NOTIONS OF NUTRIENTS AND NUTRIMENTS

238
CHAPTER
22
NOTIONS OF NUTRIENTS
AND NUTRIMENTS
It is no surprise for historians of science that in any scientifi c fi eld
ideas which in one generation seemed to be fi rmly based truths
should be overturned in the next.
Kenneth J. Carpenter (1994)
1
ALLAYING PUBLIC HEALTH concerns about food quality was a neces-
sary step in America’s march toward food globalization. How could one be
adventuresome about new and strange foods when even familiar ones were
suspect? Moreover, perceptions had to change. For example, throughout
most of baking history, white bread has been preferred by the elites; the
whiteness signifying purity and refi nement. By contrast, brown and black
breads suggested coarseness, so that in racially-mixed Spanish America,
skin color was closely associated with the color of the bread consumed.
2
Sylvester Graham had railed against white bread in the nineteenth
century but not for the right reasons. He thought white bread was too
nutritious to be digested properly.
3
Regardless, Graham’s railing did little
to slow white bread production or to improve its yield of nutrients. Quite
the contrary. The steel roller mills that came into use in the 1870s made
it possible to turn out bread fl our lacking both bran and wheat-germ as
well as important vitamins and minerals. Interestingly, it was only after
white bread became universally available that the upper classes, at least,
discovered the virtues of coarse bread that was high in fi ber, and the coun-
terculture of the 1960s found practically anything brown (brown bread,

Notions of Nutrients and Nutriments
239
brown rice, brown skin) preferable to white (white bread, white skin,
White House).
4
Four decades later, Tufts University researchers discovered
that white bread and other refi ned grains are much more likely than whole
grains to create an unsightly abdominal region which, of course, increases
the risk of heart disease.
Graham would also probably have railed against the waterlogged iceberg
lettuce, introduced in 1894 by W. Atlee Burpee & Co. Like white bread,
it has little nutritional value and not much fl avor. Its sole virtue is that,
with reasonable care, it stays crisp. Also, like white bread, it fell from fash-
ion among the nutrition-conscious upper classes, yet both have had recent
reputation comebacks. Cheap white bread is a partner of pulled pork, and
wedges of iceberg lettuce with blue cheese dressing have become standard
fare in the new chophouses springing up across the country where only the
lettuce is an American development – even chophouses are imports.
Food prejudices and taboos are generally constants. The Seventh Day
Adventists, for example, always maintain the dietary prohibitions of the
Jews found in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, and the Mormons always reject
alcohol.
5
In the past we saw Romans frown on everyday meat-eating, believ-
ing it to be “barbarian,” and the upper classes of the Middle Ages avoided
plebian vegetables. Thus, foods such as white bread and iceberg lettuce
that fall in and out of fashion do so because of fads on the one hand and
health concerns on the other, with advertisers straining to exploit both.
This, in turn, has presented the public with another of what we might
call the “perils” of plenty. Advertising, promotions, and packaging are the

weapons of choice in a competitive struggle that aims at creating an irre-
sistible illusion of quality, no matter what the truth.
6
But any measurable
quality, in a nutritional sense, that might have reassured a jittery public
remained an elusive concept until vitamins were discovered.
7
The English had been nervous about foods since the 1850s and particu-
larly about meat contaminated with tuberculosis.
8
And, by the end of the
nineteenth century, quality as measured by purity was another, and serious,
matter for a U.S. public now thoroughly alarmed by exposés of food adul -
teration and dangerous additives at the hands of “muckraking” journalists –
and, especially, by Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle published in 1905.
9
His
description of conditions in the meatpacking industry – such as sausages
made from spoiled meat, then chemically treated to disguise this fact, and
handled by tubercular workers – turned many to vegetarianism, and meat
sales in the country plummeted by half.
10
240
A Movable Feast
The book, however, did muster support for Harvey Wiley, who, as head of
the Chemical Division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (the USDA),
had been campaigning relentlessly for a federal pure food law, while at the
same time generating publicity by using his “Poison Squad” of volunteers
to test the safety of food preservatives.
11

