious: How do you know that adding acids, bases, and washing with acetone six times didn’t create something that wasn’t in the original sample?
He posed this question to multiple analytical chemists. Every one of them gave the same answer: I have no idea.
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The Methodological Problem
The problem is not that chemists are incompetent. The problem is methodological. To detect a vitamin in living tissue, you must add reagents. To isolate it, you must process it extensively. By the time you have your “pure” compound, you have subjected the original sample to conditions that bear no resemblance to the living state. The act of looking changes what you find.
This is not a fringe concern. It sits at the foundation of analytical chemistry. When you dissolve biological material in solvents, heat it, acidify it, and precipitate out crystals, you have created laboratory conditions. Whether those crystals existed in the living tissue or were produced by the extraction process itself cannot be determined from within the process.
Consider what “isolation” actually means in vitamin research. Grant Genereux, an engineer who has spent years investigating vitamin A toxicity, traced the original 1920s vitamin A studies. Researchers used heated casein as a supposedly “vitamin A-free” diet. Animals fed this diet developed symptoms. When researchers added foods believed to contain vitamin A, the symptoms resolved. This was taken as proof that vitamin A deficiency caused the symptoms and that vitamin A was essential.
The problem, as Genereux documents: casein contains vitamin A. Heating converts some of it to retinoic acid—the most toxic form. The researchers didn’t know this; retinoic acid wasn’t identified until around 1960. What they thought was a deficiency diet was actually a toxicity diet. The “cure” worked because adding other foods diluted the toxic load. A foundational pillar of the vitamin A story—the origin experiment that shaped all subsequent research—proved the opposite of what its authors believed. This inversion was never corrected; later studies inherited the flawed framework.
Discovered Before Isolated
Shannon Rowan, a researcher who has investigated vitamin manufacturing, points out a telling sequence: vitamins were “discovered” before they were “isolated.” This matters.
The pattern: researchers observed that certain diseases (scurvy, beriberi, rickets) occurred in populations eating restricted diets and resolved when diet improved. They hypothesized that something in the curative foods was missing from the disease-causing diets. They then attempted to isolate this something.
But isolation requires knowing what you’re looking for. And knowing what you’re looking for shapes what you find. Researchers extracted compounds, tested them on deficient animals, and declared success when symptoms improved. The circular logic is embedded in the methodology: define the disease as deficiency, find a compound that reverses symptoms, declare that compound the missing nutrient.
James Lind’s 1753 scurvy trial illustrates the gap between observation and interpretation. Sailors given fresh citrus recovered. Sailors given other treatments did not. The observation is solid. But Lind also developed a concentrated citrus juice called “rob” that should have contained the same anti-scorbutic factor as fresh fruit. It failed. Sailors drinking rob daily still developed scurvy.
The standard explanation is that heat and oxidation during preparation destroyed the ascorbic acid. But this explanation is the point. If the compound ceases to function once removed from its living matrix—if processing destroys whatever made the fruit work—then the identity claim has already failed. You cannot say “ascorbic acid is the active agent” while simultaneously explaining that removing it from whole fruit destroys its activity. Either the compound works independently or it doesn’t.
When researchers in 1928 isolated ascorbic acid and named it vitamin C, they declared the mystery solved. But they never addressed this paradox. The fresh fruit worked. The concentrate failed. The isolated compound fell somewhere between.
The Matrix, Not the Thread
The standard response invokes cofactors—other compounds in whole foods that work synergistically with the isolated vitamin. This explanation concedes the central point. If the isolated compound requires other compounds to function, then the isolated compound is not the active agent. The matrix is.
Vitamin C in an orange exists within a web of bioflavonoids, fiber, enzymes, and hundreds of other compounds. These affect absorption, utilization, metabolism. To extract ascorbic acid and call it “vitamin C” is to mistake one thread for the tapestry.
The “chemically identical” argument runs aground here. Proponents claim that synthetic ascorbic acid has the same molecular structure as ascorbic acid in an orange, therefore the body cannot distinguish between them. But for two substances to be chemically identical, the natural form must first be isolated and characterized. Isolation changes context. You cannot prove identity between a compound in a living matrix and a compound extracted from that matrix by destroying the matrix.
This is not philosophical hairsplitting. It has clinical consequences. Studies repeatedly find different outcomes from whole-food sources versus isolated supplements. The body apparently distinguishes what chemistry professors insist is identical.
When Chemicals Work
None of this means synthetic compounds lack biological effects. They clearly produce effects—sometimes dramatic ones.
