Exactly what is a vitamin anyway? In the late 1800's many poor people came down with a disease called beriberi which manifested itself in anemia and paralysisThere were scientists of the day who thought beriberi was caused by a germ or bacteria, while others insisted that it was a poisoning of some kind.

Then a Dutch physician Christiaan Eijkman discovered that simply substituting unpolished rice for polished rice would prevent beriberiUnfortunately Christiaan Eijkman was of the opinion that beriberi was an infection of some kind and that something in the unpolished rice resisted that infectionOther scientists insisted that beriberi was the result of some type of systemic poisoning, and that mysteriously the unpolished rice sort of soaked up the poisonBut all agreed that there was some kind of major difference between the unpolished rice and the polished rice.