Abstract
THE twenty-five years of His Majesty's reign which are now being celebrated correspond remarkably closely with the establishment of a new era in the science of nutrition. At the opening of the twentieth century, attention was being focused on the quantitative relations of the energy exchanges of the body and on the metabolism within the body of the proteins, fats and carbohydrates of the food. The physiologists and chemists working at these problems were making most valuable contributions to the body of knowledge concerning the processes of nutrition, but such contributions were for the most part not of such a nature as to afford obvious clues either to the origin of or to the treatment of disease. The second decade of the twentieth century witnessed the rapid development of the view that the adequate nutrition of an animal depended on the presence in its food of hitherto unsuspected elements. The absence of such essential elements from a diet was proved to result regularly in the appearance of predictable signs of disease, and the fundamentally new idea of deficiency diseases became gradually established in current medical teaching.
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COWELL, S. Diet and Disease. Nature 135, 716–718 (1935). https://doi.org/10.1038/135716a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/135716a0