What are Vitamins and
Minerals?
A History Of Vitamins
Benefits of Vitamins
Guide to Vitamins
Guide To Minerals
Supplements and
their benefits
About Your Nutrition
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A History Of Vitamins
The
value of eating certain foods to
maintain health was recognized long
before vitamins were identified. The
ancient Egyptians knew that feeding
a patient liver would help cure
night blindness, an illness that we
now know to be caused by a vitamin A
deficiency. In 1747, the Scottish
surgeon James Lind discovered that
citrus foods helped prevent scurvy,
a particularly deadly disease and
which is characterized by poor wound
healing, bleeding of the gums, and
severe pain. In 1753, Lind published
his Treatise on the Scurvy, which
recommended using lemons and limes
to avoid scurvy, which was adopted
by the British Royal Navy.
This led to the nickname Limey for
sailors. Lind's discovery, however,
was not widely accepted by
individuals in the Royal Navy's
Arctic expeditions in the 19th
century, where it was widely
believed that scurvy could be
prevented by practicing good
hygiene, regular exercise, and by
maintaining the morale of the crew
while on board, rather than by a
diet of fresh food. As a result,
Arctic expeditions continued to be
plagued by scurvy and other
deficiency diseases. In the early
20th century, when Robert Falcon
Scott made his two expeditions to
the Antarctic the prevailing medical
theory was that scurvy was caused by
"tainted" canned food.
In 1881, Russian surgeon Nikolai
Lunin studied the effects of scurvy.
He fed mice an artificial mixture of
all the separate constituents of
milk known at that time, namely the
proteins, fats, carbohydrates, and
salts. |
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The mice that
received only the individual constituents
died, while the mice fed by milk itself
developed normally. He made a conclusion
that "a natural food such as milk must
therefore contain, besides these known
principal ingredients, small quantities of
unknown substances essential to life".
However, his conclusions were rejected by
other researchers when they were unable to
reproduce his results. One difference was
that he had used table sugar (sucrose),
while other researchers had used milk sugar
(lactose) that still contained small amounts
of vitamin B.
In 1897, Christiaan Eijkman discovered that
eating unpolished rice instead of the
polished variety helped to prevent the
disease beriberi. The following year,
Frederick Hopkins postulated that some foods
contained "accessory factors"—in addition to
proteins, carbohydrates, fats, et
cetera—that were necessary for the functions
of the human body. Hopkins was awarded the
1929 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine
with Christiaan Eijkman for their discovery
of several vitamins. |
What are Vitamins and Minerals?
Vitamins and minerals are necessary to enable
people's bodies to function correctly. Although they
are consumed in foods every day....
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About Your Nutrition
Your Nutrition Shop is an on-line nutritional
supplement store selling only high quality
supplements.....
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