Take Your Vitamins

Take Your Vitamins

   It's a phrase we've likely heard countless times, our parents telling us to be sure to take our vitamins.  And quite likely, that;s how we think of vitamins...as a pill.  Buy the multi, buy the B-complex, buy the D, all carefully packaged and for the most part, all 85,000 different vitamins and dietary supplements remain unregulated, untested and for the most part, all coming from China (there are no longer any vitamin manufacturing plants in the U.S.).   But beyond the politics of the manufacturing, vitamins are in themselves quite controversial, and quite complicated (and difficult to produce artificially), and have become the fascinating subject of a new book by Catherine Price, Vitamania.

   Here's how the author opens her book:  ...until recently, I thought I understood vitamins.  I could tell you that they are essential substances that we need to get from our diets, and like anyone who paid attention in fifth grade, I was aware that sailors used to suffer from something called scurvy.  But I didn't really understand why animals and plants need vitamins, how they were discovered [barely a century ago], or even the technical definition of what a vitamin actually is.  Instead, like many people, I just aimed for 100 percent of my daily requirements, ate a lot of kale, popped a multivitamin when I remembered it, and bought into the common assumption that the more vitamins a food contained, the better for me it must be...Part of my lack of curiosity stemmed from my assumption that vitamins represented a problem that had already been solved, and which I therefore didn't need to worry about myself.  So when I discovered how much scientific uncertainty still surrounds vitamins (not to mention that billions of people in the developing world still don't have sufficient access to them), I was both shocked and shaken.  If some of the most basic questions about vitamins still have no answers, then what else don't we know about nutrition?  And how should this affect the way we think about food?

   Beyond simply describing how vitamins work, her book hints at a slight undercurrent of how major food manufacturers have more or less duped the public since the early 1950s; the quest for processed, frozen and canned foods all began eliminating most of the vitamins once located within, and thus forcing the scientists to create synthesized vitamins to replace them (never mind the more controversial switch to wheat and corn).  This might be part of the backlash occurring throughout the U.S. and other parts of the world, as featured in a story in Fortune titled, The War on Big Food by Beth Kowitt: Try this simple test.  Say the following out loud: Artificial colors and flavors.  Pesticides.  Preservatives.  High-fructose corn syrup.  Growth hormones.  Antibiotics.  Gluten.  Genetically modified organisms.  If any one of these terms raised a hair on the back of your neck, left a sour taste in your mouth, or made your lips purse with disdain, you are part of Big Food’s multibillion-dollar problem.  In fact, you may even belong to a growing consumer class that has some of the world’s biggest and best-known companies scrambling to change their businesses...Major packaged-food companies lost $4 billion in market share alone last year, as shoppers swerved to fresh and organic alternatives.  Can the supermarket giants win you back?

   Organic food, simple food, slow food...these growing movements all have something in common with one thing...vitamins (here's one interesting side note from author Price's book: a 2002 study in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that only 3 percent of total beta-carotene in carrots was released when they were eaten raw, versus 21 percent when they were blended to a pulp, 27 percent when that pulp was cooked, and 39 percent when the pulp was cooked with oil).  And getting those vitamins is not as simple as we might think, for some vitamins are destroyed by heating (vitamin C) and others are simply too small to measure, often less than a grain of salt (vitamin D).  And surprisingly, to become a vitamin (vs. a mineral), it must contain carbon (minerals such as iron and potassium, which we're also told to "take" as a supplement, do not contain carbon).  And to continue with the scientific definitions, the "ose" and "ase" endings (in enzymes such as lactase and lactose) refer to what the enzyme does or that it contains sugar (the "ose" part).

   Sounding too complicated?  I bring up the enzymes because without them, our vitamins would be absorbed too slowly to be useful, and "life would grind to a halt."  Enzymes, according to author Price, ...are large protein molecules that kick-start and speed up specific chemical reactions, often making them occur millions of times faster than they would on their own.  But our bodies sometimes need help making enzymes, and enzymes sometimes need help doing their jobs.  That's where vitamins come in: two of their primary functions are to help our body create enzymes and to aid enzymes in their work.  While enzymes speed up chemical reactions without being destroyed, most of the chemical reactions that depend on vitamins actually use up the vitamins.  That's why we need a continuous external supply...It makes sense, then, that vitamin deficiencies cause problems, because without adequate vitamins, every enzymatic process that depends on those vitamins will come screeching to a stop...With that said, scientists still don't fully understand all the nuances of what vitamins do in our bodies, how they do it, or what the long-term effects of moderate deficiencies might be.

   Hmmm, so what do we really know about vitamins, even as we dutifully plop those pills, trusting that the larger companies that manufacturer them do know.  To be honest, life seems to roll along and as the plumbers often say in their trade, "if it ain't broke, don't touch it."  But with so much new research emerging in the field of vitamins and minerals, perhaps the system never was broken, until we consumers demanded more convenience.  Package those foods for later, ship that produce even further, slip that vitamin D into milk without us noticing (it's still there), slap all those "packed with vitamins" labels onto sugary cereals that have had all their natural nutrition taken out in the processing...and the ultimate buy-in, just take a bunch of pills to make up for those lost vitamins. 

   Author Price's book, and many others are worth exploring.  In the end, we may discover not only how little we know about what we're eating or swallowing or putting into our bodies, but just how delicately elaborate our bodies are at simply maintaining life.  It's an education we should have had in the beginning or should discover for ourselves now...if we only had time.  But even at our accelerated pace, perhaps we may discover that our bodies themselves are tiring or running out of time, perhaps even rebelling at having to make do with less and less...and that we need to make the time, if only for our own survival.