Vitamins Limeys Essentials Commentary

Frederick Gowland Hopkins food science

Vitamins

• People have always known
• that not all the goodness in food
• is in its calories.
• James Lind showed
• that eating lemons and limes
• prevented scurvy.
• Nikolai Lunin, studying scurvy,
• compared mice fed milk
• with mice fed the known constituents of milk
• and found that the deprived mice died.
• Takaki Kanehiro was allowed
• to experiment with men on battleships
• and found that sailors who ate a good diet,
• not merely white rice, did not get beriberi.
• Christiaan Eijkman repeated
• Kanehiro-san’s experiment but with chickens
• and showed that brown rice
• helped prevent beriberi.
• Consequently, Frederick Hopkins asserted
• that some foods contained “accessory factors,”
• which were later called vitamins.

Limeys

• Egyptians ate liver
• to see again at night.
• Limeys ate limes
• so they didn’t get scurvy.
• Japanese sailors ate brown rice
• so they didn’t get beriberi.
• One way to prevent burglaries
• —lock the doors and windows.
• Another way
• —give everything away.
• A young child
• they say
• if allowed to freely choose
• always eats a balanced diet.

Essentials

• A body needs small amounts of
• a few organic compounds
• that it cannot produce itself.
• Who knows what unmeasurable qualities
• a person needs
• that a mind cannot produce by itself.