THE VITAMIN B COMPLEX 



nourished for most of the war period are not gaining weight today as 

 they should ; some are even losing weight." If this is a picture of the 

 state of nutrition in this country today, what is the picture like in less 

 fortunate countries ? The problem of adequately feeding the world's 

 population has by no means ceased to exist with the cessation of 

 hostilities. Indeed, now is the time to examine the problem afresh in 

 the light of the vast experiment carried out in this country between 

 1939 and 1945. The theories of nutritionists were then put to the test 

 in a way that had not previously been possible, and as a result many 

 widely-accepted generalisations had to be modified. 



In order to feed everyone properly it is obviously necessary to 

 know the nature of the substances present in food, how much of each 

 is needed to maintain a certain level of activity, and how much is 

 present in the foods commonly consimied. Investigations carried out 

 during the last forty years have gone a long way towards supplying 

 complete information on these points and, as already stated, this was 

 used in formulating the food policy of this country during the 1939-45 

 war. With the additional information accumulated during the war 

 and since, we have an even more complete picture of what is necessary 

 for proper nutrition. What is now lacking is the machinery for 

 applying this knowledge to rid the world once and for all of the spectre 

 of famine. 



The foundations of the science of nutrition were laid during the 

 nineteenth century, when Liebig demonstrated that foods consisted 

 of three main elements — proteins, carbohydrates and fats — and Voit 

 and his colleagues showed that carbohydrates were burnt in the body 

 to produce energy ; that proteins were used for building up the 

 tissues of the body ; and that fats provided a reserve of food on which 

 the body could draw in an emergency. It is difficult to say when 

 this simple concept came to be recognised as inadequate as a basis 

 for assessing the importance of different foodstuffs, for even in the 

 eighteenth century sailors knew that scurvy could be prevented by 

 lime-juice and fresh vegetables, while in 1885 a Japanese admiral, 

 Takaki, eliminated beriberi from the Japanese navy by improving the 

 sailors' diet. Perhaps the most significant date is the year 1897, in 

 which Dr. C. Eijkman, a Dutchman employed in his country's colonial 

 service in Java, began to study beriberi, a common disease of the 

 tropics, which had hitherto been attributed to a bacterial infection. 

 He noticed that hens in the prison yard suffered from a kind of leg 

 weakness similar to the paralysis of beriberi from which the prisoners 

 themselves were suffering. If anyone else had noticed this similarity, 

 they had drawn from it the obvious conclusion that the hens had 

 caught the infection from the men ! Eijkman, however, made a 

 urther observation : he noticed that when the food of the hens was 



