book review
The Vitamin Complex Our obsessive quest for nutritional perfection
Review by Ursula Arens Writer; Nutrition & Dietetics
Ursula has spent most of her career in industry as a company nutritionist for a food retailer and a pharmaceutical company. She was also a nutrition scientist at the British Nutrition Foundation for seven years. Ursula guides the NHD features agenda as well as contributing features and reviews
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By Catherine Price Oneworld Publications, 2015 ISBN 978-1-78074-346-2 Price: £11.99
If you are in a hurry, the conclusion of this review is, a MUST READ book for dietitians. But perhaps you have time to linger and consider further why this is such an excellent book. The hugely annoying factor is just that Catherine Price is not a nutrition professional, but has managed to dig deeper, consider wider, communicate more clearly and conclude more pragmatically than many colleagues who are more learned in this terrain. She is a disciple of Michael Pollen who is well known as a prolific and influential food policy communicator, but Catherine Price has steered more into the sciency-bit of food debate (the home of dietetics). Catherine discusses the history of vitamins, the economic and policy debates of vitamins, the latest health research on vitamins, the confusions both planted and accidental around vitamins, the industry and consumer pushes and pulls around supplementation and the legislative and political inputs on vitamin use. There is massive interweaving of all of these aspects and all contribute to the high alertness of consumers and industry to these ‘magic bullets’ that promise health and wellbeing, to counter the damages of sedentary lives and conveniencedriven food choice. Catherine is always cool and rational in her discussions and yet there is enough pepper and spice in the illustrations she selects, to make this a very exciting read. The topics are all well known to dietitians and yet there
NHDmag.com November 2015 - Issue 109
are so many new and astonishing aspects to Catherine’s insights on vitamins, that a huge ‘fortification’ of understanding is guaranteed. For a tiny taster of the contents of this book, let’s start at the very beginning: with the letter A. Vitamin A is widely available from many natural and fortified food sources in the UK diet, but deficiency is still a global problem causing blindness and fatal outcomes from impaired immune responses to diseases such as measles. Night blindness precedes dry-eye and ulceration of the cornea and, yet, even if it never develops to the severe stages, it is a major handicap in societies without the illumination provided by electricity. Seeing children become fully dependent on others after sunset - estimated to affect more than 130 million preschool children and it is common enough to be considered a normal part of late pregnancy in some poorer communities - estimated to affect more than six million pregnant women annually. Historical descriptions of sailors’ blindness were evidently due to vitamin A deficiency, but were tagged to causes as random as homesickness or humidity or masturbation. Treatments for afflicted sailors were bizarre, although being locked in a dark closet, ‘to give the eyes a rest’, was perhaps less painful than other common maritime remedies for ill health.
