VITAMINES AND LIGHT

Waipa Post, Volume XXIV, Issue 1638, 7 May 1925, Page 3

VITAMINES AND LIGHT

It is widely-known fact that an adequate diet must contain not merely sufficient proteins, fats, and carbohydrates to furnish energy and maintain the tissues of the body, but also a small amount of certain “ necessary food factors ” or “ vita-mines ” essential to health For example, a synthetic milk can be made up containing the same proteins, fats, and carbohydrates as natural milk; but animals fed on such a synthetic diet cease to grow, develop various definite disorders, and presently die, in the absence of the vitamines which natural milks, and many other natural foods, contain Inadequate supplies of certain of these vitamines lead, in man, to disorders like beri-beri and scurvy .Many natural fats (butter, cod liver oil) contain vitamines in whose total or partial absence young animals will cease to grow, fail to form bones correctly (rickets), and become subject to disorders of the breathing passages on the one hand and of the eye (xerophthalmia) on the other It is provable that at least two factors are missing or deficient in such cases, their chemical nature, it must be said, is quite unknown It is found that exposure to sunlight in anmials, such as s, helps to ward off the eye disorders, due to a deficiency of “ vitamine A ” in the diet Ultra-violet light, which, though invisible to our eyes, is chemically active and affects the photographic plate, which has a great influence in promoting growth and in preventing rickets in rats, whose diet is partly deficient in the necessary vitamine