Vitamins & You [antikvár]

Introduction Why a book about vitamins? Why, indeed, when such a book could save, improve, or prolong your life? Because dietary recklessness has become a national habit that claims, impairs, and shortens tens of millions of lives, concern for improving the American way of eating while achieving and maintaining ideal vitamin intake must become a primary goal for all of us. Proper nutrition— particularly proper vitamin nutrition—can lessen, defer, or prevent the debilitation of aging, promote immunity to infectious disease, improve our general level of health, and help correct the harm done to our bodies by pollution, processed "junk" foods, drugs, and such personal poisons as alcohol and tobacco. Although our high school textbooks graphically portray some of the crippling vitamin depletion diseases of the recent American past and of the Third World today— rickets, scurvy, beri beri, and pellagra—none of us suffers from those tragic disorders. The dramatic injury and impairment of such exotic hygiene class "horribles" are as much relics of our nation's history as silent movies.