Word: vitamins
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...child against rickets, health authorities recommend a daily vitamin D intake of 400 international units (ten micrograms), which is easily obtained from milk. If the youngster's system makes more vitamin D as he plays in the sun, it is usually not enough to be dangerous. If he is given more than 20,000 units, a child becomes severely ill. In northern climes, most white adults make all the vitamin D they need from casual exposure of their face and hands to the sun and need no dietary supplement. They get ill on 100,000 units...
...very existence of the essential vitamin D, or "sunshine vitamin," was not established until the present century, but its imprint upon history goes back a million years or more. According to a theory now elaborated by Brandeis University Biochemist W. Farnsworth Loomis, it is because of the human body's need to take in a certain amount of vitamin D, but not too much, that the human species has developed into three principal racial groups distinguished by skin color and loosely called black, yellow and white...
Loomis points out in the journal Science that vitamin D is no ordinary vitamin. Unlike the others, it occurs in virtually no natural foods.* It is synthesized in the skin under the influence of ultraviolet rays. The body needs vitamin D if it is to process calcium from food to make bone. Consequently, children need proportionately more vitamin D for their growing bones, and a D deficiency causes rickets...
Origin on the Equator. The control of skin color over vitamin D synthesis, says Loomis, explains the distribution of the races of man in prehistoric and early historic times. As far as anthropologists can tell, "human beings" originated in Africa near the equator. Almost certainly, they had black skins. Many anthropologists have argued that dark skin evolved as a protection against sunburn and skin cancer. On the contrary, says Loomis: dark skin came first, and light skin evolved as a protection against a deficiency of vitamin D. Black skin allows only 3% to 36% of ultraviolet rays to pass, while...
...while, Walgreen's aims to maintain low prices made possible by tightly integrated operations. The drug and cosmetic factory in Chicago stocks the chain's shelves with Perfection cold cream, Orlis mouthwash, and Olafson vitamin tablets and capsules, of which the company makes 290 million annually. Eight ice cream plants churn out 3.2 million gallons of 21 flavors each year, while its roasting and blending plant produces enough coffee to fill 50 million cups. Watching over all this is a computerized inventory system...