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Tracing the Cause of Disease |
The first solid hint that a specific dietary deficiency could lead to disease came in 1754. In that year the Scottish naval surgeon James Lind showed that scurvy --the painful and sometimes fatal bane of mariners on long ocean voyages--could not only be cured but also prevented with the juice of oranges, lemons, and limes. By the late eighteenth century, British sailors (soon nicknamed "Limeys") were reaping the benefit of Lind's discovery.
Meanwhile, the advent of the Industrial Revolution in Britain in the late 1700s brought with it a different scourge: rickets. The disease itself had first been described by physicians in the mid 1600s, but it was then relatively rare. By the nineteenth century, however, as more and more families left the outdoor life of the farm for factory work in the smoggy air of industrial cities, rickets had become a plague all over Europe. Symptoms of the disease were unmistakable. The bones of afflicted infants remained soft, like cartilage, and the babies were slow to sit, crawl, and walk. As the children grew, their soft bones bent under the additional weight, leaving the children with rickets' telltale pigeon breast, bowed legs, or knock-knees. Rachitic children (that is, children with rickets) also suffered from tetany: painful spasms of the hands, feet, and larynx, along with difficulty in breathing, nausea, and convulsions. This condition, later found to be symptomatic of insufficient calcium, was often so severe that children died.
Throughout the nineteenth century, sporadic reports of cures for rickets surfaced, but with little effect. In 1822, for example, a Polish physician observed that children in Warsaw suffered severely from rickets, whereas the disease was virtually unknown in the city's rural outskirts. After experimenting with the two groups, he concluded that sunbathing cured rickets. Five years later, a French researcher reported cures among those given the home remedy cod-liver oil. Neither treatment gained widespread attention, in part because the prevailing medical wisdom was that people needed only to get adequate amounts of the so-called macronutrients--proteins, fats, and carbohydrates--in order to maintain health. However, researchers looking into the causes of such diseases as pellagra and beriberi began to suspect that the macronutrients might not be the whole story--that, in fact, there was more to ordinary food than met the eye. |
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 | | | About Vitamin D - This page from the University of California, Riverside is worth an in-depth look. The site offers an overview of Vitamin D's history, nutritional aspects, and its chemistry and biochemistry. |  | | Food & Nutrition Information Center - Great resource with links to information on dietary guidelines, dietary supplements, food composition, and more. | | | Food Science and Nutrition Resources on the Web - This site offers a guide to web resources in food science and nutrition, including biochemical
& biophysical properties of foods & their constituents. | | | Nutrition Insights - Articles from the USDA Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion available in PDF format. The articles cover a wide range of topics. |  |
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