In published case series, Dr. Frederick Klenner described treating 60 polio patients during the 1948 epidemic with massive intravenous doses of ascorbic acid. All reportedly recovered without residual paralysis. He documented curing encephalitis in comatose patients, resolving shingles cases in 72 hours, reversing barbiturate overdoses and snake bites. Klenner presented his findings to the American Medical Association in 1949. They were ignored. No rigorous follow-up trials were conducted. The question is not whether his observations were perfect science—it’s why such striking results never prompted serious investigation.
Dr. Thomas Levy, a board-certified cardiologist, spent thirty years investigating and applying high-dose vitamin C therapy. In Curing the Incurable, he compiles over 1,200 scientific references documenting effects on infections and toxins. The evidence for clinical efficacy is substantial.
But efficacy does not prove that the administered compound exists in nature as a discrete entity. Electrical shock can restart a stopped heart. This does not mean the heart was suffering from an electricity deficiency. A synthetic chemical producing biological effects tells us the chemical has effects—not that the body naturally contains it or requires it as a nutrient.
Levy himself points toward a different explanation. He draws on Nobel laureate Albert Szent-Györgyi, who received the 1937 prize for work on vitamin C. Szent-Györgyi proposed that life depends on maintaining organic molecules in a state of electron desaturation—with electrons flowing continuously throughout the body to direct, control, and regulate all functions. Health exists when electrons flow fully and freely. Disease exists when flow is impaired. Death occurs when flow stops.
In this framework, ascorbic acid functions not as a nutrient replacing something missing but as an electron carrier restoring flow. High-dose vitamin C works because it donates electrons and facilitates their movement through tissues. The mechanism is electrical, not nutritional.
Levy emphasizes that vitamin C’s primary role is maintaining electron flow, not simply being a nutrient the body requires. A goat produces 13,000 milligrams of ascorbic acid daily under normal conditions and ramps up to 100,000 milligrams when sick. Levy interprets this not as nutrient intake but as dynamic electrical regulation—the body producing electron carriers on demand.
If ascorbic acid works by restoring electron flow, its efficacy tells us nothing about whether “vitamin C” exists in oranges as a discrete chemical entity. The synthetic compound produces electrical effects. Whether those effects replicate something that occurs naturally through whole-food consumption—or whether whole foods work through entirely different mechanisms—remains an open question.
The Deeper Question
The deeper issue is epistemological. Cowan frames it directly: we cannot confirm that purified chemicals exist at all in living beings.
This claim sounds radical until you examine what confirmation would require. You would need to detect the compound in living tissue without adding reagents that might create it. No such method exists for vitamins. Every detection technique involves processing that alters the sample. The vitamin is always found after intervention, never observed in the living state.
Cowan suspects vitamins don’t exist as discrete entities—that they are “markers for an energetic function” rather than actual substances. The isolation process produces chemicals that correlate with certain biological activities. But correlation is not identity. The map is not the territory.
He extends this skepticism to the concept of chemicals themselves, agreeing with Nobel laureate Kary Mullis that molecular bonds and structures are mental constructions—useful models, not direct observations of reality. This is a minority position, but it rests on a valid philosophical point: we never observe molecules directly. We observe the outputs of instruments and construct models to explain those outputs. The models work predictively. Whether they describe what actually exists at the molecular level is a separate question.
For practical purposes, this distinction rarely matters. If the model predicts accurately, its ontological status is irrelevant. But when the model produces paradoxes—when synthetic compounds work clinically but concentrated natural extracts fail, when isolation studies prove the opposite of what researchers claim, when “deficiency” and “toxicity” present identical symptoms—the ontological question becomes practical.
What We Don’t Know
The position I’m developing is not that synthetic vitamins don’t work. Some clearly do, for some people, some of the time. The position is that we cannot conclude from their working that vitamins exist in nature as the discrete chemical entities we’ve been taught they are.
Traditional populations thrived for hundreds of thousands of years without knowing what vitamins were. Weston Price documented Swiss Alpine villagers with no tuberculosis during an era when TB was Switzerland’s leading cause of death. Their diet contained no supplements—just butter, cheese, and organ meats from animals grazing mineral-rich pastures. These populations ate whole foods prepared by traditional methods. They did not isolate compounds or calculate molecular intake.
Something in those diets sustained health. Whether that something was “vitamins” as currently defined—discrete chemical compounds identical to what laboratories synthesize—or whether it was something else entirely (energetic properties, complex matrices, factors we haven’t identified) cannot be determined from within the current methodological framework.
