Life, Death, and the Vitamin Quest

Steve:
Imagine a time when people were getting sick and dying. Sometimes large groups of people at the same time living in the same area. Symptoms were similar in each case, but the mysterious illness was defying conventional cures. Nobody could pinpoint the problem. Maybe it was something in the environment, an unknown virus or bacteria. Doctors were trying different remedies, some typical, some bizarre. But still the victims would suffer in misery, even dying a horrific death. Join us today as we discuss life, death and the vitamin quest. Welcome to the BC Messenger Podcast. This is season four, episode three, October 2025. My name is Steve Hall. I'm here as I am each month with my wife, Jennifer Hall, with Real Science, Real Bible, Real History and Real World. Thank you for joining us today.

Jennifer:
Here on this 39th episode of Real Science, Real Bible, Real History and Real World. And as you mentioned, Steve, the title of our featured topic this time is "Life, Death, and the Vitamin Quest". And just pause on that first word just for a moment, life. You know, as human beings were created in the image of God and our hearts yearn for life, we were created for life. Jesus said, "I come to give them life and to give it more abundantly." So many stories and tales have been crafted over the years in the age old theme. You know, it's a struggle, life against death. And we want life to prevail. Death entered into the world as part of the curse. But as followers of Christ, we're working to overcome the curse and bring more and more abundant life to this world in a variety of ways. I could think of so many examples right off the top of my head, really, for how the life-giving work goes on around the world and how as people, as a culture, we want life. That's what our hearts long for. This recent event in the news that's been talked about so much from so many angles involves the tragic death of Charlie Kirk, an untimely death, taking of a life that was so well known in our culture today. And we all know that's not what we want. We don't want death. We want life and we want life to go on.

Steve:
Right. And it's what Christianity has been all about since Christ came. Like you mentioned Christ, he came to bring the life. He is the life. He's light and life and life abundant. And it has been what Christianity has been all about ever since. No matter what that life looks like, the color of the skin, the age a person is, we've been on a quest for life. And it's a beautiful and wonderful quest.

Jennifer:
Even going back to the first century of Christians, you can read about how they saved lives, preserved lives, sustained life. And that's what they became known for as followers of Christ. I think of some friends of ours who have been our friends since our days in college and a ministry that they have to the people in Malawi giving life to those people. This is a nation where they still have the hunger months and kids over there don't have enough to eat during certain times of the year. Hard to find fresh water to drink. Yeah. They don't have clean water supply. And this ministry started by our friends, you can look it up, Giving Basics, is digging wells, is teaching them how to grow crops, how to fertilize their crops, how to harvest the corn, how to process the corn and giving them the tools that they need to be able to learn how to feed their people more and then building schools and resource centers to help them become educated. All these types of works going on are just thrilling to the church of God and they're giving life.

Steve:
You can look up infant mortality rates, right? I mean, how has that just changed over the last 2000 years, in the last 100 years, and the research that's been done to save the lives of babies and infants and we just, we take so much for granted.

Jennifer:
Yes. Life is a precious gift. And what we're going to talk about today is strongly a life-giving pursuit that has been going on, especially in the past 150 years or so. What does it mean to be pro-life for the Christian? We hear the word pro-life and we think, okay, yeah, that means I'm against abortion. And that's true, but that's only a part of it. We're pro-life for all of life. I saw some pictures the other day, my daughter was scrolling way back on my phone, saw some pictures of some of our children when they were much younger at a pro-life rally and they, several of them were holding up signs that said, "I am the pro-life generation." And I think we're seeing that more and more in some of the things that are going on in our world. And that's what we want. We're pro-life for all of life. Some of the work we're doing here is pro-life to sustain life for the elderly, for the other side, the other end of the spectrum, not just the babies. So yes, that's kind of where we want to begin today. Life is a gift. It's a precious gift. We know that in our souls. And I was talking to some friends the other day and one of them said, "Isn't it amazing what joy babies bring to the world?" And that's true. Babies are joyful. They bring a smile to everyone's face because it's a new life. It's a new promise brought into the world. A week ago, a week and a half ago, I was able to attend with some of my boys an NFL football game in a stadium and we've had the full experience. It was so cool. And you know, the messages of our day, there was painted on the end zone in the Titans stadium there in Nashville, "Choose Love" was painted there on that end zone. And of course, they are talking about being against hate and those types of messages. But I think there's coming a day, I believe this in faith, and I think the Holy Spirit of God is at work in our world, I think there's coming a day we are going to see painted on the end zone, "Choose Life."

Steve:
Well, there's no doubt we're passionate about this topic here today. And we're going to get into it more. But before we do, Jen, give us the rundown of the rest of the podcast today. 

