The Vitamin Content of Meat (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from The Vitamin Content of Meat

The investigations of foods in previous years were necessarily limited by inadequate methods, or by a lack of methods. As each new method became available all groups of foods were examined for that particular constituent. It is now necessary, in the light of our present knowledge to intensively investigate each group of our foods. While meat and meat products were studied mainly as sources of protein, phosphorus and iron, it is essential that we turn our attention to other substances furnished by animal tissues.

A summary of the nutritive value of meat or any one of the group of foods is especially significant at this time when human requirements of these substances are being formulated by the Food and Nutrition Committee of the National Research Council acting as an agent of the government. It is also opportune to point out the importance of meat and meat products as sources of the accessory food factors and to review the recent advances in the knowledge of the distribution of the newer members of the vitamin B complex. While it is recognized that most mono graphs or books on the Vitamins are outdated the moment they are published, the authors believe that the data gathered together here can serve as a guide until newer methods of assay or analysis are able to supplement the existing values.

The knowledge of the vitamins in the water soluble B group has accumulated so rapidly within the past few years that little has been done on the distribution of these substances in many of our natural foodstuffs. It has now reached the stage at which it is necessary to consolidate the advances made in the chemical work by making intensive investigations on the occurrence of these food factors. The isolation and synthesis of thiamin, riboflavin, pyridoxine and pantothenic acid has all taken place within the last six or seven years. The discovery that nicotinic acid is the pellagra preventing vitamin, and the importance of thiamin, pyridoxine, riboflavin, and pantothenic acid in the field of nutrition have also been the results of the most recent years. Choline, inositol, para-aminobenzoic acid, and other compounds also appear to be of physiological significance. The part that meat plays in supplying the well established factors as well as the more recently differentiated ones will become clear in the following chapters.

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