The framework assumes what it needs to prove: that living tissue contains discrete chemical nutrients that can be isolated, characterized, and replicated synthetically. Every experiment testing this assumption uses methods that presuppose it.
Cowan’s conclusion is worth sitting with: we actually have no idea whether these purified chemicals exist at all in living beings.
This is not a claim that chemistry is useless or that scientists are frauds. It’s an observation about the limits of a methodology. When every detection method involves processing that may create what it detects, the results cannot be taken as proof of prior existence.
The practical implication is not to abandon everything that works. If high-dose ascorbic acid reverses a toxic state, use it. If someone recovers from illness with intravenous vitamin C, the recovery is real regardless of what we call the compound or whether it exists in oranges.
The implication is to stop assuming we understand more than we do. To recognize that “vitamin C” may be a useful label for a laboratory product without being an accurate description of something in living foods. To consider that whole foods might work through mechanisms we haven’t identified because we’ve been too busy looking for the mechanisms we expected to find.
The chemists Cowan asked couldn’t answer his question. That honest admission—”I have no idea”—is worth more than a thousand confident assertions built on unexamined assumptions.
The question “Do vitamins exist?” deserves the same honest answer: we don’t actually know.
References
Cowan, Thomas. “Webinar from January 7th, 2026.” Dr. Tom Cowan, January 8, 2026.
Cowan, Thomas S. “Rethinking Supplements: Nature’s Electrical Elements.” Unbekoming, May 13, 2025.
Genereux, Grant. “Vitamin A Toxicity: Interview with Grant Genereux.” Unbekoming, June 18, 2024.
Levy, Thomas. Curing the Incurable: Vitamin C, Infectious Diseases, and Toxins, 3rd Edition. MedFox Publishing, 2011.
Levy, Thomas. “Interview with Dr Thomas Levy: On Vitamin C, Calcium, Copper and Iron.” Unbekoming, January 28, 2024.
Price, Weston A. Nutrition and Physical Degeneration. Price-Pottenger Nutrition Foundation, 1939.
Rowan, Shannon. “The Vitamin Deception: Interview with Shannon Rowan.” Unbekoming, September 17, 2025.
“The Supplement Question: An Essay on Vitamins, Minerals, and the Business of Deficiency.” Unbekoming, December 29, 2025.
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Author's Note
The central tension several readers identify—how can I praise high-dose vitamin C therapy while questioning whether vitamins exist?—deserves a direct answer.
The essay distinguishes between two claims: (1) synthetic compounds produce biological effects, and (2) those effects prove the compounds exist in nature as discrete entities. The first is demonstrable. The second is assumed.
Keith provided something valuable: a direct quote from Szent-Györgyi himself. When a colleague with hemorrhagic diathesis took paprika, he was cured. When Szent-Györgyi later tried to replicate this with pure ascorbic acid, "we obtained no response." The discoverer of vitamin C found that the isolated compound failed where the whole food succeeded. This is the matrix argument stated by the man who named the molecule.
pobrecollie asks the pragmatic question: if it works, does the identity question matter? For therapeutic purposes, perhaps not. If high-dose ascorbic acid reverses a toxic state, use it. But for understanding what health requires—and whether we need industrial products or simply need to eat differently—the question matters considerably.
klimer raises a concern worth taking seriously: could questioning vitamins serve pharmaceutical interests by creating confusion? The essay argues the opposite direction—that whole foods work through mechanisms we don't need to fully understand, while the supplement industry profits from the deficiency framework. But I appreciate the suspicion. After five years of watching narratives weaponized, skepticism about any argument's ultimate beneficiaries is reasonable.
hillcountry draws a parallel to Larson's critique of nuclear theory—the same logical structure where preconceived ideas determine which interpretation of identical evidence gets accepted. The vitamin A research Genereux traced follows this pattern exactly.
eileen points toward what I think is the right direction: relationship with living systems rather than molecular inventories. Whether we call it energetic, electrical, or simply "what traditional preparation preserved," something in whole foods sustains health that isolation destroys.
Horsea T. asks whether the Swiss really ate only butter, cheese, and organ meats. No—Price documented their full diet including rye bread and vegetables. The point was the absence of supplements, not the absence of variety.
Thank you for reading.
I have been questioning this vitamin subject for years too. SO MUCH of our supposed "science" is just black magic hocus pocus.
One thing I have noticed...since the covid scam a lot more people are questioning some of these things, and this is good.