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The American scientists who helped construct this system were cele-brated in the nation’s press. Home economists and social workers taught its lessons in schools, women’s clubs, and government agencies. By 1910, then, the middle-class public was accustomed to the idea that food con-tained essential substances whose presence could be determined only by scientists in laboratories. They were also on board with the idea that sci-ence, not taste, was the best guide for judging the healthfulness of food.
It was relatively easy, then, for them to accept the idea at the core of what I have called “the Newer Nutrition,” which said that food also contained invisible elements called vitamins that could also be detected only in the laboratory.¹
Who actually discovered vitamins was, and remains, a controversial subject. However, there can be no doubt that the idea that they were es-sential to life owed much to Casimir Funk, the young Polish biochemist who gave them their name. By the early 1900s, a number of chemists suspected that good health depended on much more than the New Nu-trition’s holy trinity of proteins, fats, and carbohydrates.² But it was not until 1911 that Funk, working at the Lister Institute in England, managed to isolate a water-soluble “accessory factor” whose absence in the diet caused beriberi, a disease that was common in East Asia. In what proved to be a world-historical stroke, he christened it a “vitamine.”
In 1915 the American chemist Elmer McCollum isolated another sub-stance whose absence caused an eye disease in rats and seemed to stunt their growth. At fi rst, he called it “fat-soluble A,” but, realizing that Funk had come up with a much catchier name, he changed it to “vitamine A,”
deft ly relegating Funk’s discovery of four years earlier to second place, as
“vitamine B.” This was followed, over the next seven years, by the isola-tion of vitamins C and D, which were found to prevent scurvy and rick-ets, respectively.³ These discoveries received breathless att ention in the press, and although these ailments were hardly present in America, the nation was soon swept up by a wave of concern regarding the healthful-ness of its food that was later labeled “Vitamania.”⁴
As early as 1921, when only a few vitamins had been discovered and litt le was really known about them, Benjamin Harrow, a prominent doc-tor, warned the public that an insuffi ciency of them resulted in diseases that “manifest symptoms which are hideous, revolting. . . . Millions have died for lack of vitamines.”⁵ Why did such alarums strike such a sensi-tive note among the public? Harrow himself gave the most important answer when he said, “The very term is pregnant with meaning.”⁶ Surely
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my mother would not have been so anxious to ply me with them had they been saddled with one of the twenty-three other names that scientists ini-tially suggested; that is, names such as “fat-soluble A,” “water-soluble B,”
“anti-scorbutic C,” “accessory food substance,” and “food hormone.”⁷ The genius of the term “vitamin” is that it is double-barreled, connoting something essential for both life and vitality. McCollum, for example, played on this by calling them essential “for the preservation of Vitality and Health.”⁸ Not only did my mother expect them to keep me healthy;
she also hoped they would give me the energy to practice the piano.
As with germophobia, solid scientifi c backing helped vitamania trump the panoply of other food fads and nostrums tempting Americans.
Leading the charge was the folksy chemist Elmer McCollum. Raised by a very supportive mother on an isolated Kansas farm, he progressed from a one-room rural schoolhouse to graduating showered with honors at the University of Kansas. He was then accepted for graduate work at Yale, where he did his doctorate in chemistry under the prominent nutri-tion researcher Thomas Osborne. Yale proved to be a bump in the road, though, for McCollum felt that high-fl ying nutritional scientists such as Osborne and his colleague Lafayett e Mendel looked down upon him as a midwestern “hick.” This seemed confi rmed when, aft er completing his degree in 1906, McCollum failed to secure a post as a researcher at a prestigious Ivy League university. Instead, he had to return to the Mid-west, to a position at the state agricultural experiment station in Madi-son, Wisconsin, adjacent to the state university, which did its nutrition research on cows.⁹
But McCollum’s ambition remained undimmed, and he set out to make his mark by proving the existence of the suspected “accessory fac-tors” in food. He became a fi xture at scientifi c meetings, displaying pho-tographs comparing scrawny, debilitated catt le with healthy ones that had been fed diff erent feeds that contained exactly same amounts of proteins, carbohydrates, and fats. He became one of the fi rst scientists to experiment with rats, who have a much faster life cycle than catt le, and showed that there was some component in butt er fat and egg yolks that was necessary for their growth and well-being. In 1915 he isolated it and, as we have seen, cleverly called it “vitamine A.”¹⁰
In 1917 McCollum fi nally made it back East, as chairman of the bio-chemistry department of the new school of public health at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. Although the post in a public health school was not all that prestigious among scientists (his
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few doctoral students were mainly women in home economics), the opportunities for self-promotion in the media were much bett er there than in Madison. He now began cultivating a Horatio Alger image as a humble Kansas farm boy who had risen to become the nation’s lead-ing nutritional scientist. In 1918 he came out with a short book explain-ing vitamins to laypeople called Th e Newer Knowledge of Nutrition. In it, he slyly implied that it was he who had discovered them, something he embellished in subsequent editions. He gained particular satisfaction from telling how the Yale researchers Osborne and Mendel had furi-ously pursued the same goal, but had ended up down blind alleys.¹¹ By the time his lab isolated vitamin D in 1922, the American press was already describing him as “the famous biochemist.” He went on to bill himself as the discoverer of “two of the four known vitamins.” By 1925 not only was he unabashedly calling himself the discoverer of vitamins;
he was also claiming, unfairly, that Osborne and Mendel had resisted his discoveries.¹²
Much of McCollum’s fame derived from his warnings that insuffi -cient vitamins in the human diet led to horrifi c health consequences.
