The book Vitamania: Our Obsessive Quest for Nutritional Perfection by Catherine Price explains our obsession with vitamins, which she argues are actually making us less healthy.
Many people take vitamins, but most of them are taking them for the wrong reasons and due to misunderstandings. Vitamins are commonly added to other supplements and untested alternative health mixtures, adding a veneer of health to unhealthy products.
How many people take vitamins? A 2019 Harris poll found that 86 percent of American adults take vitamins or supplements (American Osteopathic Association 2019) other estimates are lower but usually over half. Until 1935, food was the only source of vitamins, but today we can get them from pills, dietary supplements, and fortified foods. People think they make us healthier, make us live longer, give us more energy, and prevent and reverse disease. He continued to believe scurvy was a digestive disease caused by blocked sweat glands.įast forward to the present: Vitamins are assumed to be some kind of miraculous panacea. One glitch was that they assumed bottled lemon juice would do the trick they didn’t know that the heat used in the bottling process destroyed the vitamin C.Īlas, poor Lind! He didn’t understand the significance of his experiment. It took a long time for the Royal Navy to adopt fresh citrus fruits. This eventually led to the nickname “Limeys” for British sailors. Lind’s experiment established that scurvy could be cured (and it can also be prevented) by adding fresh citrus fruits to the diet. The first five proved useless the last one worked like a charm.
a nutmeg-sized paste of garlic, mustard seed, horseradish, balsam of Peru, and gum myrrh three times a day.25 drops of elixir of vitriol three times a day.James Lind compared these six proposed remedies: Scurvy, a disease caused by vitamin C deficiency, was rampant in the British Royal Navy, disabling and killing more sailors than combat, storms, shipwreck, and all other causes combined. In 1747, one of the first controlled clinical trials in the history of medical science involved vitamin C, though the researcher had no idea what a vitamin was the vitamin wasn’t discovered until 1912.
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