590 'voegtlin: role of vitamines in nutrition 



nutritive value of wheat flour and corn meal. As stated pre- 

 viously, numerous observations have demonstrated the fact that 

 if the diet of people is largely made up of highly polished rice 

 and is otherwise deficient in vitamines, beri-beri will make its 

 appearance; whereas, if undermilled rice is substituted for the 

 highly milled variety the disease is not so likely to break out. 

 Little 3 reports an epidemic of beri-beri among the fishermen of 

 Newfoundland who lived mainly on bread made from highly 

 milled wheat flour. 



. From these considerations it would appear that a simple 

 method for the determination of the vitamine content of cereal 

 products would be of great value. Unfortunately it is still 

 impossible to base such a method on the direct isolation of 

 these substances from the natural foods. The determination of 

 the total phosphorus content of these products, however, seems 

 to give a fairly accurate index of the relative amounts of vitam- 

 ines present. While phosphorus does not enter into the vitamine 

 molecule, the distribution of phosphorus and vitamines within 

 the grain run practically parallel. Fraser and Stanton, on the 

 basis of a large number of observations and analyses, came to 

 the conclusion that rice containing less than 0.4 per cent of P 2 5 

 is deficient in vitamines. Myers and myself have used this 

 method in order to correlate the vitamine content of wheat and 

 corn products as found by animal experimentation with that of 

 the quantitative estimation of the P 2 5 content of these same 

 products. Without going into detail it was found that in the 

 case of these cereals the same relation exists between P2O5 and 

 vitamine content as in the case of rice. (See Table 3.) 



We believe that the determination of the P 2 5 index will be 

 found of value in all cereal products, except the so-called "self- 

 rising flours." These latter products contain baking powders 

 which often are composed of phosphates. As the label of these 

 flours always indicates whether baking powder has been adied, 

 it will be an easy matter to discard such flours for this purpose. 

 I now should like to call attention to another factor involved 



3 Little. Journ. Am. Med. Assoc, 68: 2029. 1912. 