These he would illustrate with gruesome photographs of rats affl icted by vitamin defi ciencies—skinny wrecks with coats of patchy hair who were weak, blind, and barely mobile. He would invite journalists to his lab, which could accommodate 3,000 rats, and show them two groups of rats, one of which had been fed a vitamin-deprived diet and were obviously sickly. A typical report from one of these visits said that the rats on the restricted diet would “begin to fail. Nervousness and irritability, bodily emaciation, then death would be their portion, while the other rats would remain plump, strong, bright-eyed and serene until old age comes upon them.” These would oft en be accompanied by photographs of the healthy and the scrawny, debilitated rodents. Thanks to such stories, vitamins soon became associated with death-defying qualities. Collier’s magazine headlined a 1922 article on them: “How Long Do You Want to Live?” A chapter in a book explaining vitamins was called “Increase the Length of Your Life.”¹³
It did not take long for food producers to realize that they now had an invaluable new marketing tool: they could claim their products con-tained invisible, tasteless, weightless substances that were essential to the most important functions of life. Bett er still, although scientists could tell which foods contained vitamins, it would be many years before they could measure their vitamin content accurately or estimate how much of each vitamin was necessary to prevent defi ciencies. As a result,
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practically anyone, even producers of chocolate bars and chewing gum, could advertise them as packed with vitamins.¹⁴
Profound social changes also provided the food producers with a ready audience among women. For middle-class mothers, the 1920s pro-duced an almost perfect storm of anxiety-producing factors. The rise of
“companionate” marriage increased the pressure on wives to be their husbands’ best friends and lovers. Yet at the same time, the culture was growing more child-centered, demanding that they be perfect mothers as well. Meanwhile, the servants who had been common in their house-holds before the war practically disappeared, leaving them entirely responsible for meeting these sky-high expectations. To make mat-ters worse, the Newer Nutrition made the traditional source of advice on feeding children, their own mothers’ ideas, seem out-of-date, if not downright dangerous. These insecurities were heightened when their children went to school and returned home with warnings about the im-portance of those mysterious vitamins.¹⁵
Elmer McCollum, the celebrated vitamin researcher, posing in 1926 with some of the rats he used to demonstrate the horrible eff ects of vitamin deprivation. Alarming photos of scrawny, vitamin-deprived rats on death’s door played a major role in promoting “vitamania.” (The Johns Hopkins University)
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The bane of my childhood, cod liver oil producers, were early adopt-ers of the practice of scaring mothadopt-ers. At fi rst, they exploited Elmer McCollum’s recommendation to drink cod liver oil for its vitamin A, a defi ciency of which he said caused eye disease and rickets. Then, in 1922, he discovered that rickets was actually caused by a defi ciency in vitamin D, which fortuitously was also present in cod liver oil. Rickets was by then quite rare in America, so he came out with a more general warning that vitamin D was necessary for early bone development.¹⁶ This prompted cod liver oil vendors to shift into high gear, telling moth-ers that “scientists [say] children with an insuffi cient amount of the
‘sunlight’ vitamin . . . do not develop healthy bones and sound teeth.”
The Squibb company warned that, “Doctors say a startling percentage of babies’ X-ray pictures show a failure of bones to grow perfectly,” a problem that could be solved by its cod liver oil. Another of its advertise-ments asked mothers, “Can you keep your child off the casualty list? Will
Ads such as this one from 1936, saying that a child needed the vitamins in cod liver oil to avoid becoming a “casualty” of winter, cre-ated fears among mothers that their children’s normal diets were not enough to keep them healthy.
