Word: vitamine
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Americans, if we believe all the advertisements we read, have to take a vitamin pill or two every day to get through that little letdown we are said to have in the middle of the afternoon, and most of us are pretty well supplied with vitamins in our regular diet. But the Chinese haven't had enough vitamins for years and years, and they are more jittery and irritable and restless than ordinarily, and they are tired. They are anemic, they are full of parasites and malaria and tuberculosis and dysentery. They have got to have adequate food...
...healthy people need vitamin pills? Many a doctor and nutritionist has loudly asserted that they do not. Last week the California Institute of Technology offered evidence that extra vitamins are good for almost anybody...
During the first six months, there was no visible difference in the working efficiency of the two groups-although both groups, apparently for psychological reasons, did better than a third group which got no pills at all. In the second six months, the vitamin-fed group pulled ahead. (Conclusion: taking extra vitamins usually shows no results for at least six months.) They had 19% less absenteeism, 27% less turnover (i.e., fewer quit or were fired); they also scored 2.6% higher in the company's merit ratings...
...vitamin pills seemed to have more effect on the worker's mental vigor than on their physical condition; the vitamin eaters got sick just about as often as the others, but they played hooky less often and seemed much keener and happier at their work. The investigators figured that the pills had added the equivalent of 10½ working days a year to each man's output...
...word "vitamin" is only 34 years old, and the vitamin fad is younger still. But this passage from St. Jerome's Life of St. Hilarion, written some 1,550 years ago and recently quoted by a letter writer to the British Nature, is an accurate description of vitamin A deficiency and its cure. Though ordinary olive oil contains almost no vitamin A, Nature's erudite correspondent noted that "a crude and unpurified oil such as St. Hilarion would have permitted himself" would contain enough of the vitamin to cure...