History of Vitamin

These days we could find a wide rage of vitamin supplements in drugstore. But do you know the people who worked hard to find vitamin? In the early 1900s, a few innovative scientists proved that some diseases not just caused only by germs but there were some caused by lack or deficiency of food factor-later called vitamin. Vitamin is named in 1912 by Polish-American chemist named Cashmir Funk (1884-1967). According to Funk, disease like beriberi and scurvy are caused by the lack of a particular vitamin which previously called as food factor or accessory food factor.

The discovery of vitamin made its long journey. Began in the 18th century, sailors on long sea voyages survived for many months on an unvarying diet of preserved food. The awareness of nutrition is almost none. Many sailors succumbed to scurvy. That resulted in loose teeth, bleeding gums, bruising, and even death. All remedies failed until Scottish naval surgeon James Lind (1716-1794 took notice. Lind selected 12 sailors with scurvy, divided them into pairs, and gave each pair of group different foods for two weeks. The group which fed citrus fruits-oranges and lemons recovered rapidly. Lind published his results in 1753 and in 1795 the British Admiralty put Lind research into practice.

In 1900, Dutch physician Christian Eijkmann (1858-1930) was sent to Indonesia to investigate the cause of beriberi. Beriberi is a disease which causes numbnes and muscle weakness. Eijkmann found out that if chickens were fed on polished (white) rice with the outer husk removed they developed a disease very similar to beriberi. Remarkably, if fed on whole (brown) rice, they rapidly recovered. Eijkmann concluded that the husk contained a food factor.

Another inventor is Frederick Gowland Hopkins (1861-1947). Hopkins fed rats carefully in controlled diets. Hopkins found out and concluded that to stay healthy, rat-and he also presumed on humans too-needed amount of what he termed accessory food factor.

In 1914, Joseph Goldberger (1874-1929) of the US Public Health Service demonstrated that pellagra-a disease that causes spread by insects but was the results of poor diet, and could be reserved by a vitamin (niacin) found in protein-rich foods. In the mean time British physician Edward Mellanby (1884-1955) showed in 1918 that a substance in cod liver oil-later identified by American scientist E.V. Mc Collum (1879-1967) as vitamin D-could prevent rickets, a deficiency disease characterized by weakened bones.

By the end of the 1930s, scientist had identified vitamins A, C (the scurvy-preventing vitamin in citrus fruits), D, E, and the B vitamins, including B1, B2, and B12. This wealth of knowledge about vitamins means that deficiency diseases have been all but eliminated in the developed world. And nowadays, many nutritionists believe that, for most people, a mixed diet containing fresh vegetables and fruits provides all the vitamins they need.