85 : Vitamania and Its Deficiencies
you help him build strong bones, sound teeth, and a sturdy body this winter?”¹⁷
Scientists then discovered new dangers in an insuffi ciency of the vi-tamin A in cod liver oil. Some said a defi ciency of it was the prime cause of infant pneumonia. Others linked it to the common cold and measles.
Still others called it an “anti-infective agent,” saying that this defi ciency made children susceptible to serious infections of all kinds. The Parke-Davis drug company exploited the ensuing fears adeptly, telling mothers that the “resistance-building” vitamin A in its cod liver oil “increased their fi ghting power” against whooping cough, measles, chicken pox, mumps, and scarlet fever.¹⁸
Meanwhile, the realization that vitamins were not just confi ned to specifi c foods such as milk and cod liver oil, but were also present, in varying degrees, in most foods, was proving to be a boon for food pro-ducers. A wave of mergers and takeovers in the food industries during the 1920s produced a slew of companies with heft y budgets to promote their brand-named products. They helped spread vitamania far beyond the anxious-mothers market, with its focus on infants and children.
Now, insuffi cient vitamins were said to threaten the health of everyone in the family.¹⁹
One of the fi rst out of this gate was Fleischmann’s Yeast. In the early 1920s, with yeast sales falling because of the steep decline in home-baked bread, it began marketing its yeast cakes as “the richest known source of” vitamin B. It said eating three of the cakes each day, either spread on crackers or dissolved in drinks, had “a truly remarkable eff ect on the digestive system.”²⁰ Over the next fi ft een years, the company came out with such an impressive number of dubious claims for these unappetiz-ing cakes—from curunappetiz-ing acne and boils to combatunappetiz-ing “nervous exhaus-tion” and the common cold—that, as we have seen, in 1938 the Federal Trade Commission fi nally charged it with false advertising.²¹
Vitamin C, isolated in 1921, also had legs, even though for years its only known property was to prevent scurvy, which was practically non-existent in America. The California Fruit Growers Exchange, using the Sunkist brand, mounted a highly successful national campaign extol-ling the “daily orange” for its “health-giving vitamines and rare salts and acids.”²² By 1932 it was citing scientists’ advice to drink two full eight-ounce glasses of orange juice a day, with the juice of half a lemon added to each glass.²³ (When combined with the simultaneous calls for drink-ing a quart of milk day and the popular penchant for coff ee drinkdrink-ing, this must have put considerable pressure on the national bladder.)
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Ironically (or hypocritically), since they themselves were food pro-cessors, some companies fed fears that modern food processing robbed foods of many of their essential nutrients. In 1920 Fleischmann’s urged eating its yeast cakes because “the process of manufacture or prepara-tion” removed from many foods the “life-giving vitamine” that provided the energy people needed. “Primitive man,” it claimed, “secured an abundance of vitamines from his raw, uncooked foods and green, leafy vegetables. But the modern diet—constantly refi ned and modifi ed—is too oft en badly defi cient in vital elements.” One of its 1922 ads said, “A great nutrition expert says we are in danger because we eat so many ar-tifi cial foods—use so many of the things which are convenient under modern conditions but have been robbed of valuable properties in manufacturing.” A cod liver oil producer warned that the winter months were called “the danger months” because of the scarcity of vitamins A and D in the diet. Scientists said this was because canned fruits and vegetables, “the common food sources of these precious vitamins, of-ten lack the health giving elements they so abundantly furnish in the summer.”²⁴
McCollum, meanwhile, had devised the clever phrase “protective foods” to describe vitamin-rich foods. Foremost among these were milk and leafy green vegetables. According to him, milk made “all the pastoral peoples of the past and present,” from the biblical Israelites to present-day Bedouins, “superior in physical perfection” to all other people.²⁵ He recommended that Americans boost their milk consumption from half a pint per day per person to one full quart.²⁶ As for leafy green vegetables, not only would these provide vitamins; they would also “serve to main-tain the intestinal tract through promoting elimination.”²⁷ He therefore recommended that Americans eat two salads a day. This was sweet mu-sic to large California corporate farmers, who were soon shipping long trainloads of their recently developed iceberg lett uce throughout the na-tion. By 1930 McCollum was being credited with having transformed the American diet. That year the New York Times recalled the impact of his photographs of vitamin-deprived rats. It said that without the vitamins provided by milk and leafy green vegetables, “the rats were stunted and nervous; they aged and died early. With these elements they grew large, muscular, and glossy coated, and lived to be rodent Methuselahs.” As a result, it reported, milk sales had soared and “lett uce, formally a vegeta-ble Cinderella, within a decade occupied the center of the grocer’s stalls, with exactly seven times its previous popularity.”²⁸
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