Will you be additives?

Can you poison with vitamins? Can. In 1912, polar explorers Douglas Mouson and Xavier Mertz were left alone on the Antarctic coast, after their companion fell into a glacial crack with most of the group supplies. Following the example of Amundsen, polar explorers began to eat one after another dog-hackers that dragged their sledges. This tactic helped Amundsen to get to the pole, but she killed the 31-year-old athlete Mercnes, and Moson had to come to her senses for a long time after a serious illness. Only in the 1970s did the doctors find out what was the matter: in the liver of Husky (as well as in the liver of a white bear or a seal) anomally a lot of vitamin a . And in high doses it is fatal. “An important factual in case you have conceived a polar expedition,” the independent American scientific journalist Katherine Price remarks sarcastically in his book “ Vitamania ” .

The same vitamin A could save half a million lives a year if orthodox green and convinced believers stopped fighting GMOs. In the villages of Africa south of Sahara, the price list tells, you can observe how, with the onset of dusk, children are divided into two groups. Some continue to play, others diverge home until the morning. These second ones have “chicken blindness”, nichtalopia, dysfunction of night vision. This is the first symptom of vitamin A and large problems with immunity: such children have three to six times higher from the mortality from diseases that, under other circumstances, would not even require the doctor’s intervention. According to the estimates of the 2005, in the third world, about 190 million children and 19 million pregnant women suffer from this, and 250-500 thousand of them become blind: after the “chicken blindness” the cornea is destroyed, and the eye can literally flow out. (In a civilized world, where the problem with vitamin A is not so acute, the process is slowed down at the stage of “dry eye syndrome”. If you have a feeling of sand in your eyes, you may also have to change a diet.)

Vitamin A could save half a million lives a year if the orthodox green and convinced believers stopped fighting GMOs.

In 2000, genetic engineers of Ingo Pouteus from Switzerland and Peter Bayer from Germany came up with a decision - gold rice. In the DNA of ordinary white rice, one Narcissus gene and one gene of the soil bacterium Erwinia were introduced uredovora : Together they launch the synthesis of beta-carotene, from which vitamin a is obtained in the human body. The grains ultimately acquire a yellow-orange hue. In 2005, through another genetic modification, the content of beta-carotene in rice was increased by 23 times-and it became enough for the standard portion of the bedspread of vitamin A. The problem is solved? As if not. The last time the gold rice was mentioned in New York Times in 2013: 400 men defeated the experimental plantation in the Philippines, and the women went to the demonstration - our children, they said, not for your experiments.

Maybe no GMO is necessary and it is worth just giving preference to healthy food - fruits and vegetables rich in vitamins? Price is forced to upset us: the average American (and, probably, the average Russian) receives the overwhelming part of the vitamins from lemons or mangoes, but from crackers, bread, juice or milk, where vitamins are systematically added artificially. They are made by chemical synthesis in factories, like pharmacy drugs or powder for a dishwasher. If all seven billion people suddenly decided to switch to “natural” sources of vitamins, vegetables and fruits, then the logistics and agriculture of the world would not have coped with a request. And not only they: say, are you ready to eat a half pound of carrots daily to get the required dose of the same beta-carotene?

“Vitamin's content in fruit” will have to be divided into 18 if you want to find out how much it actually enters the body.

In the very formulation of “rich in vitamins”, lack of reference is embedded. Of all 13 vitamins known to science, four - a , d , e , k are soluble in fats, but insoluble in water. This means that when they - or their chemical predecessors - enter the body with fruit juice, most of the substance remains unclaimed. In theory, one molecule of vitamin A is obtained from one beta-carotene molecule. In practice, if you ate mango or papaya, one out of 18 molecules will enter the desired reaction. So, the “Vitamin's content in the fruit” must be divided into 18 if you want to know how much it actually enters the body. (But due to the solubility of vitamins in fats, the price notes, the vegetables fried in oil can be suddenly more useful, no matter what the universal harm of fried.)

The very name of the book, glued from the words “vitamin” and “mania”, seems to hint that vitamins are not as good as we think of them. But the subject of attacks Price is not vitamins themselves, but a whole set of practices - from cultural to political - which became a side effect from the opening of vitamins made a hundred years ago.

Example? The industry of dietary supplements, bioactive additives, from isolated amino acids to an extract from the heart of a dried toad. Vitamins have opened a legislative loophole for them. In 1938, after a scandal with a medicine based on a poisonous solvent, the USA appeared in the USA - FDA , the Office for Sanitary Supervision of the Quality of Food and Medicines. This agency introduced strict rules for drug manufacturers - obliged to conduct tests for health safety. The law did not apply to vitamins, as an obvious good - and with them to other substances that are found in nature as components of food. So the class of unregulated "food additives" was born. After the 1962 tragedy with talidomide (the mothers who took this sleeping pill, children with congenital deformities were born) FDA clarified their requirements for medicines: now clinical trials in several stages should prove their effectiveness and their safety. “Food additives”, of course, did not concern again.

Does this mean that they are harmless by definition? In the 1980s, L -Riptophanes-a natural amino acid found in a variety of proteins-caused an epidemic of the disease, which is called the syndrome of eosinophilia-mialgia. It all started with spasms in muscles and itching - and ended with paralysis and a wheelchair. After the hearing in the US Congress, the Japanese manufacturing company paid the victims two billion dollars of compensation.

The idea of ​​talking about food in the language of chemistry is the result of the shock that vitamins caused at the time of their debut.

But the main problem is not so much harm from the drugs themselves as harm from inaction. If you are treated with a useless substance for cancer, then you irreversibly lose time that could be spent on real treatment. However, by the time in the 1990s in the USA, lawmakers decided to ensure that the manufacturers bear at least some responsibility for the assertions about the miraculous power of some berries of the Ginkgo Biloba bilos in the healing of cancer and AIDS, the food additive industry was already able to stand up for themselves-and set the lobbyists-heavyweights.

Another effect of the “Vitamin Casus” is chemical terms in large font on the packaging of products in the store that denote the substances present in these products in insignificant quantities - lycopines, resveratrol, flavonoids. Why does the content of gluten and omega-3-imposed acids excite people far from chemistry, more than, for example, the question, in what conditions did the tomatoes ripen and fed the cow with antibiotics? Price claims: the very idea of ​​talking about food in the language of chemistry is the result of the shock that vitamins caused at the time of their debut. It turns out that I learned the world, there are substances that in microdoses change the effect of food on the body: here the sailors are dying from scurvy in buses - but they are recovering before our eyes.

Vitamins now - primarily indulgence. They ate a ball of ascorbic acid - and you can afford a piece of fat pork: today you have already taken care of health. This is known by manufacturers of harmful foods who willingly write on a pack of chips with tomatoes that they contain vitamin C or B 12, and this will be pure truth: adding them to potato paste, from which the chips are stamped is not so difficult. In the modern world, where salt is iodized, and flour is vitaminized, getting a scurvy or Beri Buri is not easy. But to take multivitamins or dietary supplements instead of eating healthy foods and treating doctors - this, according to Price, is “to insure from earthquakes where the main danger is a flood”.