The sailors' legs were so swollen that he could not walk. Their captain, hoping to stop the dreaded "scurvy infection", led the man to the shores of a desert island in the Atlantic. The poor man was killed, the captain thought, but perhaps the rest of the crew could be saved that way.
The abandoned man chewed the healthy grass he had found in clumps here and there on the island. To his surprise, he could have walked a lot in a few days! His forces returned quickly and he was eventually captured by a passing ship and returned to London. Imagine the shock of his former colleagues when they first saw him: it was as if he had risen!
The story of the sailor who "ate and lived the grass like an animal" was of great interest to a Scottish surgeon, Dr. James Lind. As part of the British navy, he was well acquainted with the thousands of sailors who died of scurvy each year. Lind's question was: do weeds contain something that does not contain a normal human diet? Was there a connection between scurvy and diet? Lind decided to experiment and was responsible for an important chapter in the story "How they found your vitamins."
Not because Dr. E was looking for a vitamin. The word was unknown until 1911. The discovery of most vitamins was in fact unintentional when scientists fought certain diseases without studying food or diet.
This story does not have a single hero, but it does involve men from different countries. These pioneers often could not benefit from the discoveries of others because they lacked the benefits of modern communication. Despite ridicule from contemporary doctors and researchers, these men's efforts are sometimes a tale of courage, perseverance and ultimate success.
History of vitamin C.
On May 20, 1747, I admitted twelve patients with scurvy. . . Their cases were the best I could get, "Dr. Lind reported. His results showed that" the most sudden and visible positive effects were seen with the use of oranges and lemons; of those who took them, they were fit to work at the end of the six days.
Did the medical world rejoice in its time? No. On the contrary, the idea that diet causes scurvy was rejected and rejected. Did the crews of some ships not drink lemon juice and still have scurvy? Unfortunately, that was true, but they had boiled the lemon juice and destroyed what we now call vitamin C.
Finally, about forty-seven years later, the British Admiralty allowed Lind to repeat his experience. An entire fleet of ships got enough raw lemon juice for a twenty-three week voyage. The results were so spectacular that a year later, in 1795, lemon juice (later replaced by lemon juice) became part of the British sailors' regulatory system. Scurvy was no longer the "master of the wave" and British sailors still call themselves "Limey" today!
However, the isolation of the cause of the effectiveness of lemons and other fruits and vegetables has been very slow. In 1905, a Dutchman, Professor Pekelharing, wrote after his experiments on rats: “Milk contains an unknown substance of great importance for nutrition, even with extremely low consumption. It showed that even in the midst of seemingly abundant foods (fats, proteins, carbohydrates) the mice would die if this "unknown substance" was missing. Unfortunately, his report was published only in Dutch and is not widely circulated.
At the start of the 20th century, several research groups were "on the trail" of the mysterious anti-scurvy substance. In 1931, a lemon juice concentrate was made 20,000 times more effective than the original juice. An intensive attempt has now been made to discover the exact nature of this important association. Once its "chain" or molecular structure is determined, it could be synthesized and mass produced. So in 1935, vitamin C (also called ascorbic acid) was the first “pure” vitamin made available to the public through mass production.
However, more than one vitamin has been discovered in an attempt to cure scurvy. Man has learned that illness is not always caused by an attack from an infection or bacteria. Sometimes this is due to a lack of nutrition.
The B complex family
The first signs of the presence of vitamin B were the fight against the dreaded disease of beriberi, which attacks the nerves and the heart. Beriberi also affects the digestive system. Our story takes us back to the sea.
In the early 1880s, two ships, led by a young Japanese doctor, Kanehiro Takaki, left Japan on similar voyages but with different regimes. The first boat served the usual price of rice with vegetables and fish. However, the other served the crew with wheat and milk and more meat than on the first ship. The results were convincing. Beriberi devastated the first ship, killing 25 people. There were no casualties on the other ship. Takaki quickly succeeded in convincing the Japanese Admiralty to introduce a new regime for the entire fleet.
When the news broke in England, he was hoping there would be great interest, but there isn't. Instead, it was up to a young Dutchman, Christiaan Eijkman, to convince the Western world of the value of diet over beriberi.
Eijkman was working in Java, where beriberi was prevalent at the time, and made a remark that completely changed his approach to the problem. Some experimental chickens have been exposed to beriberi infection. However, instead of dying, they recovered over time. How is that possible, Eijkman thought? He checked all possible variables and found only one clue. The chickens ate shiny "white" rice for a while, but then returned to the normal price, the original unpolished "brown" rice.
