system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Why do our bodies require such variety of vitamins and minerals when we (as a species) have never had sufficient resources until recently?
gpt
A lot of humans **did** die off. Before the advent of stable agriculture and farming, humans had to resort to hunting and gathering, which meant that their diet was highly dependent on the local flora and fauna.

In most cases, fruits and animals were usually sufficient in an amount to ensure survival. The ones who were not able to get enough nutrition would get sick and die off, and with infections, predators, difficult child birth and a lack of a steady supply of food the average age was about 30 to 40 years. Just enough time to survive, have children and raise them up to live on their own.

The vitamins and minerals that we do generally rely on are derived from several sources, leafy green vegetables, animal meat and other items. These sources of food in the omnivorous diet have their own cellular machinery, which depends on the same vitamins that we have in our body as well.

To summarily answer your question, almost all complex life requires these vitamins and minerals in order to grow and function, because they work on a cellular level. The presence of an omnivorous diet made getting these nutrients easier for humans, but without a steady source of balanced food, they would depend on what they could find and get, which sometimes ended well, and sometimes didn't.

It would take a lot of generations for a body to stop requiring a nutrient that is too hard to find, and these things are so well coded into cellular life, that it's unlikely to happen.