• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1188 0

supposed to be eating these days, especially this business about vitamins and minerals. Early in the twentieth century the food scientist Wilber Atwater did some lab experiments on nutritional needs and published his findings. He got a tremendous amount of attention as people celebrated finally knowing what we needed to eat for optimal well-being. But Atwater had erroneously set the daily allowance of protein and calories much too high. When researchers polled Americans, they found that by Atwater’s standards, almost no one was getting enough. This crisis became the Great Malnutrition Scare of 1907–1921. Thousands of children were measured from top to bottom, including their cephalic indexes, as researchers looked for signs of trouble. They checked kids for rosy cheeks and large stature, things that were not at all stable characteristics among immigrants. National attention was obsessed with this for a generation. The New Republic asked this mind-boggling question in 1918: “How are we to account for the fact that malnutrition occurs as much among the well-to-do as among the poor?”13 It was all due to a bad number, and no one thought to check that number for a while. Instead, health reformers moved on to figuring out what foods to eat in order to get the protein. Remember, if you reexamine your moment’s basic knowledge, the likely result is that you either (a) waste your time confirming something “everyone knows”; or (b) discover something people are very unlikely to believe. That is how even wildly strange trances of value persist over time, trapping everyone in their moment in some absurd nonsense that no one will ever care about again.

What are vitamins? When scientists first started analyzing what was in food, they found proteins, carbohydrates, and water. That’s all. They dismissed fruits and vegetables as unnecessary sugar water and fiber. Vitamins weren’t isolated and named until 1912. Elmer McCollum and others at Yale showed that an absence of vitamin A in rat diets led to rats with bad vision and stunted growth. Nutritionists across America suddenly equipped their labs with rats and started removing things from the poor rats’ diets. It was quickly obvious that vitamins C and D were necessary or the subject would suffer scurvy and rickets, respectively, though it took a while to figure out how they worked. McCollum showed that the absence of vitamin B in one’s diet led to beriberi. He called the foods that had vitamins “protective foods,” and soon so did everyone else. Modern science has not actually gotten that much further. We have been unable to determine what quantity of vitamins people need for good health. That’s why food packages list contents in terms of RDA, “recommended” daily allowances; scientists could not come up with enough of a consensus to merit stronger language.

It is not just vitamins that we are a little hazy about. Broccoli and carrots are protective against cancer, right? Wrong. Scientists have not been able to find any correlation. Why did we think there was one? The biggest reason is that in the 1970s we started doing studies of cancer worldwide and nationwide, and we found huge, manyfold differences by geography. Regarding breast cancer, researchers could draw a straight line directly relating the amount of fat in the diet to the rate of breast cancer in the population. And when people emigrated from low-cancer areas to high-cancer areas, they and their children soon had cancer rates that matched those of their new neighbors. Diet seemed the likely culprit, and this conclusion was widely broadcast in the popular press. Early follow-up studies asked cancer patients about their diets and seemed to confirm the guesses about fats and fiber. But once we started getting results from forward-looking, long-term studies (where you didn’t know in advance who ended up with cancer), the correlation totally disappeared. Scientists offer this explanation: the cancer demanded an explanation (“Why me?”), and the patients provided one by perceiving that they had not had enough broccoli and carrots. Thirty