Angus Greig
IN 1911, Polish chemist Casimir Funk made one of the most influential biomedical discoveries of all time. He learned that a disease called beriberi affected those who ate a diet of mainly white rice, but not those who ate mostly brown rice. He isolated a chemical from rice bran, showed it could prevent beriberi, and called it “vitamine“.
We now call that compound vitamin B1. It is one of many essential nutrients that the human body cannot produce in sufficient quantities and that we must obtain from food. Casimir’s breakthrough led to similar discoveries, including the compounds that prevent scurvy and rickets. In 1920, the British chemist Jack Cecil Drummond proposed dropping the “e” and using the umbrella term “vitamin”.
Early success at identifying, preventing and curing nutritional deficiencies naturally led to the idea that dietary supplements were good for everybody. Science now recognises around a dozen essential vitamins, as well as some 20 minerals considered essential in small amounts. In the US, iodine was added to table salt in 1924 to prevent goitre, vitamin D to milk in 1933 to prevent rickets, and several vitamins and minerals were added to flour in 1941.
Public awareness of vitamins grew, and with it, a desire to take personal control. Single vitamin supplements became available in the US in the 1930s, and multivitamins went on sale a decade later.
Though health authorities emphasise that most of us should be able to get all of the vitamins and minerals we need from a balanced diet, the industry has boomed. The list of supplements now numbers in the hundreds. It is estimated that …
