This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I-Heart Radio.

Hello and welcome to the podcast.

I'm Tracy V. Wilson, and I'm Holly Fry. Once again, I'm returning

to the realm of nutritional deficiency diseases. I just find them very interesting, especially because

people have really figured out how to treat them way before they figured out exactly what was

causing them, which has not always been the case

with other diseases, like scurvy is caused by vitamin C deficiency. And people had figured out

that some foods, including citrus fruit, could prevent scurvy by the 17th century. So today we

know that these foods are good sources of vitamin C, but people made the connection between

the food and the scurvy well over a century before Casimir Funk even coined the word

vitamin, and that also happened before any individual vitamin had been identified and named.

We have an episode on Scarvy, and then last year we also did an episode on Palagra, which

is caused by niacin deficiency.

People were similarly treating Palagra with Brewer's yeast decades before we knew what

niacin was, or that brewer's yeast has a lot of it in there,

the discovery and identification of specific vitamins grew in part from people trying to figure

out what exactly people were missing with that missing substance, making them sick.

Nutritional rickets is caused by a vitamin D deficiency,

and people figured out two ways to treat it

before we even knew what vitamin D was.

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