[By the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research] [spacer height=”20px”]

Summary: The discovery of vitamins in the early twentieth century was profoundly big news in the field of science, with much of the original research reported by top scientific journals and publishing houses of the day. This would change around the middle of the century, when the monopolistic medical industry conspired to keep nutrition studies out of the leading scientific journals, forcing nutrition investigators to report their findings in lesser known publications. Yet before medicine’s clampdown, vitamin research commanded the full attention of the scientific world, as reflected by these abstracts from the 1930s addressing nutrition and heart disease. The excerpts, taken from a variety of prestigious science journals of the day, consistently report a connection between a lack of vitamins, particularly vitamin B1, and the development of heart disorders. With the rise of industrial food manufacturing fundamentally altering the country’s food supply—including destroying much of its vitamin B1—health authorities at the time would had to have gone out of their way not to see the connection between the processing of America’s foods and the degradation of its health. Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research reprint 6, 1939.