Vitamins on trial
Melinda Wenner Moyer

462 | NATURE | VOL 510 | 26 JUNE 2014

In 1911, Polish biochemist Casimir Funk discovered what was behind a then-mysterious neurological condition known as beriberi, common in regions where people's main source of calories came from de-husked, or 'polished', rice. He fed a group of ill pigeons a substance he had isolated from rice polishings, and within 12 hours, they had recovered. Funk went on to propose1 that a handful of puzzling ailments including beriberi and scurvy arose because of deficiencies in nutrients like the one he had found in the rice husks. He considered these chemicals vital amines, which he shortened to “vitamines”.
Although many embraced the idea that vitamins could prevent or reverse certain illnesses, the medical establishment railed against it: Funk's colleagues at the Lister Institute of Preventive Medicine in London questioned his theory and tried to ban him from using the term vitamine in his papers, and a 1917 editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association noted that although “the expression 'deficiency disease' has become popular”, the concept is a “vague explanation that is readily accepted by the uncritical”2.

Today, nobody doubts that vitamin B1 can prevent beriberi or that vitamin C prevents scurvy. But scientific opinion about the use of vitamin supplements by millions of seemingly healthy people has never been more divided.

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