The Vitamins

Understanding the vitamins is fundamental to understanding
nutrition. The history of their discovery and the continuing
elucidation of their roles in health is the history of the
emergence of nutritional science out of the areas of physiology, biochemistry, medicine, and agriculture. The practical
application of that knowledge draws on food science,
medicine, public health, economics, sociology, and agriculture. Capturing the understanding and contemporary relevance that was produced by that history and available for
contemporary application is a formidable challenge. It is also
a privilege. For us as authors, that task has involved years of
reviewing thousands of publications, and months of looking
for ways to present that complex information clearly and
with neither oversimplification nor overstatement.