Vitamin and C dissolve into the water when a vegetable is boiled, and are then lost when the water is discarded. The body's stores for different vitamins vary widely; vitamins A, D, and B are stored in significant amounts, mainly in the liver, and an adult's diet may be deficient in vitamins A and D for many months and B in some cases for years, before developing a deficiency condition. However, vitamin B (niacin and niacinamide) is not stored in significant amounts, so stores may last only a couple of weeks. For vitamin C, the first symptoms of scurvy in experimental
Vitamin B12 deficiency Zealand, cattle suffered from what was termed "bush sickness". It was discovered that the volcanic soils lacked the cobalt salts essential for synthesis of the vitamin by their gut bacteria. The "coast disease" of sheep in the coastal sand dunes of South Australia in the 1930s was found to originate in nutritional deficiencies of the trace elements, cobalt and copper. The cobalt deficiency was overcome by the development of "cobalt bullets", dense pellets of cobalt oxide mixed with clay given orally for lodging in the animal's rumen. Vitamin B12 deficiency Vitamin B deficiency, also known as cobalamin deficiency, is the