Terrors of the table : the curious history of nutrition / Walter Gratzer.
The author here offers a marvelous smorgasbord of stories taken from the history of nutrition, providing an engaging account of the struggle to find the ingredients of a healthy diet, and the fads and quackery that have waylaid the unwary. The book teems with colorful personalities, a veritable who...
I tiakina i:
| Kaituhi matua: | |
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| Hōputu: | Pukapuka |
| Reo: | English |
| I whakaputaina: |
Oxford ; New York :
Oxford University Press,
2005.
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| Ngā marau: | |
| Urunga tuihono: | Contributor biographical information |
| Whakarāpopototanga: | The author here offers a marvelous smorgasbord of stories taken from the history of nutrition, providing an engaging account of the struggle to find the ingredients of a healthy diet, and the fads and quackery that have waylaid the unwary. The book teems with colorful personalities, a veritable who's who of medical history, from Hippocrates to Pasteur, plus such intriguing figures such as Count Rumford, who argued that since plants got their food from water, soups would make the best meals for us. The author highlights the brilliant flashes of insight as well as the sadly mistaken leaps of logic in the centuries long effort to understand how the body uses food. We see the ingenious experiments used to reveal the workings of the stomach, the chemical analyses that uncovered the nature of proteins, carbohydrates, and vitamins, and the slow recognition that malnutrition lay behind such terrible diseases as scurvy, rickets, beriberi, and pellagra. Along the way, we read about the invention of the tin can (which originally had to be opened with a hammer and chisel), learn why ancient Egyptians had thicker skulls than Persians, and find out about today's fads and fancy diets, some dangerous, others just daft, such as the blood group diet, where you plan your meals around your blood type (people who are type 0 are supposed to eat more meat). Included are anecdotes from the history of medicine and with sharp portraits of the scientists who advanced our understanding of diet and digestion. "This is the story of man's enduring curiosity about the way that food sustains life, and of our untiring struggle to find the vital ingredients of a healthy diet." "It is a story of heroes and villains, of scientists who risked their lives in self-experimentation, and of quacks and charlatans preying, as they still prey, on a gullible public. Through these pages march a procession of remarkable personages: there are scientific geniuses and social crusaders; there is the incomparable Lavoisier, who died on the scaffold; Justus von Liebig, the most celebrated chemist of his time, who truculently promoted his own usually valueless patent foods; the egregious Count Rumford of the Holy Roman Empire, spy, physicist, diplomatist and scoundrel, who improved the lot of the poor "without loving or esteeming his fellow-creatures"; and many more. And here also march the poisoners, the faddists, the peddlers of nostrums like Lydia Pinkham's cure-all, consisting mainly of alcohol, and soothing opium syrups for babies." "Millions have died of malnutrition, caused as much by want as by ignorance of the essential requirements of the body; but more have been saved by increasingly scientific approaches to a healthy diet. Walter Gratzer tells the strange history of the science of nutrition: of the gradual dawning awareness that vital ingredients can stave off terrible diseases - such as scurvy, beriberi, rickets and pellagra - that still torment the poor around the globe, and also of the rush to develop diets and supplements that might improve the quality of life of those who eat them."--BOOK JACKET. |
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| Whakaahuatanga ōkiko: | ix, 288 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm |
| Rārangi puna kōrero: | Includes bibliographical references (pages 260-269) and index. |
| ISBN: | 0192806610 9780192806611 |