How Vitamins Became Pills—And Why We’re Going Back to Food

By Krista Maas de Villiers, BSc Dietetics, Founder of Nunona 

Before vitamins came in bottles, they came from food.

Vitamin C came from fruits and vegetables. Vitamin E came from nuts, seeds, and plant oils. Folate was first isolated from spinach.¹ For most of human history, we consumed these nutrients without knowing their names or exactly what they did.

Then nutrition science changed everything. Scientists discovered that foods contained individual compounds essential to human health. We learned to identify them, isolate them, measure them, and eventually manufacture them at scale.

It was a remarkable scientific achievement. But somewhere along the way, we began to confuse isolated nutrients with complete nourishment.

From Food to Factory

Once scientists identified individual vitamins, the next challenge was making them stable, standardized, affordable, and widely available. Synthetic manufacturing made that possible.

Today, many of the vitamins used in conventional supplements aren't extracted from the foods in which they naturally occur. Instead, they're produced through chemical synthesis, microbial fermentation, or a combination of industrial processing steps. Depending on the nutrient and manufacturing method, this can involve petrochemical-derived chemical intermediates, solvents, acids, fermentation, purification, and other processing methods.²⁻⁴

Vitamin E, for example, can be chemically synthesized using industrial chemical intermediates. Vitamin C is commonly manufactured from glucose through fermentation and chemical processing, while vitamin B12 is typically produced through microbial fermentation before being purified and processed into supplemental forms.²⁻⁴

If you want to understand more about the difference between synthetic and food-derived nutrients, read our guide to Real vs. Synthetic Nutritional Supplements: Why What You Take Matters.

Synthetic vitamins have played an important role in preventing deficiencies and improving public health. But synthetic, isolated micronutrients were developed to solve a particular problem, and providing individual nutrients isn't the same thing as providing complete nourishment.

How Pregnancy Nutrition Became a Checklist

The history of folate illustrates this evolution particularly well. In the 1930s, physician Lucy Wills discovered that a factor in yeast extract could help prevent a form of pregnancy-associated anemia. What became known as the "Wills Factor" was eventually connected to folate, which was later isolated from spinach.¹

Decades of research established the importance of folate for neural tube development, and folic acid supplementation became a cornerstone of prenatal care.⁵ This was an enormous public-health achievement. We tell the full story in Prenatal Pills: A Brief History and Why They Fall Short Today.

Over time, however, the prenatal expanded. Iron, vitamin D, B12, DHA, choline, and other nutrients were added, and pregnancy nutrition increasingly became a checklist of isolated micronutrients. The more nutrients a prenatal contained, and often the higher the percentages listed on the label, the more "complete" it appeared.

We began measuring nutrition by what appeared on a supplement label rather than considering everything the maternal body actually needs.

Isolated Micronutrients Aren't Complete Nourishment

Synthetic, isolated micronutrients can help meet specific nutritional requirements, but micronutrients are only one part of maternal nutrition.

A conventional prenatal pill provides essentially no protein, healthy fats, complex carbohydrates, fiber, meaningful calories, or energy. Yet pregnancy and postpartum require all of them.

Pregnancy and lactation substantially change the body's energy requirements.⁶,⁷ The body also needs protein, fats, carbohydrates, fiber, and micronutrients to support the many physiological demands of pregnancy and postpartum.

And what's listed on the label isn't necessarily what your body can use. We explore the importance of nutrient form, food pairings, and bioavailability in Absorption Over Excess: Why More Isn't Always Better in Prenatal Nutrition.

Even if every isolated micronutrient listed on a prenatal label were perfectly absorbed, however, it still wouldn't provide the nourishment of food.

From Supplementation to Nourishment

Synthetic vitamins solved an important problem: they made it possible to deliver specific nutrients consistently, affordably, and at scale. But our understanding of maternal nutrition has continued to evolve.

We now know far more about the nutritional demands of pregnancy and postpartum, including the importance of folate, iron, DHA, choline, iodine, and B12, as well as protein, healthy fats, carbohydrates, fiber, and adequate energy. Nutrient availability during the first 1,000 days—from pregnancy through approximately a child's second birthday—is particularly important for healthy growth and development.⁸ We explore this critical window in The Future Is Fed Today: Why the First 1,000 Days of Nutrition Matter.

That's the thinking behind Nunona Mama Bites. We take what modern nutrition science has taught us about the nutrients mothers need and deliver them through a more complete form of nourishment. Mama Bites combine 27+ essential nutrients with protein, healthy fats, complex carbohydrates, fiber, and real calories from organic foods. Folate comes from organic leafy greens, iron from organic spinach, choline from organic sunflower lecithin, and DHA from microalgae.

Nunona replaces the conventional prenatal while also providing something a synthetic pill simply cannot: real nourishment.

The Next Chapter of Nutrition

Vitamins began with food, and the discovery of individual nutrients transformed our understanding of human health. Learning how to isolate and manufacture those nutrients made it possible to prevent deficiencies at scale and changed public health for the better.

But that doesn't mean the pill should be the final chapter in the story.

We now understand more than ever about what the body needs during pregnancy and postpartum. Micronutrients matter, but so do protein, healthy fats, carbohydrates, fiber, and adequate energy. We can use a century of nutrition science to create something more complete: nutrition that delivers the essential nutrients we know matter alongside the food and energy the maternal body needs to function at its best.

The result is a prenatal that can do more than deliver vitamins and minerals. It can help support steady blood sugar, hormone health, digestion, energy, and recovery while actually nourishing you.

That’s the idea behind Nunona. We’re taking everything modern nutrition science has taught us and bringing it together in a more complete form of maternal nutrition, with real, organic food at the center.

References

1. Hoffbrand AV, Weir DG. The history of folic acid. Br J Haematol. 2001;113(3):579-589. doi:10.1046/j.1365-2141.2001.02822.x.

2. Eggersdorfer M, Laudert D, Létinois U, et al. One hundred years of vitamins—a success story of the natural sciences. Angew Chem Int Ed Engl. 2012;51(52):12960-12990. doi:10.1002/anie.201205886.

3. Pappenberger G, Hohmann HP. Industrial production of L-ascorbic acid (vitamin C) and D-isoascorbic acid. Adv Biochem Eng Biotechnol. 2014;143:143-188. doi:10.1007/10_2013_243.

4. Fang H, Kang J, Zhang D. Microbial production of vitamin B12: a review and future perspectives. Microb Cell Fact. 2017;16:15. doi:10.1186/s12934-017-0631-y.

5. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Recommendations for the use of folic acid to reduce the number of cases of spina bifida and other neural tube defects. MMWR Recomm Rep. 1992;41(RR-14):1-7.

6. Butte NF, King JC. Energy requirements during pregnancy and lactation. Public Health Nutr. 2005;8(7A):1010-1027. doi:10.1079/PHN2005793.

7. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Dietary Reference Intakes for Energy. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press; 2023. doi:10.17226/26818.

8. Schwarzenberg SJ, Georgieff MK; Committee on Nutrition. Advocacy for improving nutrition in the first 1000 days to support childhood development and adult health. Pediatrics. 2018;141(2):e20173716. doi:10.1542/peds.2017-3716.