Vitamin Supplements Overview By: Health Articles | - Vitamins are a group of organic food substances or nutrients found only in living things, plants and animals. Vitamins were discovered by Dutch physician, Christiaan Eijkmann, who won the 1929 Nobel prize in physiology and medicine. The word vitamin was derived from the term vitamine. The term "vitamine" was first used in 1912 by Dr. Casimir Funk, a Polish biochemist, in reference to substances that were vital to life and contained an amine.