By Walter Gratzer
Walter Gratzer right here deals a wonderful smorgasbord of reports taken from the background of nutrients, offering an interesting account of the fight to discover the materials of a nutritious diet, and the fads and quackery that experience waylaid the unwary.
Gratzer recounts this heritage with attribute crispness and verve. The booklet teems with colourful personalities, a veritable who is who of scientific historical past, from Hippocrates to Pasteur, plus such fascinating figures equivalent to count number Rumford, who argued that when you consider that vegetation obtained their foodstuff from water, soups might make the easiest food for us. Gratzer highlights the intense flashes of perception in addition to the unfortunately fallacious leaps of good judgment within the centuries-long attempt to appreciate how the physique makes use of nutrients. We see the inventive experiments used to bare the workings of the tummy, the chemical analyses that exposed the character of proteins, carbohydrates, and supplementations, and the gradual attractiveness that malnutrition lay at the back of such negative ailments as scurvy, rickets, beriberi, and pellagra. alongside the best way, we examine the discovery of the tin can (which initially needed to be opened with a hammer and chisel), research why old Egyptians had thicker skulls than Persians, and learn about brand new fads and fancy diets--some harmful, others simply daft, similar to the blood staff nutrition, the place you propose your nutrients round your blood kind (people who're kind zero are meant to devour extra meat).
Spiced with colourful anecdotes from the heritage of drugs and with sharp photographs of the scientists who complicated our figuring out of nutrition and digestion, Terrors of the Table is a needs to learn for somebody attracted to nutrition and well-being.
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Additional resources for Terrors of the Table: The Curious History of Nutrition
Example text
If scurvy was a 'putrefactive' disease (as for instance the malodorous decay of the gums was taken to imply), it ought, Pringle kept insisting, be prevented or reversed by the elements of fermentation. The notion was taken up by David MacBride, who, in a publication of 1764 entitled Experimental Essays^ made a daring and fatuous intellectual leap: putrefaction was accompanied by the emission of'fixed air1 (carbon dioxide), and therefore the loss of this gas must be its cause. To reverse the process, then, it was necessary only to put back the fixed air.
Nelson (who believed that salt was the true cause of scurvy and would use none himself) was one who secured an issue of 30,000 gallons of lemon juice when he set out in 30 TERRORS OF THE TABLE 1804 on his i8-month blockade of Toulon, and received funds to take on board another 20,000 gallons in the Mediterranean. The fruit was most often put into barrels, which were then filled with sea water and stoppered. This probably prevented decay induced by bacteria or moulds. By the time of Trafalgar scurvy had at last been largely banished from the Royal Navy.
The Admiral, who suffered from gout, must have found Blane's ministrations very satisfactory, for he appointed him to the special position of Physician to the Fleet. It was in the Caribbean that Blane had his first sight of scurvy. After barely 12 months he and Rodney were back in London and they presented a strongly worded report to the Admiralty. During the last year, it noted, some 1600 sailors had died, most of them from scurvy and especially infections arising out of it, and only 60 from enemy action.