In 1906, a call for higher vitamin intakes was made to decrease outbreaks of which ailments?

In 1906, Frederick Gowland Hopkins highlighted scurvy and rickets as ailments that could be reduced by recognizing the importance of previously unidentified dietary factors. At the time, many scientists believed that a sufficient diet consisted mainly of protein, fat, carbohydrates, minerals, and water. Hopkins argued that foods contained additional “accessory food factors” essential to health.

Scurvy results from severe vitamin C deficiency. It can cause fatigue, bleeding gums, poor wound healing, and eventually life-threatening illness. Sailors had long observed that citrus fruits helped prevent it, but the biochemical explanation came much later. Rickets, meanwhile, affects developing bones and is associated primarily with inadequate vitamin D, calcium, or phosphate; it can produce soft, weak, and deformed bones.

Hopkins did not yet know the chemical identities of the vitamins involved, and the word “vitamin” was not coined until 1912 by Casimir Funk. His 1906 insight helped move nutrition beyond calories and macronutrients. Hopkins later shared the 1929 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discoveries concerning growth-stimulating vitamins.