Vitamin Supplements

Sunshine is a mixed blessing to vitamins. It providesenergy for growth and vitamin production in green plants and is essential for the ripening of fruits and cereals, but after the harvest it can be destructive, causing wilting and vitamin loss. It can promote the production of vitamin D in our skin, but it can also destroy the vitamin content of a bottle of cod liver oil left in the light. In addition it destroys the riboflavin content in a bottle of milk left in the sun for only a few hours. Unfortunately, the trouble does not end there because the riboflavin turns into a substance called lumoflavin and this destroys any vitamin C in milk. This simple fact has been slow to filter through to the dairy industry and the traditional, clear, glass milk bottle is still with us in many parts of the country. Its replacement by cartons has been for economic reasons as much as for nutritional ones. Read the rest of this entry »

The theory of vitamins, what they do and why we need them is absorbing in itself, but to benefit from this knowledge we need to know how to harvest our vitamins, cook them and eat them. It can be a long journey from the field, farm and sea to the table and there are many areas where vitamins can be destroyed.

‘Fresh food is best’, say the naturalists, and indeed it usually is but fresh, by definition, means the moment the crop is cut, the animal killed or the fruit harvested. Most of the food we eat, even the strawberries in summer, are at best a few hours old, and some things are weeks or more away from the picking. Quite a lot can happen to our vitamins in this time. Read the rest of this entry »