Niacin enrichment in food

Niacin, also known as nicotinic acid was synthesized in 1867 by oxidation of nicotine and widely used in photography. It was long thought that it has nothing to do with food or health issues, until German scientists demonstrated that nicotinic acid occurs in yeast and in rice polishing.

Niacin is the vitamin B3 and has fundamental roles as part of reduction/oxidation coenzymes involved in energy metabolism, amino acid metabolism, and detoxification reactions for drugs and other substances.

It was isolated by the Polish-American biochemist Casimir Funk in 1912, while he was trying to find a cure for another disease known as beriberi (nutritional disorder caused by a deficiency of thiamine).

Between 1906 and 1940 more than 3 million Americans were affected by pellagra with more than 100,000 deaths. An Austrian-American physician Dr. Joseph Goldberger, was assigned to study pellagra by the Surgeon General of the United States and produced good results.

In 1915, Dr. Joseph Goldberger working as a physician in the U.S. government's Hygienic Laboratory conducted a series of experiments on 11 healthy volunteer prisoners in a Mississippi jail and found that he could induce pellagra by altering their diets. He discovered the cause of pellagra and stepped on a number of medical toes when his research experiments showed that diet and not germs (the currently held medical theory) caused the disease.

He also stepped on Southern pride when he linked the poverty of Southern sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and mill workers to the deficient diet that caused pellagra. He concluded that the disease was caused by the absence of some factor that was lacking in corn, but that could be found in meat and milk.

In 1937 by the American biochemist Conrad Arnold Elvehjem induced a black tongue in dogs by feeding them the Goldberger diet, and then cured the disease by supplementing their diet with nicotinic acid. He later identified the active ingredient, referring to it as "pellagra-preventing factor" and the "anti-blacktongue factor." He also isolated the P-P factor from active liver extracts, showing that this factor is actually nicotinic acid (subsequently named niacin for nicotinic acid vitamin). The body's synthesis of this vitamin depends on the availability of the essential amino acid tryptophan, which is found in milk, cheese, fish, meat and eggs.

After this discovery, grain products (wheat, maize) were enriched with nicotinic acid or nicotinamide. The first tests of flour enrichment began in the 1930s. In 1941, the U.S. began mandating the enrichment of white flour-based food with niacin, and together with other nutrients such as iron, thiamin, and riboflavin (folic acid was added to this list in the 1990s).

By 1943, 75 percent of all white bread and family flour in New York was enriched, up from virtually none a few years prior. In 1943, enrichment of all bread was required as part of the War Food Administration’s Food Distribution Order and codified in War Food Order No. 1. When the government lifted wartime measures in 1948, enrichment became voluntary again.
Niacin enrichment in food

History and discovery of vitamin K

In 1929, Henrik Dam of Denmark, a biochemist at the University of Copenhagen, discovered vitamin K. Vitamin K is a fat soluble vitamin has been implicated in both cardiovascular and bone health.

At that time Dam was studying the synthesis of cholesterol in chickens. Dam found a hemorrhagic disease in chicks that were fed a diet from which all lipids had been removed.

Dam hypothesized that an unidentified lipid factor had been removed from the chicks’ feed. It was the only substance capable of halting a hemorrhagic disease in which blood does not coagulate.

Hemorrhages were prevented when unextracted fish meal was included in the diet.

In 1930 Horvath first mentioned that an unknown factor was necessary for blood clotting in chicken.

Following further research Dam called it ‘koagulations vitamin’ or ‘vitamin K’ and the letter that he assigned it is still used today.

Dam later succeeded in isolating the agent from alfafa and identifying it, for which he received the Nobel Prize for physiology and medicine.

The structure was determined to be 2-methyl-3-phytyl-1,4-naphthoquinone (vitamin K1).

After the initial discovery of vitamin K, Edward Doisy determined that the main source of vitamin K was through the diet, particular from green vegetable and fish meal.
History and discovery of vitamin K

Short History of Vitamin D

Hippocrates, the father of medicine, used heliotherapy or exposure to sunlight to treat phthisis.

The Greek historian, Herodotus (485-426 BC), observed that Persian warriors had much softer skulls than Egyptian warriors and attributed it to the turbans worn by Persians and Hippocrates described as disease resembling rickets in 130 AD.

The first scientific description of a vitamin D-deficiency, namely rickets, was provided in the 17th century by both Dr. Daniel Whistler (1645) and Professor Francis Glisson (1650).

Cod liver oil was first described as a medicinal agent for the treatment of chronic rheumatism in 1789.

Rickets captured the imagination of many chroniclers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The cause of this was a lack of a vitamin that is not a vitamin.

Beginning in the 1820s, studies showed that administering doses of cod liver oil to afflicted children could cure rickets.

The major breakthrough in understanding the causative factors of rickets was the development in the period 1910 - 1930 of nutrition as an experimental science and the appreciation of the existence of vitamins.

It was in 1919/20 that Sir Edward Mellanby, working with dogs raised exclusively indoors (in the absence of sunlight or ultraviolet light), devised a diet that allowed him to unequivocally establish that the bone disease, rickets was caused by a deficiency of a trace component present in the diet.

In 1921 he wrote, "The action of fats in rickets is due to a vitamin or accessory food factor which they contain, probably identical with the fat-soluble vitamin."

Shortly thereafter E. V McCollum and McCallum succeeded in inducing a rickets-like disease in chickens by administering an incomplete diet. The disease could be cured with cod-liver oil. They assumed that vitamin, present in cod-liver oil, was responsible for the curative effect.

In 1923 Goldblatt and Soames clearly identified that when a precursor of vitamin D in the skin (7-dehydrocholestrol) was irradiated with sunlight or ultraviolet light, a substance equivalent to the fat-soluble vitamin was produced.

Huldschinsky, Hess and Steenbock in 1924 found that a great number of foodstuff, having no antirachitic properties, became antirachitic after irradiation with sunlight or ultraviolet light. The substance activated by sunlight was called ‘provitamin D.’

Several other independent observations in the 19th and early 20th centuries fostered further links between sunlight and cutaneous vitamin D synthesis.

The first analogue of the vitamins D were determined in the 1930s in the laboratory of Professor A. Windaus at the University of Gottingen in Germany.

With the chemical isolation and finally synthesis of the two parent or native D vitamins, vitamin D2 (egocalciferol) and vitamin D3 (cholecalciferol), an etiology therapy for rickets and osteomalacia was established.

Vitamin D2 which could be produced by ultraviolet irradiation of ergosterol was chemically characterized in 1932. Vitamin D3 was not chemically characterized until 1936 when it was shown to result from the ultraviolet irradiation of 7-dehydrocholesterol.

In 1970, it is learned that vitamin D was not the biological active principle for healing bone disease.
Short History of Vitamin D