Henderson Daily Dispatch

Distributed by King Features Syndicate, Inc.

Vitamin Deficiency Causes But Few Diseases

By LOGAN CLENDENING, M. D.

The subject of the vitamins was a natural to capture the imagination of the public. The name itself belongs to the jazz age—vitamins! That means vitality, pep, energy. Put more of them in the food and you get more oomph. Then, Dr. Clendening will answer questions of general interest only, and then only through his column.

There is the fear instilled that you don't get enough of these vitamins in your diet and so the result is everybody wants them in concentrated form.

I have recently reviewed all the latest work done on the vitamins and should like to abstract it briefly in the articles of the next two weeks. These articles will answer the innumerable requests in my mail for information on the vitamins.

I want to take up first the question of how an average person gets enough vitamins. I quote as my text a letter I have just received from a manufacturer:

"The old contention that an average American diet was defense enough against vitamin deficiencies has by now been pretty well riddled. Modern foods as we eat them do not deliver the vitamin values they were supposed to."

Ballyhoo

I certainly do not agree with this statement and in fact am of the opinion that the whole subject of vitamins has been used to frighten and propagandize the public into believing that they need more vitamins than they are getting in their diet, and they bewilderedly search about for some way to overcome this difficulty.

As a matter of fact, the human diseases due to vitamin deficiency are very rare and infrequently seen even in large clinics. The clear cut diseases due to such deficiency—beri-beri, polyneuritis, pellagra, night-blindness, scurvy, etc., obtrude themselves on a physician's attention only now and again. It is true that rickets would be a common disease if special care—the use of cod liver oil—were not taken in childhood to prevent it. But most vitamin deficiencies are manufactured in the publicity department of drug and food manufacturers.

In a large clinic a thousand consecutive patients were examined carefully with this in mind and not a single instance of vitamin deficiency was found.

We now have exact chemical methods of identifying most of the vitamins as well as standards of measuring them. In a survey of American dietaries and using these methods to assess the vitamin content, the following was found:

Strawberries and Cream

The requirements of Vitamin A are 3000 units a day: an American dietary for a family spending $4.00 a head a week for food contains 5000 units a day. "There is no practical danger of Vitamin B shortage except where an unduly large number of calories are taken in the form of artificially refined foods." (Quoted from Sherman, leading American authority.)

"Try as hard as I may," writes Dr. Thurman B. Rice, Health Commissioner of Indiana, "I can't think of a diet that has more vitamins in it than strawberries and cream."

Tomorrow: How Do People Get Vitamin Deficiency Diseases?

EDITOR'S NOTE: Dr. Clendening has seven little booklets which can be obtained by readers. Each pamphlet sells for 10 cents. For any one pamphlet desired, send 10 cents in coin, and a self-addressed envelope stamped with a three-cent stamp, to Dr. Logan Clendening, in care of this paper.

The pamphlets are: "Three Weeks' Reducing Diet", "Indigestion and Constipation", "Reducing and Gaining", "Infant Feeding", "Instructions for the Treatment of Diabetes", "Feminine Hygiene" and "The Care of the Hair and Skin".