Jennifer:
Here's what you can expect as you listen through. We will be discussing Life, Death and the Vitamin Quest with quite a bit of fascinating information, stories, an adventurous tale to say the least. And then where we are today in the two newly discovered vitamins that we have here at Aardsma Research. There are some new developments with the vitamin discovery journey that's happening here. Some of it we will get into a little bit today. And then we are definitely setting the stage for next month's episode where we will delve very much more in depth into some dealings that we're having with the FDA currently, and bringing you up to date on the path that we are on with these two new vitamins. And then a quote of note that ties in very nicely, the work here with the history of vitamin discoveries over the past couple of centuries. And then closing out today, very interesting behind the scenes look from Helen as she talks about a big time hobby of Dr. Aardsma and something that they've done for years to help support the research work, which is growing strawberries. And you will enjoy hearing that. And in the closing, don't go away because at the very end of the podcast, we are going to announce the winner from the August giveaway where we had the opportunity to leave us a podcast review and be entered in for a drawing for a $50 gift card to Amazon. We will announce who that individual is at the very end of the podcast. We don't even know who it is yet because we're going to draw a name at the very end of the podcast.

Steve:
Well, part of the quest for life is the quest to conquer disease. We have all seen the horrible effects of diseases upon people and sometimes people we love very dearly. And today we take so much for granted in our modern world. One thing that we easily take for granted is that we are a people who are not as sick as we used to be. Imagine a time as we said at the beginning of the podcast when people were getting sick and dying everywhere, large groups sometimes of people in the same places at the same time, doctors having a hard time pinpointing what's going on. Is it something in the environment? Trying to give remedies. And yet the victims would just continue to suffer, continue to die. But imagine the astonishment when people began to discover that something as simple as eating a lemon or cod liver oil or going out into the sun or some specific food was fixing the problem. Welcome to the world of vitamin discovery where mysterious illnesses eventually are cured by groundbreaking advancements in science and technology.

Jennifer:
Just a few hundred years ago, nobody foresaw that tiny amounts of specific chemical substances could transform human health. Nobody knew that if you didn't have specific invisible molecules, much too small to be seen with the unaided human eye, the body would actually get sick and die. Missing molecules in fact were the cause of unimaginable suffering. 

Steve:
They may have had things they could do to cure problems, we talked about the American Indians, they would eat something and somebody would get better. They didn't know why though.

Jennifer:
I'm sure there was folk wisdom and we can read stories about that. Well, if you do this, it'll fix it, but nobody knew the reason. Nobody knew what was going on scientifically. And sometimes I didn't even know what to do to fix it. They were helpless against what seemed to be just a deadly disease. But scientists began to reach a new level of understanding of the relationship between diet and nutrition. And some of this today is like, well, of course, we got to eat the right stuff. They didn't always know all these things. And so like you said, we don't even realize the health and the abundant life that we have today that has not always been the case through history.

Steve:
We've talked about chronological snobbery, right? Where we think everybody should have known this. What's wrong with those silly people? But they just didn't know at that time. 

Jennifer:
Now once these substances, which we now call vitamins of course, once they started to become known, the path to acceptance and scientific consensus remained challenging. Surprise, surprise, right? People did not just flock to it and embrace it automatically and immediately. People often clung to what were in fact mistaken ideas and beliefs.

Steve:
And we're going to be talking about that today, giving some specific examples as we go back in history and learn from history, hopefully, getting the historical context of vitamin discovery.

Jennifer:
Now, if you fast forward a few hundred years, you will find out as we talk through this today that the era of vitamin discovery is far from over. In fact, the field of Bible / Science research, which is what is going on here at The Biblical Chronologist and Aardsma Research and Publishing, this field of Bible science now intersects with the field of vitamin discovery. And the path forward for these newly discovered vital molecules, which we are calling the anti-aging vitamins, has proven so far to be just as difficult. This new discovery has been greeted with suspicion, subjected to ridicule, and in general met with resistance. And people still cling, again, no surprise, but this is the way it goes through history, people still cling to mistaken ideas and beliefs.

Steve:
The human condition. It's just, we have to get over preconceived ideas to actually make progress. It's just always that way.

Jennifer:
So join us. We're about to traverse the arduous path of vitamin discovery, one which is lined with remarkable stories and the quest for answers to truly life and death questions.

Steve:
Much progress has been made in the science of food and nutrition. You mentioned a minute ago, the discovery of vitamins, the conquering of diseases in our world. You looked up, Jennifer, the four common ways to categorize diseases. And they are infectious diseases, there are deficiency diseases, that's where we're headed, there is hereditary or genetic diseases, and then there are physiological diseases.