In tests on humans, Eijkman quickly found that those who ate unrefined rice did not get beriberi, while those who ate glossy rice likely improved. Initially, this seemingly frowned upon "too easy to believe" answer was turned down, but Eijkman valiantly backed his claims with increasing research.
However, the full rationale for his move has been left to others. The "vital substance" in the rice bowl was finally isolated by a Polish chemist, Casimir Funk. American chemist R. R. Williams determined the molecular structure and synthesized vitamin thiamine for years.
However, much of the size and function of the B complex family was not recognized with the discovery of thiamine. But the fight against pellagra would open that door.
In Italian, "Pellagra" means "rough skin". But there is much more to this disease. It ultimately leads to madness and death. As is common in the history of vitamins, many pioneers have linked disease to diet. But even in the mid-19th century, when pellagra was found primarily among the rural poor who lived primarily on corn, popular theories attributed it to "corn poison" and "infection."
In 1915, more than 10,000 people died from pellagra in the United States alone. With its rapid spread, US Secretary of Health Dr. Joseph Goldberger in the far south, where the plague had reached epidemic proportions.
What Goldberger found was terrifying: The victims were neglected, sunk and defiled. Given the lack of hygiene in many places where flies crawl everywhere, one could easily have been misled as to the real cause. But Goldberger suspected the answer was poor nutrition. He noticed that patients at the state kindergarten developed pellagra, but the team did not. Because? There was frequent contact between the two groups. However, the team ate milk, meat, and eggs, while the patients lived primarily on grains.
However, when newspapers published the results of their studies on protein requirements, a commission published the view that pellagra was a contagious disease caused by a stable fly bite. Goldberger was horrified. He firmly believed that until the diet was identified as a cause, thousands of people would continue to die. What could he do to show that the infection was not the cause?
He announced that he and 15 other volunteers would be "infected" under medical supervision and carry the mucus of pellagra victims on their bodies. To their surprise, none of the volunteers developed Pellagra. From that time on, Goldberger concluded that a diet consisting mainly of cornmeal, rice and lard led to pellagra.
But Goldberger never found the exact substance that prevented the disease he was battling. Repeatedly repeatedly. We recognize its difficulties when we realize that vitamin B is in fact a family of complex substances that cannot be easily separated from each other. It was not until 1937 that another researcher, Dr. Conrad Elvehjem, worked with liver concentrate, nicotinic acid, better known as niacin.
Niacin is now considered "important for food". Without niacin, other B vitamins may not work properly in the body. And the vitamin B complex or family is still the subject of extensive research, with about fifteen different members currently recognized. It is generally accepted that, in addition to preventing pellagra, they function best as "equipment".
Vitamin K: immediate success
However, not all vitamins have been discovered as "cures" for plague. In recent years, research on vitamins has taken a new direction. When it comes to nutrition, research has been done on how each newly discovered vitamin can help fight various diseases or health risks.
Vitamin K is a good example. Its existence, first suspected in 1929, soon became "isolated" and spread from 1939. It only took ten years. Given the history of vitamins, we can consider vitamin K as an immediate hit!
Vitamin K was detected in chicken experiments. Some diets have been shown to lose the ability to coagulate blood. Therefore, it was observed that the blood of the chickens on a diet containing sprouted soybeans coagulates faster. Over time, the role of vitamin K emerged as an essential part of normal coagulation. Among other things, this vitamin has given many newborns, whose blood coagulation ability is often low, a good start in life.
Earlier?
When the chemist Funk first coined the word "vitamin", he based it on the idea that the substance he found was an amine (which contained nitrogen) and a life (important for life). Although not all vitamins contain nitrogen, time has shown that one of the most important aspects is correct. Although a typical vitamin like thiamine only makes up 0.001% of a real diet, it is important.
Realizing this does not mean, however, that any controversy over vitamins becomes history. The debate continues. Today, the differences revolve around the recommended dose and different areas of use. For example, you may have read conflicting articles in your local newspaper about the benefits of megavitamin therapy (large amounts of vitamins for certain health problems).
However, it is generally believed that the men who discovered their vitamins became a "friend". And researchers readily admit that the list of about 25 "recognized" vitamins is expected to grow. However, they warn that there is no reason to believe that vitamins are the panacea for all our health problems. In fact, certain overdoses can be harmful.
We look a lot like this abandoned British sailor. He did not find the "fountain of youth" on his lonely island. But how grateful you must have been for the renewed strength that the vitamin-rich herb offers! In the same way, we should also be grateful for our limited knowledge of these little compounds that are necessary for life: our vitamins.
