The Vitamine Manual

In the Philippine prisons, reformers made the rice cleaner and whiter—and beri-beri rose. What had they taken out of the meal?

In the early twentieth century, laboratories from the Philippines to England were racing to understand why polished rice could bring on disease, and why rice polishings could relieve it. Walter Hollis Eddy follows the clues from Eijkman’s sickened fowls to Casimir Funk’s tiny crystals—and the naming of a mysterious new family of food substances. But the puzzle reaches far beyond beri-beri: these elusive factors may reshape what people think they know about feeding adults and babies. If food’s value cannot be measured by its familiar nutrients alone, what else is hidden in the diet?

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