Welcome to Lifestyle Mania.. My name is Pawan Kaushik. Let's try to find the answer to a question.. Have you ever taken vitamin pills? Millions of people in the world consume vitamin pills every day. It is not that you are also one of them. The world has changed a lot in the last hundred years. These vitamin tablets have seen a changing world. Within a hundred years, these vitamin pills have become a billion dollar market. Vitamins are considered to be a major contributor to physical and mental health, but is it necessary for every person to take vitamin tablets? So today we are asking this question that when and how did vitamin pills become involved in the lives of crores of people. Let us know the opinion of experts to find the answer to this question..
What are vitamins
Vitamins are organic compounds that people need in small amounts. Most vitamins need to come from food because the body either does not produce them or produces very little.
Dr. Lisa Rogers is our first specialist who works with the World Health Organization (WHO) and has a keen eye on vitamins. According to Dr. Lisa Rogers, in the 17th century, scientists first realized that there was something in food other than protein, carbohydrate and fat that was very important for good health. At the time, scientists noticed that sailors on long sea voyages were not getting fresh fruits to eat. Because of this, there is a shortage in their diet, which affects their health.
In the beginning of the 20th century, it was understood among scientists that Vital Amines is such that different types of vitamins are needed in our body.
There are currently 13 recognized vitamins but if you look with alphabet, there are eight types of vitamin B in between vitamin A and C.
Despite advances in science, much remains to be known about vitamins. From above our deteriorating food habits have added to the difficulties. According to Dr. Lisa Rodger, most people take vitamin pills thinking that it will benefit them as if some magic will happen from these pills. But we forget that the body gets vitamins only when we eat a balanced diet regularly. Just taking pills doesn't work. Taking vitamin pills in medical conditions such as pregnancy or old age is a different matter, but there are still millions of people who take vitamin pills in supplement form.
Never ending business
Catherine Price, a science journalist by profession, was so curious about vitamins that she wrote a book on it. Catherine Price believes that the Polish biochemist Casimir Funk, who coined the term vitamin in the early 1900s, should receive a marketing award. She often jokingly says that a name like food accessory factor doesn't show the wonders that Vitamins showed. No one likes to give their child the food accessory factor every day.
Catherine Price claims that people who were looking to earn money at that time. A new concept of vitamins in the food market proved to be a lottery for them. Food product marketers thought this was a wonderful thing because the scientists themselves were saying that there was something in the food for it. There are things that one cannot see that have no taste of their own. These are very less in quantity but the diseases caused by their deficiency can even kill you.
During the era in which vitamins were being discovered, many changes were taking place in the food industry. Nutrients naturally present in foods In most cases, all those nutrients were being destroyed during food processing.
Natural vitamins are present in the oil, but because of the oil, processed food gets spoiled in a long time. That is why it was necessary to eliminate the natural oil during processing, so in this way the natural vitamins are lost from the processed food. To compensate for this, more and more synthetic vitamins were added to processed food!
But in marketing parlance, it was called Aided Vitamins and thus the concept of Aided Vitamins came into existence.
In this episode, vitamin pills were born in America in the 1930s and more and more women were the target of these pills. The merchants of these pills turned the marketing towards women. Vitamin pills were advertised in women's magazines, and today, by the turn of a century, this is the way mothers should be very careful about vitamins to keep their families healthy. For this, children should also be given vitamin supplements.
In the late 1930s, the vitamin-assisted food industry flourished in the US, and the food supplement market grew to $40 billion.
13 vitamins are essential for humans, but today there are more than 87 thousand food supplements available in the market. The whole vitamin industry has come to a standstill and we have become dependent on it. There is no doubt that vitamins are very important to us, but the mega food supplement industry has worked hard to establish the fact that the secret of good health and longevity lies in pills.
Vitamins for victory
Vitamins were believed to be necessary for victory. To win the war it was necessary to be in good health. To save the war won, it was necessary that the health of the people was good. For a country to be successful it is necessary that the people of that country do not suffer from malnutrition.
Dr Salim Ali Gilani, (Professor of Food and Nutrition History at the University of Cambridge) explains that the most interesting cases of government intervention regarding vitamins were seen during World War II. In 1941, the administration of President Franklin Roosevelt announced a vitamin allocation for American soldiers.
The British government was also concerned about health. During World War II, Great Britain made sure its soldiers were not vitamin deficient.
But in the 1920s, Britain became a little more vitamin conscious. Educated people were inspired to take vitamin supplements because of the marketing. The vitamin pills were called White Magic.
But after World War II, doctors noticed that children were falling seriously ill due to excessive vitamins. This alerted the government and made its plan. Then in the 1980s it was decided that folic acid, a form of vitamin B, was very important for early fetal development. Women are asked to correct folic acid deficiency before becoming pregnant and to replenish folic acid in the early weeks of pregnancy.
People start taking vitamin pills and all kinds of food supplements thinking about the dangers and potential benefits of diseases, they do so only when they come across confusing information about vitamins and no one can clear those misconceptions. Doesn't take away and that's it. The reason for this is that the business of vitamins is flourishing all over the world.
Desire for perfection
The population of middle class people has increased all over the world, middle class people have purchasing power, they have money to spend, they also have time, in this they can think properly about their health. According to Matthew Oster (Head of Consumer Health at Euromonitor International) the consumption of health products is the fastest growing in Asia, China is also a growing market in this regard, the market for health products has increased in countries of Southeast Asia, especially in Thailand and Vietnam. In Asia, this market has become very commercialized over the years, he believes, one of the reasons for the global growth is that young people are consuming a lot of vitamin pills. Recent research has shown that the craving for vitamins has increased in younger people, whereas it did not in the earlier generation. Now everyone wants to look sexy and cool, celebrities also promote it with their looks and fitness.
But will this trend continue like this or is there any possibility that people will focus on their plate instead of vitamin pills?