UNDERWEIGHT CHILDREN

Abstract

It was customary until recent years for those concerned with problems of human nutrition to assume that vitamin B was widely distributed in natural foodstuffs and that any reasonably well constructed diet was likely to contain enough of that vitamin. These assumptions were based on the older assays of food for what is now termed the vitamin B complex, which has recently been shown definitely to consist of at least two vitamins. Some lack of uniformity still exists with regard to the method of naming these vitamins, but little doubt obtains as to their character and general distribution. The antineuritic substance which is still generally termed vitamin B is the more thermolabile of the two, and the antipellagric substance, the separate existence of which was demonstrated by Goldberger and his associates and which is now called vitamin G, is fairly thermostable. The history of the separation of these two factors