The Vitamine Manual

by Walter Hollis Eddy

In 1911 Casimir Funk coined the name Vitamine to describe the substance which he believed curative of an oriental disease known as beri-beri. This disease is common in Japan, the Philippines and other lands where the diet consists mainly of rice, and while the disease itself was well known its cause and cure had baffled the medical men for many years. Today in magazines, newspapers and street car advertisements people are urged to use this or that food or medicament on the plea of its vitamine content. In less than ten years the study of vitamines has increased to such an extent that it is difficult to find a chemical journal of any month of issue that does not contain one or more articles bearing on the subject. Such a rapid rise to public notice suggests an importance that justifies investigation by the laity as well as the chemist and in the pages that follow has been outlined in simple language the biography of this newest and lustiest of the chemist's children.

Dr. Funk christened one individual but the family has grown since 1911 to three members which for lack of better names are now called vitamines "A," "B," and "C." There are now rumors of another arrival and none dare predict the limits of the family. Had these new substances been limited to their relation to an obscure oriental disease they would have of course commanded the medical attention but it is doubtful whether the general public would have found it worth while to concern themselves. It is because on better acquaintance they have compelled us to reform our ideas on nutrition of both adults and babies and pick out our foods from a new angle, that we accord them the attention they demand and deserve. Granting then, their claim upon our attention, let us review our present knowledge and try to see with just what we are dealing. This will be more easily accomplished if we consider the vitamines first from the historical side and reserve our attention to details of behavior until later.

A limited diet of polished rice and fish is a staple among the peoples of the Orient. When the United States Government took over the Philippine Islands in 1898 it sent there a small group of scientists to establish laboratories and become acquainted with the peculiarities of the people and their troubles. One of the first matters that engaged their attention was the condition of the prisons which were most unsanitary and whose inhabitants were poorly fed and treated. Reforms were put into operation at once and the sanitary measures soon changed these prisons to places not quite so abhorrent to the eye. In trying to improve the diets of the prisoners little change was made in their composition because of the native habits but the reformers saw to it that the rice fed should be clean and white. In spite of these measures the first year saw a remarkable increase in the disease of beri-beri, and the little group of laboratory scientists had at once before them the problem of checking a development that bid fair to become an epidemic. In fact, the logical discoverers of what we now know as the antineuritic vitamine or vitamine "B" should have been this same group of laboratory workers for it was largely due to their work between the years 1900 and 1911 that the ground was prepared for Funk's harvest.

The relation of rice to this disease was more than a suspicion even in 1898. In 1897 a Dutch chemist, Eijkman, had succeeded in producing in fowls a similar set of symptoms by feeding them with polished rice alone. This set of symptoms he called polyneuritis and this term is now commonly used to signify a beri-beri in experimental animals. Eijkman found that two or three weeks feeding sufficed to produce these symptoms and it was he who first showed that the addition of the rice polishings to the diet was sufficient to relieve the symptoms. Eijkman first thought that the cortical material contained something necessary to neutralize the effects of a diet rich in starch. Later however, he changed his view and in 1906 his position was practically the view of today. In that same year (1906) F. Gowland Hopkins in England had come to the conclusion that the growth of laboratory animals demanded something in foods that could not be accounted for among the ordinary nutrients. He gave to these hypothetical substances the name "accessory food factors." To Hopkins and to Eijkman may therefore be justly attributed the credit of calling the world's attention to the unknown substances which Funk was to christen a little later with the name vitamines. Other workers, of course, knew of these experiments of Eijkman and Hopkins and in 1907 two of them, Fraser and Stanton, reported that by extracting rice polishings with alcohol they had secured a product which if added to the diet of a sufferer from beri-beri seemed to produce curative effects. It is obvious that logic would have decreed that some of these workers should be the ones to identify and name the curative material. But history is not bound by the rules of logic and it was so in this case. Another student had been attracted to the problem and was working at the time in Germany where he also became acquainted with Eijkman's results and began the investigation of rice polishings on experimental lines. This student was Casimir Funk and a little later he carried his studies to England where he developed the results that made him the first to announce the discovery of the unknown factor which he christened vitamine. Funk's studies combined a careful chemical fractioning of the extracts of rice polishings with tests for their antineuritic power upon polyneuritic birds, after the manner taught by Eijkman. By carrying out this fractioning and testing he obtained from a large volume of rice polishings a very small amount of a crystalline substance which proved to be curative to a high degree. A little later he demonstrated that this same substance was particularly abundant in brewers' yeast. From these two sources he obtained new extracts and carefully repeated his analytical fractionings. The result was the demonstration that they contained a substance which could be reduced to crystalline form and was therefore worthy of being considered a chemical substance. In 1911, before Fraser and Stanton or any other workers had been able to show to what their curative extracts were due, Funk produced his product, demonstrated its properties and claimed his right to naming the same. At that he barely escaped priority from still another source. The chemists in Japan were naturally interested in this problem and possessed an able worker by the name of Suzuki. Suzuki and his co-workers Odake and Shimamura were engaged in the same fractioning processes with polishings and entirely independently of Funk or other workers they too succeeded in isolating a curative substance and published their discovery the same year as Funk, 1911. Their methods were later shown to be identical up to a certain point. Suzuki called his product "Oryzanin." Funk's elementary analyses had shown the presence of nitrogen in this product and his method of extraction indicated that this nitrogen was present in basic form. For that reason he suggested that his product belonged to a class of substances which chemists call "amines." Since its absence meant death and its presence life what more natural than to call it the Life-amine or Vita-amine. This is the origin of Funk's nomenclature.