It was the uproar caused by The
Jungle that prompted President Theodore Roosevelt to order an investiga-
tion, and Wiley fi nally got his bills passed:
12
the Pure Food and Drug Act of
1906 and the Federal Meat Inspection Act of 1907, which he subsequently
erratically and idiosyncratically enforced.
13
These Acts, although amended from time to time by Congress to make
them more effective, were routinely circumvented by the food industry
and even used by big producers to force smaller ones out of business. Still,
the Acts constituted an important acknowledgment by the federal govern-
ment that it had both the authority and the responsibility to ensure a safe
food supply for the nation.
14
In 1907, an article appeared in the USDA yearbook entitled “Food and
Diet in the United States,” in which its author asserted, “in no [other] coun-
try is there a greater variety of readily accessible foods of good quality.”
15
But despite such reassurances, the nation’s safe food jitters were far from
over. Rather, the appearance of the article coincided with the beginning of
the nation’s next food scandal: pellagra, a nutritional defi ciency disease
(see Chapter 23), had broken out among people in the south who had little
access to either food variety or quality.
16
Not that poverty was immediately
identifi ed as the culprit, but corn became a chief suspect, and in 1909 the
plant was put on trial for murder by the state of South Carolina.
17
By 1913, it was clear that there were at least 100,000 cases of the illness

in the south (in that year it killed 1,192 people in Mississippi alone),
and the disease continued to stalk that region until the middle 1930s. In
1934, pellagra was credited with the deaths of 3,602 Americans and it was
estimated that there were 20 cases for every death.
18
The persistence of pellagra did nothing to sooth a public worried about
the dangers lurking in its food supply, nor did publications like Leon
A. Congdon’s Fight for Food (1916).
19
Congdon, Division Chief of Food
and Drugs for the Kansas State Board of Health, systematically criticized
the food industry for adulterating and mislabeling foods, and for employ-
ing unsafe additives. He was especially hard on the milk industry, which
he correctly portrayed as responsible for outbreaks of typhoid and scarlet
fever as well as diphtheria and tuberculosis.
20
In fact, of the cattle supplying
Notions of Nutrients and Nutriments
241
Pittsburgh with milk in 1907, between 10 and 15 percent were found to be
tubercular,
21
and in the following year it was estimated that from 20 to 25
percent of all dairy cattle in the nation were affected with the disease.
22
Pasteurization, it was pointed out, was an easy remedy but hardly one
consistently utilized, as a signifi cant percentage of samples of milk, butter,
and cream for sale in U.S. cities were found to be infected with tubercu-
losis bacilli.
23

Another turn-of-the-century problem was lead water pipes,
which had come into use with the beginning of canalized water toward
the close of the nineteenth century. Fortunately, this danger was quickly
realized, and many municipalities abandoned their use when it became
apparent that the presence of lead sharply increased infant mortality rates,
elevating them from 25 to 50 percent.
24
Congdon was similarly concerned about the safety of new food substi-
tutes like oleomargarine and saccharin, and echoes of such concerns have
continued to reverberate right down to the late twentieth-century distress
caused by the use of other laboratory-produced products such as Stellar,
Simplesse, and Olestra.
25
In addition to one alarm after another set off
by new food-processing technologies from an industry few relish trusting
with their lives, the public has gotten a century’s worth of contradictory,
but nonetheless “scientifi c,” advice about what constitutes good nutrition –
beginning with the remarkably high recommendations for protein and fat
intake that were in vogue at the start of the twentieth century.
26
Such advice has always commanded a wide audience, because in speak-
ing to questions about the salubrity of various foods taken into the body,
it speaks to concerns that are both eternal and global – as refl ected in the
Hippocratic medicine of the ancient Greeks, the Chinese yin and yang, and
the Ayurvedic texts of India. But despite the antiquity of the anxiety, little
more than theorizing about nutriments could be done until the advent of
modern chemistry and the birth of nutritional science.
Vitamin A defi ciency and the blindness (especially night blindness) it
causes was probably the fi rst nutrient defi ciency to be identifi ed. The prob-
lem was known to the ancients – both Hippocrates and Galen wrote about