Jennifer:
It's interesting. We don't even think about this as regular folks. We don't think about the fact that they didn't use to know that some diseases could be passed person to person, other diseases would develop in the body and would not be able to be caught by somebody else, others were in your genetics from the time you were born, and yet others were brought on by a deficiency. This was unknown. This was not commonly understood at all. Okay, you have something and now this one kid has it, now another kid has it, they must be spreading it to each other. No thought at all that maybe all these kids are missing something that they desperately need out there. In fact, diet and nutrition.

Steve:
The idea that deficiency in a certain nutrient could cause disease was slow to accept. And especially as we're going to go and see in the history of fighting disease, for life, the idea of infectious disease, germ theory, this was exploding on the scene. This was something that was newly discovered. And so there was a lot of bias.

Jennifer:
The golden years for, you know, the vitamins that we know of today, the traditional vitamins, the golden years for discovery of those was pretty much mid 1800s to fairly early 1900s. Probably focused on very late 1800s to the first couple of decades of the 1900s. That's when these things started to really be discovered. And at the same time is what you're saying, germ theory was really the fashion and the fad of the day that, oh, wow, okay, you can catch this and here's how this is happening. And so there was confusion. There wasn't clarity that some diseases were from a completely different etiology, cause or origin.

Steve:
Well, you have to know the past to understand the present. And so what we're going to do today is go into the history of vitamin discovery and look at the past so that we can understand the present better. We have taken an article that was written by a scientist, a lady by the name of Harriette Chick, and we are going to go through that article today. Who was Harriette Chick and why are we reading her article, Jen?

Jennifer:
Very pleased to be able to talk about one of these great individuals who is not normally recognized as much of a hero today, but definitely was in her time. Harriette Chick, we have an article written by her that is part of Dr. Aardsma's library, and we used it for the episode today heavily for the material that we're presenting today. This article was put out in 1975 in a journal called "Progress in Food and Nutrition Science". "The Discovery of Vitamins" by Harriette Chick was part of this publication in 1975. Harriette Chick was 100 years old when she wrote this article in 1975. She was born in 1875 and she has a remarkable story of how she invested her life in nutrition and vitamin discovery and figuring out different mysterious illnesses, diseases. And in fact, her work is very unusual for a couple of reasons. Number one, she was a woman in her field as a biochemist, which was very unusual there in her time. And then secondly, her work spanned nine decades. That's a long time to be investing your life. And then if you're going to be 100 years old and you're going to write a history of the discovery of vitamins, and she was there first hand for a lot of it, then this is something to really pay attention to as we try to understand where we are today with what we're doing here.

Steve:
Right. She was a British microbiologist, protein scientist, nutritionist. She was one of 11 children. That's an interesting point. She was born into a Methodist family. She went to a school that was well known for excellence in teaching the sciences, and yes, as you said, became one of the first women biochemists in the world.

Jennifer:
Yeah. They're in the early 1900s or the turn of the century there, she went to work for the Lister Institute where in fact, another great trailblazer in vitamin discovery also spent the majority of his career. The Lister Institute is a not-for-profit organization which is basically just dedicated to humanitarian causes. And these individuals who maybe had a hard time finding a place for their work elsewhere found the Lister Institute to be a place where they could move forward with their experiments, their results, even when it perhaps wasn't accepted elsewhere. It was in Britain. It was originally established as the British Institute of Preventive Medicine. She describes, as she begins the article, how people began to understand that there were invisible parts of foods that were still unknown. And she describes some different experiments that were done early on where this started to become a realization. We're missing something here. I thought this was a cool story she told, that there was a group of scientists that thought that they knew everything that was in milk, proteins, fats, carbohydrates, salts. They separated it all out and fed it to mice separately and the mice wouldn't thrive. They would die. And that was the beginning of clues for them that there must be present, also, some unknown materials which are essential for life. This was the very beginning of figuring it out. I'm always amazed. God builds these mysteries into his creation and then he lets man figure it out piece by piece, bit by bit, and it is a tough journey.

Steve
It's quite the puzzle. God can make a puzzle. Yes, he can. Yes, he has. But we study history and see how these puzzles were resolved and found out and that helps us today as we study more puzzles that are sitting in front of us and figuring them out in God's creation. Well they began to realize in the story you gave there that these mice were deficient in something. The word that we're using here, deficiency disease was beginning to be realized. They were deficient in something. Something must be present that is unknown to us that's essential for life that we need to figure out. And so we are going to talk here today about five different vitamins that have been discovered throughout history that were in this article by Harriette Chick.

