Terrors of the Table

The author here offers a marvelous smorgasbord of stories taken from the history of nutrition, providing an engaging account of the struggle to find the ingredients of a healthy diet, and the fads and quackery that have waylaid the unwary. The book teems with colorful personalities, a veritable who's who of medical history, from Hippocrates to Pasteur, plus such intriguing figures such as Count Rumford, who argued that since plants got their food from water, soups would make the best meals for us. The author highlights the brilliant flashes of insight as well as the sadly mistaken leaps of logic in the centuries long effort to understand how the body uses food. We see the ingenious experiments used to reveal the workings of the stomach, the chemical analyses that uncovered the nature of proteins, carbohydrates, and vitamins, and the slow recognition that malnutrition lay behind such terrible diseases as scurvy, rickets, beriberi, and pellagra. Along the way, we read about the invention of the tin can (which originally had to be opened with a hammer and chisel), learn why ancient Egyptians had thicker skulls than Persians, and find out about today's fads and fancy diets, some dangerous, others just daft, such as the blood group diet, where you plan your meals around your blood type (people who are type 0 are supposed to eat more meat). Included are anecdotes from the history of medicine and with sharp portraits of the scientists who advanced our understanding of diet and digestion.