My Nutritional Awakening
Why I take a lot of vitamins
Oct 11, 2025
Back around 1960 my aunt developed breast cancer and had a radical mastectomy (breast, lymph nodes and all – that’s what they did back then). She was told that if she had no secondaries for 10 years she could consider herself cured.
Nine year and several months later a secondary appeared, and that began a long series of further secondaries – each followed by surgery, radiation or chemotherapy regimes which made her life miserable. Like a lot of people in similar situations, she was ready to try anything. At the time there was a little book entitled “Folk Medicine: A Vermont Doctor’s Guide to Good Health” by Dr. D.C. Jarvis, which had been on the New York Times Bestseller list for the previous 2 years. Its prescription was apple cider vinegar and honey. My aunt read it and asked my mother (her sister) who had a PhD in Biochemistry what she thought. My mom read it and asked me (who had recently graduated from university with a minor in biochemistry) for my opinion.
Well, Dr. Jarvis had absorbed enough scientific jargon to write an impressive sounding discourse which obviously persuaded a lot of people to buy his book but to anybody who actually knew the science (my mother) it was mumbo-jumbo.
My mom and I agreed that vinegar and honey might be very good for you but the ‘scientific’ reasoning in the book was pure nonsense.
My aunt died a few years later.
That was when my interest in nutrition began. I found a book called “Let’s Get Well” by Adele Davis which is a name which would have been quite familiar at the time to health food advocates. (If you go to any health food store you will likely find a wall of nutrition books.) What set this book off, though, was that it was fully referenced – 60 pages of fine print references mostly from recognized academic journals. However, anybody who wants to, can create a list of academic papers- most people will assume it is valid and move on. But, I was working at the University at the time and I decided to test it. I spent a day and a half deep in the stacks at the university library pouring over old volumes of these journals, and the vast majority of Davis’ citations were spot on. There were some in which she interpreted the data differently from the original author and reached different conclusion but overall, the book was a scholarly contribution to nutritional science that should have been more widely read than by health food advocates.
Canada and most western governments publish nutrition guides for their citizens which encapsulate the conventional wisdom on what people should eat in order to be healthy. The reality is that the conventional wisdom is mostly based on outdated parameters of what constitutes a deficiency. For instance Vitamin D deficiency causes rickets (you’ve likely never seen a case) but that’s the benchmark – 400-800 IU per day. Newer research has found that Vitamin D plays an important role in many aspects of health. Davis suggests (in 1965) that 2,500 to 5,000 is what’s really needed. I take 3,500 myself.
When humans were evolving in the savannas of Africa their food was raw and they ate a lot of it in order to get the calories they needed in order to sustain their extremely active lives – running, jumping, climbing, digging, etc. in order to get the food calories they needed. Their intake of vitamins was much greater than what we typically get from our processed diet of today, For that reason I take large dose supplements – what some people refer to as megavitamins. If you’re interested in what I take, there is a detailed list on my website – oldwhitby.ca.
For awhile (and you can still find ‘warnings’ online), there were warnings not to take more than recommended doses because of ‘toxicity’. While there are cases of vitaminosis, the doses required are much higher than (more than 10x) regular levels
I found that many of Davis’ references dated from the 1930s which was when nutrition research had its heyday. For instance, it was in the 1930s that research originally connected cholesterol with heart disease. When rats were fed pure cholesterol they developed atherosclerosis. When they were fed egg yolk they got atherosclerosis. However if fed whole eggs they didn’t – the egg white contains phospholipids which counteract the cholesterol. This was known back in the 1930s but some food companies were selectively citing the negative research about cholesterol and atherosclerosis as a marketing ploy for margarine, (and other foods) for decades (butter fat is also high in cholesterol). The medical profession for years was swept up in this narrative but the connection between heart disease and cholesterol is largely mute at this point except for narrow segments of the population.
I became an avid reader of nutritional information and, among other things I got a copy of “Composition of Foods” from the US Dept of Agriculture which was a large format (9” x 12”) 200 page book which listed the nutritional composition of thousands of foods in numerous formats in great detail. That detail and a lot more is now online in hundreds of databases that can be accessed from https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/
So, what exactly is a vitamin? The human body creates most of the chemistry it needs from building blocks in our food. However through evolution, we lost the ability to produce a few chemicals that were unnecessary because they were already in abundance in our food. But as we moved from Africa to other parts of the world and our lifestyles changed dramatically, we no longer got these chemicals in our food. These chemicals are what we now call vitamins.
Humans have been aware for centuries that there were some diseases which could be prevented by adding specific foods to the diet. For instance Vitamin C prevents scurvy which manifests as bleeding gums and your teeth falling out, so when Captain Cook sailed around the world he took a large supply of limes. He didn’t know anything about vitamins but he knew that eating limes worked. Other diseases required other supplementation. As our knowledge increased we started adding vitamins to staple foods. Governments started adding vitamin D to milk in the 1930s and then added vitamin A in the 70s when more people turned to low-fat milk. Since the 1940s flour has been supplemented with thiamine (B1), riboflavin (B2), niacin (B3) and iron – folic acid was dded to the mix in the 1990s to prevent neural tube defects in newborns.
This supplementation was done to cover common and serious deficiencies. What is being missed is that as our knowledge increases we are finding that many vitamins perform many different functions and that we may not be aware of any symptoms or perhaps those symptoms may occur very gradually. People aren’t dropping dead over vitamin deficiencies, but the affects are likely subtle and cumulative and may affect lifespan and it enjoyment.
Also there are many levels of deficiency and depending on what we’re eating and how much, a deficiency may occur at one time of our lives and not others. People are diverse and some may require more than another. Also if you are living with a lot of stress or if you are sick or healing from an injury you are using more vitamins.
To cover these eventualities it makes a lot of sense to supplement your diet.
