Nutrient Deficiency Diseases - Early Vitamin Deficiency Diseases, Scurvy, Beriberi, Pellagra, Rickets, Other Vitamin Deficiency Diseases - Mineral deficiency diseases

Nutrient Deficiency Diseases - Early Vitamin Deficiency Diseases

Nutrient Deficiency Diseases - Scurvy

Scurvy is one of the oldest vitamin deficiency diseases recorded and the first one to be cured by adding a vitamin to the diet. Scurvy was a common malady of sailors of the age of exploration of the New World. It has been recorded that Vasco da Gama was supposed to have lost half of his crew to scurvy in his journey around the Cape of Good Hope at the end of the fifteenth century and Richard Hawki…

Nutrient Deficiency Diseases - Beriberi

Discovering the causes for beriberi became part of the history of discovering vitamins. Christian Eijkman (1858-1930) was a Dutch physician who was a member of a government commission sent to the East Indies in the 1880s to study the disease beriberi, which was prevalent in southeast Asia, where the main diet is comprised of unenriched rice and wheat. In wet beriberi there is an accumulation of fl…

Nutrient Deficiency Diseases - Pellagra

Pellagra is a vitamin deficiency disease associated with poverty. The symptoms of pellagra are referred to as the "three D's"-diarrhea, dermatitis, and dementia and if disease is not treated it may lead to death. Gaspar Casal (c. 1691-1759) was the first to publish a thorough explanation of pellagra in 1762 after his death. He studied and wrote about the disease which he obser…

Nutrient Deficiency Diseases - Rickets

Rickets is a bone disease deficiency caused by a lack of vitamin D, called the "sunshine" vitamin because it is the only vitamin that can be produced by the effects of sunlight on the skin. It was a common disease of infants and children, but since all milk and infant formulas have vitamin D added to them, it is rarely seen today. In rickets, legs will become bowed by the weight of t…

Nutrient Deficiency Diseases - Other Vitamin Deficiency Diseases

Night blindness or the difficulty of seeing in dim light is caused by a deficiency in vitamin A which helps in the formation of visual purple needed by the eyes for night vision. The deficiency can also cause glare blindness when the eye is either exposed to too much light or a sudden change in the amount of light when entering a darkened room. Another eye disease caused by vitamin A deficiency is…

Nutrient Deficiency Diseases - Goiter

Nutrient Deficiency Diseases - Protein (amino Acid) Deficiencies

Nutrient Deficiency Diseases - Marasmus And Kwashiorkor

A specific wasting away disease caused by protein deficiency in third world countries that lack adequate food supplies is called kwashiorkor. It is a word which describes the condition of an infant who has to be weaned away after a year to make room for the next baby. The weaning food, which is mainly sugar and water or a starchy gruel lacks protein or has a poor quality of protein. The weaning di…

Nutrient Deficiency Diseases - Treatment And Prevention

Nutrient Deficiency Diseases - Diet And Supplements

Most nutritionists insist on a well-balanced diet consisting of the major food substances as an effective and economical way of obtaining nutrients for health. On the other hand, advocates of health food stores maintain that the FDA's required daily allowances (RDAs) for nutrients are much too low and that cultivation of much of our food supply and its preparation robs our diet of much of i…

Nutrient Deficiency Diseases - Recent Research On Vitamins A And C

Research using 22,000 physicians under the supervision of the Department of Medicine at Harvard is studying the long-term effects of beta carotene (vitamin A) in lowering the incidence of cancer and boosting resistance to infection. It is also being studied in the treatment of AIDS. Beta carotene is a safer version of vitamin A than the preformed oil form called retinol. It is found in carrots, sw…