Sunday, March 27, 2011

Vitamin Nicotine

I was making chocolate milk in Germany one day when I happened to glance down at the ingredients on the nutrition label and see the word "Nicotinamid." Vitamin nicotine what? No wonder their kids start smoking so young! No wonder I love this chocolate milk so much!

The next time we were at the store I checked the ingredients labels on several brands of kids chocolate milk, and sure enough, they were all nicotine fortified. I decided to check my translation of the word "Nicotinamid" against my trusty dictionary and was surprised to find that it actually translates to Niacinamide, Vitamin B3.

Well, I went home and forgot all about this incident, until this morning when I once again encountered Nicotinamide, on the ingredients of my generic Life cereal. Two minutes with wikipedia later, I can now inform you that Niacin is a made up word for NIcotinic ACid vitamIN. Turns out the first niacin was isolated by treating nicotine with nitric acid, but once its nutritional value came to light, the powers that be thought it best not to actually name it vitamin nicotine. They thought it might stress people out to think there was nicotine in their cereal and vitamins in their cigarettes :).

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