Both Funk's original crystals and Suzuki's oryzanin were later shown to be complexes of the curative substances combined with adulterants and we do not yet know just what a vitamine is or whether it is an amine at all but no one since 1911 has been able to get any nearer to the identification than Funk and while he has added much data to his earlier studies he has himself not yet given us the pure vitamine. For that reason it has been suggested by various people that the name vitamine should not be used since it has no sufficient evidence to support it. Hopkins of England had suggested the name "accessory food factors." E. V. McCollum holds that we should call them the "unidentified dietary factors" and added later to this phrase, the terms water-soluble "B" and fat-soluble "A" after the fat soluble form was discovered. Most chemists feel, however, that the purpose of nomenclature is brevity combined with ready recognition of what you are discussing and that it is unnecessary to change the name vitamine until we know exactly what the substances are. The result is that while still a mystery chemically they remain under the name of vitamine and the kinds are distinguished by the McCollum terms "fat-soluble" A, "water-soluble" B, and "C."

We see that beri-beri then was responsible for Funk's adding to our chemical entities a new member but it does not yet appear why this entity concerns our normal nutrition. To get this relation we must turn for a moment to the state of knowledge in 1911 in regard to foods and their evaluation and what was going on in this field of study at the time.

A great advance in measuring food value was the discovery of the isodynamic law. Translated into ordinary language this law states that when a person eats a given amount of a given kind of food, that food may liberate in the body practically the same amount of energy that it would produce if it were burned in oxygen outside of the body. The confirmation of this law permitted us to apply to the measurement of food the same method we had already learned to use in measuring coal. For convenience the physicists devised a heat measure unit for this purpose and naturally called it by a word that means heat, namely, "calorie." Using this unit and applying the isodynamic law it was merely necessary to determine two things; first, how many calories a man produces in any given kind of work, second how many calories a given weight of each kind of food will yield, and then give the man as many calories of food as he needs to meet his requirements when engaged in a given kind of labor. The measurement and tabulation of food values in terms of calories and the investigation of the calorie needs of men and women in various occupations has been one of the great contributions of the past twenty years of nutritional study and to the progress made we owe our power to produce proper rations for every type of worker. Army rations for example are built up of foods that will yield enough calories to supply the needs of a soldier and during the recent war extended studies conducted in training camps all over the United States have shown that when the soldier eats all he wants he will consume on the average about 3600 calories per day. In France the American soldier's ration was big enough to yield him 4200 calories per day if he ate his entire daily allowance.

But calories are not the only necessities. A pound of pure fat will yield all the calories a soldier needs in a day but his language and morals wouldn't stand the strain of such a diet. Neither would his health, for not only does his body demand fuel but also that it be of a special kind. While there are many kinds of foodstuffs, chemical analysis shows that they are mainly combinations of pure compounds of relatively few varieties. The chemists call these proteins, fats, carbohydrates, and salts. Meats, eggs, the curd of milk, etc., are the principal sources of protein. Sugars and starches are grouped together under the name of carbohydrate. By salts is meant mineral matters such as common salt, iron and phosphorus compounds, etc. In selecting foods it was found that the body required that the proportions of these four substances be kept within definite limits or there was trouble. We know now that a man can get along nicely if he eats 50 grams of protein per day and makes up the rest of his calories in carbohydrates and fats, provided that to this is added certain requirements in salts and water.

It is also obvious that the foods given must be digestible and palatable.

We had reached this status some time before 1911. But, a short time before this, there had arisen a controversy as to the relative value of different types of proteins. The animal- vs. vegetable-protein controversy was one of the side shows of this affair. This controversy had led to a careful study of the different kinds of proteins that are found in foodstuffs. Through a brilliant series of chemical investigations for whose description we haven't time or space here, chemists had shown that every protein was built up of a collection of acids which were different in structure and properties, that there were some seventeen of these in all and that any given protein might have present all seventeen or be lacking in one or more and that the proportions present varied for every type of protein. It was then obvious that proteins could not be considered as identities. More than that, it was the necessary task of the food expert to separate all proteins into their acids or building stones and not only show what was present and how much but determine the rôle each played in the body. To this task many set their faces and hands.