Nutrient Deficiency Diseases - Early Vitamin Deficiency Diseases, Scurvy, Beriberi, Pellagra, Rickets, Other Vitamin Deficiency Diseases - Mineral deficiency diseases
Nutrient deficiency diseases occur when there is an absence of nutrients which are essential for growth and health. Lack of food leading to either malnutrition or starvation gives rise to these diseases. Another cause for a deficiency disease may be due to a structural or biological imbalance in the individual's metabolic system.
There are more than 50 known nutrients in food. Nutrients enable body tissues to grow and maintain themselves. They contribute to the energy requirements of the individual organism and they regulate the processes of the body. Carbohydrates, fats, and proteins provide the body with energy. The energy producing component of food is measured in calories. Aside from the water and fiber content of food, which are also important for their role in nutrition, the nutrients that serve functions other than energy production can be classified into four different groups: vitamins, fats, proteins, and minerals. All are necessary for proper body function and survival.
There are about 25 mineral elements in the body usually appearing in the form of simple salts. Those which appear in large amounts are called macro minerals while those that are in small or trace amounts are micro minerals. Some that are essential are calcium, phosphorous, cobalt, copper, fluorine, iodine, iron, sodium, chromium, and tin. Aluminum, lead, and mercury are not as essential.
Additional Topics
Polish-born Casimir Funk (1884-1967) originated the word vitamin in 1912, spelling it as vitamine, because he thought they were part of a group of organic compounds containing nitrogen, called amines. The final -e was later dropped in 1920 at the suggestion of the English nutritionist Jack Cecil Drummond who pointed out that these trace-like substances found only in food and essential for good hea…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Iodine is necessary for the proper functioning of the thyroid gland which controls the body's basal metabolism rate through its production of two hormones, thyroxine, and triiodinethyronine. Without a sufficient amount of iodine in the diet the gland begins to enlarge its cells in its efforts to produce the hormone, thus producing a goiter, which is a swelling around the neck. Certain regio…
Proteins are needed in the body for amino acids. Proteins are broken down in the digestive system to form amino acids which are then absorbed by the rest of the body to form new proteins in the form of vital body tissues such as muscle, connective tissue, and skin. There are two types of protein, fibrous and globular proteins. Fibrous protein is insoluble and goes into making the structural tissue…
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…
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…
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…
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