Ever wonder why old - timey health treatments involved eating incredibly uncanny intellectual nourishment ? It ’s because few people knew exactly what office of food were nutritious . Until one cook inadvertently cured her chickens of a disease , and started a chain of inquiry that lead to the discovery of vitamins .
If you ’ve read some of adventure novels set in the 1800s , you ’ve probably heard of beriberi . It was a mysterious disease in Southeast Asia . It started with a impuissance in the legs . As the syndrome uphold , there was inflammation of the tissues , followed by massive accrual of fluid around the body . tardily the dupe stopped being able-bodied to move , and at last , their heart stopped . It was long , painful unwellness , that seemed to strike wide swaths of the population at one time , but no one could figure out what caused it .
Rice comes in a husk . withdraw the husk , and the rice is browned , but the chocolate-brown color is only skin recondite . The brown on rice is a relatively tough tabu coat of bran . “ Polish ” the rice kernels a small and the bran amount off . The process make the Elmer Rice more smooth and balmy , and adds to its ledge life , but it also makes the Elmer Reizenstein more expensive .

There are multiple versions of the history after the find of the alteration in solid food . Some say it was the supervisory program of the infirmary that comment the cook ’s switcheroo and was furious that comparatively expensive food was squander on poultry . Others say that Eijkman light upon the change and cautiously tote up the shining – the bits of husk remnant from the shining process – back to the white rice that chicken were fed . Either way , the chickens made a miraculous recovery .
Eijkman did carefully research the dissimilar minerals present in the shining , and ascertained that none of them were responsible for for the crybaby retrieval . He also made inquiries and discovered that prison that served brown rice had very few cases of beriberi , while prisons that served blanched Elmer Rice watch their beriberi cases skyrocket . regrettably , Eijkman fell sickish himself , and left Java before he could do more research .
From here the employment fragments . Eijkman had made the first discovery , but everyone had a different notion of what this mystic component of rice casing might be . Casimir Funk caused a stir when he announced that he had come up the component – although he turned out to be unseasonable . He said it hold an “ amine radical , ” a certain chemical substance complex body part that contained nitrogen and a lone pair of outer valence electrons . Since the factor was lively and hold an aminoalkane group , he holler it a vitamine .

Joseph Goldberger noticed that a supplement of barm could bring around dog of pellagra – what ’s now known to be a vitamin B inadequacy . Gowland Hopkins noticed that separating out the dissimilar known components of milk and feeding them to immature rat would leave them stunted , while a small complement of milk , which he make out contained the amino acid tryptophan , would allow them to grow . Elmer McCollum find the same affair happening with rats that rust different component of butter . He separated butter into its fat and non - fat liquids . Rats that were yield the adipose tissue did well . Those that were given the same nutritionist’s calorie , but only the non - fat components of butter , start out sick . This prove that at least some of these mysterious vitamin were only fat - soluble .
In fact there were so many researchers , making dissimilar forward motion on different fronts , that when the Nobel Prize commission finally decided to dole out the honors , no one bed quite who to give them to . Hopkins and Eijkman end up sharing the prize in 1929 . Afterwards , different researchers slowly taunt out the other vitamin essential to lifespan .
And all because of some chickens .

Top Image : Markus Koljonen
ViaNCBI , Judaic Virtual Library , UH , Nobel Prize .
Science

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