Vitamins

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Vitamins

Apart from their actual health benefits, vitamins have played an important role in the American consciousness as the arena for a struggle between competing systems of knowledge: the positivist authority of "normal science" with its controlled experiments and research protocols versus the anecdotal evidence and personal experiences of ordinary consumers. Since antiquity, it has been commonly known that there is a connection between diet and health, but it was not until the early 1900s that specific vitamins were isolated and accepted by the public as essential to our well-being. What began as an exercise in public health became big business: by the end of the century, retail sales of vitamins in America exceeded $3.5 billion, with surveys showing more than 40 percent of Americans using vitamins on a regular basis. The story of vitamins demonstrates, in the words of social historian Rima Apple, that "Science is not above commerce or politics; it is a part of both."

The term "vitamins" (originally spelled "vitamines") was coined shortly before World War I by Casimir Funk, a Polish-American biochemist who was among the first to investigate the role of these substances in combatting deficiency diseases such as rickets. By the middle of the 1920s, three vitamins had been identified (vitamin A, vitamin C, and vitamin D), as had the vitamin B complex. Even then, manufacturers were quick to seize on the public's interest in vitamins as an angle for promoting their own products. Red Heart trumpeted the vitamin D content of its dog biscuits; Kitchen Craft declared that since its Waterless Cooker cooked foods in their own juices, none of the "vital mineral salts and vitamin elements … are washed out and poured away with the waste water." Particularly compelling were the appeals to "scientific mothering" in ads for such products as Squibb's cod-liver oil ("the X-RAY shows tiny bones and teeth developing imperfectly"), its competitor H. A. Metz's Oscodal tablets ("children need the vital element which scientists call vitamin D"), Cream of Wheat, Quaker Oats, and Hygeia Strained Vegetables. Pharmaceutical firms likewise targeted mothers in periodicals such as Good Housekeeping and Parents' magazine, with the publishers' blessings: "An advertiser's best friend is a mother; a mother's best friend is 'The Parents' Magazine,"' proclaimed its advertising department, while the director of the Good Housekeeping Bureau generously promised clients that all products advertised in the magazine, "whether or not they are within our testing scope, are guaranteed by us on the basis of the claims made for them."

Harry Steenbock, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin, discovered in 1924 that ultraviolet irradiation of certain foods boosted their vitamin D content, thus providing an alternative source to wholesome but distasteful cod-liver oil. The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation was created to protect his patents and to license his process to manufacturers. (Ironically, it would be Wisconsin's Senator William Proxmire who, exactly half a century later, would spearhead a congressional campaign which resulted in the Food and Drug Administration's reclassifying most vitamins as food rather than drugs.)

The scientific reasons advanced for taking a particular vitamin were often compelling. In the late 1700s, fresh fruit, rich in vitamin C, had been dramatically shown to be a preventive for scurvy, the cause of many shipboard deaths on long sea voyages: Captain James Cook added citrus to the diet of his crew on his three-year circumnavigation of the globe, during which only one of his seamen died. (Cook's limes, which became a staple of shipboard diet throughout the British navy, gave rise to the slang term "limeys" for Englishmen.) But widespread consumption of a vitamin for its original purpose sometimes created partisans for its benign effects in another area, as when Nobel laureate Linus Pauling advocated high dosages of vitamin C in the 1970s as a therapy for the common cold, and subsequently proposed that it could even play a role in curing cancer.

The appeal to scientific authority helped to legitimate vitamin consumption, but as vitamins became popular science and demand grew, other marketers became eager players, and from the 1930s on there was increasing competition between health professionals (physicians and pharmacists) on the one hand, and grocers on the other. Trade journals for the druggists repeatedly stressed the profitability in vitamins and the desirability of keeping consumers coming back to the drugstore for their supplies (and discouraging them from buying vitamins in the general marketplace). The grocers (and later the health food stores) and their public wanted to keep vitamins readily available and affordable. And there were skeptics as well, including the FDA, whose own claim to scientific legitimacy had the force of law, and which attempted to regulate vitamin marketing in order to prevent what it often saw as fraudulent claims and medical quackery.

Often, however, when the FDA frustrated the demand for dietary supplements with its regulatory impediments, it aroused an endemic populist distrust of big government and fierce resentment of a professional pharmaceutical and medical establishment seen as monolithic or even conspiratorial. In the late decades of the century, the public found a willing ally in Congress, which received no fewer than 100,000 phone calls during debate on the Hatch-Richardson "Health Freedom" proposal of 1994 (it reduced the FDA's "significant scientific agreement" standard to "significant scientific evidence" for labeling claims, so long as they were "truthful and non-misleading," and shortened the lead time for putting new products on the market); with 65 cosponsors in the Senate and 249 in the House, the bill passed handily.

—Nick Humez