Vitamins
If there's one thing about nutrition we think we know for sure, it's that vitamins are good for us. In reality, however, most of us know nearly nothing about vitamins. And our faith in vitamin supplements or pills, combined with our current beliefs about nutrition and health, is doing us harm.
Discovered barely a century ago, vitamins were a revolutionary breakthrough in nutritional science, providing cures and ways of preventing some of the world's most terrifying diseases. But it wasn't long before vitamins moved from the labs of scientists to become supplements that could be added to food or taken independently. By the end of World War Two, vitamins were available in forms not found in nature - vitamin-fortified peanut butter, vitamin gum, even vitamin doughnuts. Vitamins had entered the scientific mainstream, yet far from expressing perfectly reasonable scepticism over these products, the public asked for more. This is a process that has continued ever since.
In the 21st century, we're such believers in vitamins' inherent goodness that we don't really realise to which scientists still don't truly comprehend how vitamins work in our bodies, or how much of each vitamin we require. We're not aware that vitamins (and our enthusiasm for them) are what opened the door for the array of supposed wonder nutrients that intrigue and confuse us today, whether they be probiotics or antioxidants or omega-3s.
We don't notice the ways the food marketers and dietary supplement makers use synthetic vitamins to add an appearance of health to otherwise unhealthy products; nor do we acknowledge the extent to which we use vitamins and these other vitamin-inspired nutrients to give ourselves permission to overeat foods of all kinds. And we certainly don't recognise that by believing in the idea that isolated dietary chemicals hold the keys to good health, our obsession with vitamins is making us less healthy.
One assumption about vitamins is definitely true: we do indeed need them. The 13 dietary chemicals that we call vitamins affect each one of us every minute of every day, helping us to think and speak and move our muscles, extract calories from what we eat, even see the words on this page. Deficiencies in these vitamins cause serious illnesses and even death - something that still occurs around the world today - and when administered soon enough, vitamins can be astoundingly powerful; give vitamin A to a girl suffering from the vitamin A deficiency condition of night blindness, and she can recover full vision within days. Our need for them is no more avoidable than our need for air.
But the very power of vitamins makes them a double-edged sword. Their ability to save lives has promoted the idea that they can do the impossible in all of us, regardless of whether we're actually deficient in them. This has led to beliefs in vitamins that are based more on faith than fact. When we seek out vitamins today, it's not because we're worried about night blindness, or pellagra (a disease caused by a lack of vitamin B3), or beriberi (a disease caused by a vitamin B1 deficiency), or any of the other conditions that vitamins can actually prevent and cure. Instead, we use vitamins as insurance policies against whatever else we might (or might not) be eating, as if by making up for our bad eating habits, vitamins can save us from ourselves. We think that vitamins will help us live longer and stay healthier, even prevent or reverse disease. It is now generally accepted that vitamins will help give us an advantage over other competitors at sporting events. Many people choose to take more vitamins as they don't want to rely on conventional treatment by doctors. Perhaps that's why when we hear the word 'vitamin', we immediately think of pills, turning substances found naturally in foods into something we can just take. Yet, while we all have access to information and research about the side effects of pills, and it seems unlikely that any one drug could possibly fix all our issues, we assume that vitamins are both cures and entirely risk-free.
In a way, our attraction to vitamins, like our general obsession with nutrition, is perfectly logical: our well-being is affected by what we eat, and no one wants to be sick. But that doesn't explain how the term 'vitamin', a word coined by Polish biochemist Casimir Funk before any vitamin had even been chemically identified, has come to be synonymous with health. Isn't it odd, for example, that cyanocobalamin and alpha-tocopherol sound intimidating, while vitamins B12 and E - which are names for the same substances - seem good? Isn't it strange that we worry about hydrogenated oils, high fructose com syrup, artificial sweeteners, and genetically-modified food, but allow synthetic vitamins to be added to nearly anything without question - and then use the presence of those vitamins to define the food as healthy?
