Part One

THE HISTORY OF VITAMIN E

A rags to riches story:
From a vitamin looking for a disease ...
To the shady lady of vitamins ...
To the master antioxidant and
supernutrient!

Good fairies attended every phase of the advent and early history of vitamin E.

-- Herbert M. Evans, 1962

THE DISCOVERY

If good fairies were indeed helping, they chose some really good researchers. The year was 1922 and the place the University of California at Berkeley. Herbert A Evans, a young research physician specializing in embryology, and his assistant, Katharine S. Bishop, were feeding their laboratory rats a special semipurified diet. This diet was developed by two groups of pioneer nutritionists of that era, Drs. Thomas B. Osbome and Lafayette B. Mendel and Drs. Henry A. Mattil and R. E. Conklin.

SEMIPURIFIED AND PURIFIED DIETS: AN IMPORTANT RESEARCH TOOL FOR NUTRITIONISTS

Instead of whole foods, sermipurified diets contain mostly ingredients isolated in pure form and only a small amount of whole food. For example, the diet used by Evans and Bishop contained starch to provide carbohydrates, milk casein for protein, lard and butter for fat, brewer's yeast for micronutrients including some vitamins, and salts for minerals. Unlike semipurified diets, purified diets do not contain whole foods--only pure ingredients.

Semipurified and purified diets have been great tools for nutrition research. By excluding a nutrient from the diet, researchers can evaluate the effect of its absence on survival, growth, and health. By introducing increasing amounts of the nutrient in the diet, they can determine what is the minimum amount required f