Vitamania

I didn't expect to learn much from this book – vitamins are pretty much my day job. I (think) I know every biochemical reaction relevant to human metabolism that requires a vitamin or mineral cofactor. If someone has been prescribed vitamins to actually help them, rather than act as a placebo, it's a pretty high chance that it was prescribed by me or one of my colleagues. So, vitamins, I know them. And like most people who actually understand vitamin biochemistry, I also have a deep skeptical place in my heart for the use of vitamins as pseudoscience. So much so that during my pregnancy, I took pure folic acid rather than a prenatal multi-vitamin.

But Vitaminia was fun anyway. Price spends a lot of time focusing on the history of nutritionalism: how we understood that food was made of of molecules, identified what they were and realized that they were necessary. The experiments along the way to prove that. Price also explores food and vitamin safety regulations over the years, and the absence of supplement safety regulation in the modern era. I found this a fun and fast read.