Many little-known facts now considered mere nutrition trivia made serious contributions to the science of nutrition in their day. We`ve collected an assortment of these obscure but fascinating tidbits and invite you to play Nutrivia, our own variation on one of today`s most popular games.
-- Who first recognized goiter as a dietary deficiency?
A--The Chinese, 5,000 years ago. Although they didn`t know about iodine deficiency, ancient records show the Chinese treated this apparently common condition with burnt sponge, seaweed and sometimes a dose of dried deer thyroid. Iodine was not recognized as the mineral capable of curing goiter until 1820.
-- A popular advertisement has promoted iron tonic as a treatment for
''tired blood'' as far back as we can remember. But iron tonic pre-dates the 20th Century. When was it originally concocted?
A--Iron in the form of ''steel tonic,'' prepared by steeping steel filings in Rhenish wine, was used to treat anemia by Dr. Thomas Sydenham, the 17th-Century physician who has been called the father of modern medicine.
-- The word ''vitamin'' was originally spelled with an ''e'' as the final letter. Why was it dropped?
A--Casimir Funk, a Polish-born biologist, coined the term in 1912 based on two assumptions: That these substances were vital to life--''vita'' meaning ''life'' in Latin--and that chemically they were all nitrogen-containing compounds or ''amines.'' It was soon discovered that all vitamins were not amines.
-- Now that we understand the chemical structure of vitamins, we can produce them inexpensively in the laboratory. Originally they had to be extracted from foods. The combination of crude technology and lack of knowledge about nutrient sources meant that it took enormous quantities of food to extract tiny amounts of vitamins. How many yolks were used to obtain riboflavin the first time?
A--Some 33,000 to get only 100 milligrams, about one-fifth of a teaspoon. Investigators would have done better with a richer source, such as milk or cheese. Extracting the first samples of folic acid proved equally cumbersome, requiring four tons of spinach, even though it is high in the nutrient.
-- It is well known that British sailors were called ''limeys'' because they took lemon juice on long sea voyages to ward off scurvy, the severe vitamin-C deficiency. But that was hardly the first effective antidote to the sailor`s nutritional curse. What was?
A--Again, it was the Chinese who, in the 5th Century, took pots of growing ginger aboard ship and avoided scurvy by eating the leaves. History also records that in 1536 Jacques Cartier cured scurvy in sailors with an infusion of leaves and bark from an evergreen.
-- Botulism became famous as a virulent type of food poisoning after an episode several years ago involving Bon Vivant soup. When was botulism first identified?
A--Its name comes from botulus, the Latin word for sausage, because the disease was traced to smoked sausages in Wurtenberg, Germany, early in the 19th Century. Stored under conditions that allowed the spores to germinate and produce their toxin, the sausages were then eaten raw.
-- The tomato is native to South America, and by the middle of the 16th Century had become an important food in Europe, where it was considered an aphrodisiac. Why did early colonists in this country refuse to eat it?
A--They believed that the tomato, a cousin of the toxic belladonna and mandrake plants, also was poisonous. The myth faded out sometime after 1820, when on the steps of the Salem, N.J., courthouse, Robert Gibbon Johnson publicly ate a tomato, and lived to tell the tale.
-- Eggshell color has no bearing on the nutritional content of the egg. Yet historically, homemakers had a reason to pick one hue over the other. What was it?
A--In the days before modern transportation and storage, locally produced eggs were preferred to those that had traveled great distances without refrigeration. Since hen breeds common in New England laid brown eggs, homemakers there chose them over those with white shells. Exactly the opposite was true in New York.
-- Today we have nutrient analyses for thousands of individual foods and prepared food items. What was the first American food to be analysed?
A--Appropriately enough, it was Indian corn. The chemical analysis was published in 1821 by John Gorman of Harvard University, the same year that the first canning factory, Underwood, was established in this country.
-- Attempting to control their cholesterol levels, millions of Americans consume vegetable-oil margarines rich in polyunsaturates. What is the origin of margarine?
A--Late in the 1860s, French food technologist Hippolyte Mege-Mouries produced a ''butter'' from suet, chopped cow`s udder and a little warm milk. Commercial production began in 1873, but the Paris Council of Hygiene ruled that his creation could not be sold under the name of butter.