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1, 1942, the FDA simply directed the flour mills to add certain vitamins and minerals to white flour (an inexpensive national health plan without angst). The list hasn’t changed since then except in 1998, when folic acid was mandated for inclusion in the mix as a means of preventing spina bifida and other defects of the brain and spinal cords of developing fetuses.
    While people learned, over the ages, to treat certain diseases with specific foods—night-blindness with liver, scurvy with citrus or pine needle extracts—it wasn’t until 1912 that the concept of vitamins was conceived. Polish biochemist Casimir Funk coined the name “vital amines” ( amine is the chemical term for something made from ammonia and containing nitrogen) while he was trying to isolate the “anti-beriberi factor” from brown rice (this was based on the observation that people who ate brown rice seemed immune to the disease, while those who ate white rice weren’t). Somehow the words got combined, the e got dropped (when it was discovered that not all of them were amines), and an industry was born. All thirteen vitamins were discovered by 1948 and synthesized by 1972.
    As simple and inexpensive as enrichment seems, there is a catch: it is hard to make vitamins and minerals. Research into how best to manufacture them simply and cleanly takes years and millions of dollars. Patents and secret processes abound. The factories are complex and require specialized raw ingredients. The actual chemical synthesis of vitamins might be quick, but it is dirty, and it is a challenge to handle the nasty solvents and waste products involved. Cutting-edge biotechnology and genetic engineering are central (fermentation, the biotech route, is overtaking chemical synthesis as the way to go). And the companies aren’t talking—months of dead-end research proves that. It is virtually impossible to find anyone who will explain the manufacturing process, which changes daily and therefore leads to a lot of false information. Especially galling is that the multinational companies that claim to make the vitamins are changing so fast that even they don’t know, or won’t say with any authority, who makes what. 3
    Some of the flux is typical, but, nevertheless, it’s not good business. In 1999, the six major vitamin companies that controlled 80 percent of the world market were caught in a price-fixing scandal, the billion-dollar settlement of which led to the disappearance of some, the mergers of others (Dutch giant DSM, the world’s largest vitamin manufacturer, paid more than a billion dollars to acquire Hoffman–La Roche’s vitamin business in 2003), and a huge drop in prices (in the neighborhood of 75 to 80 percent). Between the penalties and the price drop, the business became a burden for most of the big Western companies. BASF, the other giant, has started several “joint ventures” in Japan and China since 2001 that even it seems to find difficult to identify. Because of the price-fixing lawsuit, and because the Western world has intensified its pollution laws (vitamin manufacturing can take a heavy environmental toll), the industry is moving quickly to countries such as India and especially China. Most of the minor players seem to have joint ventures or distribution deals of various sorts that allow them to call themselves manufacturers when all they really do is resell Chinese chemicals—a far cry from the farmer’s market.
    It is likely that most of us, as I did before starting this book, think that vitamins are squeezed from fruits or somehow extracted from vegetables. That’s where our mothers told us to get them, after all, and eating naturally vitamin-rich foods is still the best way. But, in fact, it is actually harder to extract B vitamins from natural sources than it is to create them synthetically. Even though they are chemically identical, lab-made vitamins are better because they are consistent in strength and quality, while the amount of