Before I read this book about vitamins, I thought I knew what it would be like. It would be vaguely reassuring. It would tell me that I was consuming the right vitamins, but perhaps in the wrong quantities. Medically speaking, I expected it to point me in a certain direction. There would be chapters about scurvy and beriberi, and how these diseases can easily be cured, now we know about vitamins. There would be stuff on cancer. For a while, I would eat a lot of carrots.
Well, I was partly right. Catherine Price, a fastidious reporter, has given us the stories of scurvy and beriberi, and how these scourges were cured with vitamins. She also tells us about night-blindness, a condition that can make your eyes develop ulcers, but that can be cured with small doses of vitamin A. But, it turns out, this isn’t a book about how marvellous things are, now we know about vitamins. On the contrary. It’s about the fact that, in the scheme of things, when it comes to vitamins, we know very little. Price spent some time studying the science. ‘I was both shocked and shaken,’ she tells us.
How much do we know about vitamins? Just about enough to know that we don’t know very much at all. There are 13 — vitamins A, C, D, E, K, and eight types of vitamin B. Not a taxonomy to inspire confidence. In any case, they exist in food. We need them, not as fuel, but ‘to facilitate chemical reactions in our bodies that keep us alive’.If we were cars, they would be more like oil than petrol. With a car, you need to fill up with petrol more often than you need to change the oil.
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