Tony Oliveira, age 13, of San Diego, Calif., for his question:
WHO DISCOVERED THE USE OF VITAMINS?
The idea that certain diseases might be caused by a deficiency or lack of certain elements in a diet is a comparatively new one.
One of the first to think along the vitamin line was a man named Kanehiro Takaki, the surgeon general of the Japanese Navy. In 1882, he found that he could greatly reduce the number of beriberi cases among his nation's naval crews by adding meat and vegetables to their diet of rice.
Then, in about 1900, a Dutch medical officer named Christiaan Eijkman made another interesting discovery in a prison camp. He found that those who ate polished rice, which was rice that had the hulls removed, developed beriberi, while those who ate whole rice, hull and all, did not.
In 1912, a Polish biochemist named Casimir Funk working in London tried to isolate the anti beriberi factor which seemed to be in rice hulls. While he did not manage to isolate the factor in a pure state, he did come up with a class of chemical compounds called amines.
Funk named the fihd vitamine, feeling that amine was essential to life.
Earlier, in 1906, a man named Frederick Hopkins from Cambridge University in England had published a report showing the effect of diet on the growth of rats.
Hopkins said that a substance called "accessory food factors," found in certain foods, were essential for growth and normal development. The word "vitamin" with the "e" dropped came to be used to describe all substances of this type.
Later, an American biochemist named Elmer McCollum showed that fat soluble vitamins consisted of a mixture of vitamins. And an American physician named Joseph Goldberger showed that the water soluble vitamin was also a mixture.
Since then, many vitamins of both the water soluble and the fat soluble type have been isolated and identified.
We have since learned that the vitamin is a complex substance that is essential to the human body for health and growth. But vitamins are not needed for fuel.
Fuel is supplied to human bodies by fats and carbohydrates. The human body makes some vitamins itself, but often in amounts too small to meet its needs. Others are not made in the body at all and must be supplied.
The best way to obtain vitamins is to eat foods in which they occur naturally. There are also preparations of pure vitamins that contain a single vitamin or a combination of several vitamins. Vitamin preparations should be used if prescribed by a doctor.
Not all the functions of many vitamins are completely known. But doctors do know that vitamins have such specific uses that one cannot replace, or act for, another.