night blindness – and they had a cure for the condition. It was liver, high
in vitamin A, although the vitamin and its assignments were not under-
stood for another 2,500 years. In fact, the discovery of most of the chief
nutrients was a strictly twentieth-century phenomenon, even though the
importance of some minerals, such as iron, to human health was at least
vaguely understood in the eighteenth century.
27
242
A Movable Feast
In 1789, Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier published the fi rst modern chemical
textbook that used the term “calorie” and showed that all animals, humans
included, were machines that burned food for energy, thereby demolishing
the millennia-old theory of the “four humors.” A half-century later, Justus
von Liebig, a 39 year old German chemist, argued that this combustion
produced animal heat and he founded the science of biochemistry while
introducing the concept of proteins. These, he argued, were the only true
nutrients, even as science was going about disproving him.
28
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, it was known that blood
contained iron and, by its end, numerous other minerals were understood
to be vital to life itself.
29
But important as such mineral research was in
advancing nutritional knowledge, it was only with the discovery of vita-
mins that the fi eld of scientifi c nutrition experienced a truly spectacular
birth. This occurred as disease descriptions in earlier texts were matched
with modern counterparts suspected of being caused by nutrient defi cits.
Vitamins came to light in the ensuing search for their causes and cures.
THIAMINE AND BERIBERI
Illustrative is beriberi, caused by a dietary defi ciency of thiamine (a B-

complex vitamin). Historically those that consume a diet centered too
closely on rice, and one that excludes thiamine-rich foods, particularly
animal foods, have been especially susceptible to the malady. In Asia dur-
ing the latter part of the nineteenth century, the disease achieved a new
virulence when new steam-driven mills were applied to processing rice. In
stripping away the husks and hulls of the grains (polishing them) they also
stripped away their thiamine. The cardiac symptoms of “wet” beriberi, as
well as the paralytic symptoms of “dry” beriberi, became widespread, as did
those of the invariably fatal “infantile” beriberi that mothers passed on to
their babies in thiamine-defi cient milk.
30
Recognition that beriberi was a defi ciency disease began with the work
of Christiian Eijkman, a Dutch military surgeon in Java, who showed dur-
ing the 1890s that a diet of polished rice caused beriberi-like symptoms
in chickens, but symptoms that vanished when the diet was switched to
crude (unpolished) rice.
31
In the fi rst decade of the twentieth century, the
Malayan government instituted programs to warn of the dangers of con-
suming polished rice and to encourage the production of unmilled rice.
Both programs dramatically lowered beriberi incidence.
Notions of Nutrients and Nutriments
243
After learning of these developments, the United States launched similar
programs in the Philippines during the 1920s that were overseen by W. E.
B. Vedder and colleagues. It was Vedder who encouraged R. R. Williams, a
scientist at the Bureau of Science in Manila, to begin studies that led in 1933
to the isolation of the substance protective against beriberi, a substance that
Williams named “thiamine.”
32

Thiamine was a “vitamin,” the word coined in 1912 by Polish chemist
Casimir Funk, who proposed that an absence of a dietary substance he
called vitamine was responsible for scurvy, pellagra, and rickets as well as
beriberi. He was simultaneously right and wrong, but with Funk’s notion
of a “vita” (life) “amine” (any chemical compound containing nitrogen) the
vitamin age leaped into the twentieth century. Research during that cen-
tury, however, carried us well beyond vitamins to an understanding that
all nutrient defi ciencies, if suffi ciently severe, can either produce disease or
lower disease resistance.
33
VITAMIN C AND SCURVY
Scurvy, caused by vitamin C defi ciency, is probably the nutritional defi ciency
disease that has caused the most human suffering.
34
It was infamous as a
scourge of seamen, who regularly turned yellow, developed purple spots all
over their bodies, had gums grow over teeth, teeth fall out, and old wounds
open up. Such symptoms were prominent among the crews of the expedi-
tion led by Vasco da Gama that rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1498,
crossed the Indian Ocean to Calicut, and returned to Lisbon the following
year.
35
In that not so tender-hearted age, it was declared a successful (and
enormously profi table) venture even though scurvy and other ailments had
claimed 100 of the 160 Portuguese seamen who had begun the voyage.
Progress in shipbuilding and navigation technology had reached a point
where humans could remain at sea for indefi nite periods of time, and con-
sequently, away from the vitamin C contained in those fresh fruits and
vegetables found ashore (many sailors also developed night blindness since
the same circumstances produced vitamin A defi ciency).

36
It was, there-
fore, “progress” with a price. Scurvy would ultimately kill substantially
more than a million sailors – claiming more of them than all other diseases,
shipwrecks, naval warfare, and nasty storms combined.
37
Nor did the disease limit itself to sailors. Soldiers – such as the Crusad-
ers in 1250 – engaged in prolonged warfare and under siege (along with