How Did We Get Hooked on Vitamins?
The Inquiry
BBC
4.6 • 1.7K Ratings
🗓️ 27 December 2018
⏱️ 24 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Millions of us take a vitamin tablet every day - how did they become so popular? We follow the rise and rise of vitamins from their discovery just a century ago, to the multi-billion dollar market of today. The story of how the vitamin supplement entered our daily lives takes us from the targeted guilt-tripping of concerned mothers, to the use of vitamins as a weapon against the Nazis, via a plan for vitamin doughnuts.
Experts question whether most of us need to take them at all – so how did we get hooked on vitamins?
Contributors include:
Dr Lisa Rogers – World Health Organization Catherine Price – Author of Vitamania: How Vitamins Revolutionized the Way We Think About Food Dr Salim Al-Gailani - Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge Matthew Oster – Head of Consumer Health, Euromonitor International
Presenter: Kavita Puri Producer: Beth Sagar-Fenton
(Photo: a woman shopping at 'Mr Vitamins', a chain of supplement outlets in Sydney, Australia. Credit: Saeed Khan/Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening to the inquiry on the BBC World Service with me, Kavita Puri. |
| 0:08.0 | Each week, one question, four expert witnesses and an answer. |
| 0:17.0 | It's morning in South Africa, and Shantani is organizing her children and getting ready for her day. |
| 0:27.4 | She finishes breakfast and opens a bottle of pills. |
| 0:32.0 | She takes a large tablet and washes it down with a glass of cold water. |
| 0:37.0 | She does this every day. And once a month she has a painful shot of a nuclear red substance. |
| 0:47.1 | She has no medical problems, yet she's taking these vitamins in the hope she will feel healthier and live longer. |
| 0:55.0 | Why? Because she read online about the possible benefits and some of her best friends pop these pills. |
| 1:01.0 | So why not? She's just hedging her bets. |
| 1:07.0 | Shantani is not alone. Millions and millions of us around the world are doing it, |
| 1:14.0 | and it's a big and rapidly growing business. |
| 1:17.0 | So this week we're asking, |
| 1:19.0 | how did we get hooked on bitamines? |
| 1:28.0 | Part one, vital for life. |
| 1:37.6 | I grew up in Arizona and we used to travel quite a bit to our neighboring country of Mexico and we just noticed lots of differences in the nutritional status of people in our hometown versus those in Mexico. |
| 1:46.0 | Dr. Lisa Rogers works for the World Health Organization in Geneva. |
| 1:50.0 | She monitors where the people around the world are getting enough vitamins. |
| 1:55.0 | It just intrigued me about what people eat and how that affects them and so that hooked me from then on and I started studying vitamins. |
| 2:01.0 | But what are they? She says back in the 1700s |
| 2:08.0 | scientists noticed there was something essential in foods that was not a protein carbohydrate or fat but was still necessary for good health. |
| 2:18.0 | It was way back that they noticed this in the sailors that would go off for quite some time on ships and they didn't have any |
| 2:24.0 | access to fresh fruits and so they recognized very early on that without these fresh fruits |
... |
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