Author: Catherine Price
More than 50% of Americans take some kind of Vitamin supplement. However very little is known about the beneficial effects of the same. There are some very clear diseases like scurvy, beri beri, pellagra, etc. that are caused by Vitamin deficiencies, but most of these are uncommon in the US today. Time and again the author drops into her oft-repeated story of how, by default, most people assume that Vitamins are beneficial and blindly take them with an almost religious belief.
I learnt a few things from this book. First, that vitamins are barely a 100 years old. Their initial discovery seemed elusive as the early scientists were convinced that diseases like scurvy, beri beri, etc. were caused by germs. Now that they are easily available in developed countries we have a different problem. Vitamins and the general class of supplements have mushroomed into a large unregulated industry making all kinds of false claims and suggestions. The author goes into quite a bit of detail to describe the failed attempts of the FDA to tame the food supplement industry.
I was disappointed that despite all the research that the author conducted she didn’t try to distill it and provide the reader with a birds-eye view of the current understanding on the benefits and dangers of each of the major vitamins/supplements in the market. Maybe there is really no definitive picture and that is why she was not able to draw one! Overall, it felt like each of the chapters were independently constructed and then patched together without a storyline to weave through it.
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