Jennifer:
Yes, she goes through five and so we're going to touch briefly on each one and tell some of these fascinating stories.

Steve:
Now the first one we'll mention, we're just going to go A, B, C and D, right Jennifer? And then actually B3 after that.

Jennifer:
Yes, niacin. Niacin gets tagged on there as the fifth one. It doesn't fall so nicely in the list here.

Steve:
But the first one, we'll just hit quickly, vitamin A. You're probably going to have to say this word because I think you can say it better than I. The deficiency is now called what?

Jennifer:
A vitamin A deficiency is called xerophthalmia. Starts with the letter X.

Steve:
That's what we know of today. Now at the time of Chick's writing of the article, it didn't appear to have a name for it. The word for it.

Jennifer:
It's the only one that doesn't have the name for the deficiency disease in her article from 1975, but it is now called xerophthalmia. And the big thing with not having vitamin A is that you are going to have terrible trouble with your vision. Scientists were finding out that rats being fed certain types of fats like lard or olive oil failed to grow. But if they were given butterfat or egg yolk, it would supply whatever this missing nutrient was. And so they called it fat soluble A. And that was kind of the name they gave to it as it was an unknown and what eventually became vitamin A. In 1904, it was observed that there was an eye disease common among Japanese children, a dry condition of part of the eye, and that it seemed to be due to lack of fats in the diet. Now I will say that this vitamin A section is the shortest section and the least dramatic of any of the sections in this article. But they found out they could cure it by giving fish or liver oils. During the First World War, it was a serious problem among some Danish children.

Steve:
Right. During the First World War, a more serious eye trouble that would actually lead to blindness among Danish children, in severe cases, there was ulceration of the cornea that would occur. The children had to be fed on separated milk due to a measure of the economy that...

Jennifer:
Because of the war.

Steve:
Right. That was going on to enable more butter to be exported. So that's what was happening. So they were separating this. Obviously, we know now something was being taken out that they were needing in both the children and the adults that were on this diet, a mild deficiency of the fat soluble factor has been shown by a condition of what they call night blindness, or an inability to see in a dim light.

Jennifer:
Harriette Chick in the article, she calls herself the writer. She says she remembers a case in post-war Vienna of a boy brought to a hospital because his father found him unable to see in twilight and had to lead him by the hand. And then when the boy found out he had to stay in the hospital, he began to cry, but he did not have tears wetting his eye because of the dryness of the cornea. And Harriette Chick herself observed this happening. And so this was the beginning of them finding out vitamin A. So important for eyesight. And we get it through a fat soluble substance. It comes to us through fats. And if children are deprived of it or anyone, their eyesight will not develop properly. And you know, it's amazing to me, even in our modern world in 2025, I have been buying something for my babies and children called A and D ointment. And I was raised with A and D ointment. My mom was a strong believer in it. It's great stuff. But where is that coming from? That's this knowledge that developed, you know, 100 some years ago, we need vitamin A. It's very important.

Steve:
Eat carrots. I remember growing up being told eat carrots are good for your eyes. I didn't know why. But now we know, it's vitamin A that's in those carrots. Well that's our first vitamin that is in the article. The second one that Harriette Chick goes into is vitamin B. Vitamin B, the deficiency without it is what is called beriberi. Now we are going to go through these vitamin deficiencies and what the diseases were, and diseases are, that you can get if you don't have these vitamins. But let me remind everybody that these are horrible things we're talking about. And as we get into the description of them, we'll see that.

Jennifer:
Yeah. Try to imagine this happening to your spouse or your child and you're seeing them just fail in so many areas of health and you have no idea what to do or how to fix it.

Steve:
And again, how blessed we are that we don't, at least in the modern world, see many of these diseases today. Beriberi has been prevalent in endemic form, especially among populations whose staple food, staple cereal, is rice. Such countries, mainly Asian countries, Japan, India, Malaya, the former Dutch Indies, the Philippine Islands, the disease which leads gradually to peripheral neuritis, emaciation, paralysis, and then finally to death, usually from heart failure. This is beriberi. It's only been since toward the end of the 19th century that this was recognized to be of dietary origin.

Jennifer:
As we go through these, we're going to point out what were the specific hindrances, what were the specific categories of difficulty that were being faced by the scientists that were advancing the cures for these things. The cause of beriberi was related to the polished rice that they were eating in these different areas, which was depriving them of an essential nutrient. But again, they were trying to figure this out. Scientists were trying to nail down what is the cause here, what is going on. Not everybody thought it was the rice. Some early researchers thought so. But there were always wrong theories, rabbit trail type of ideas that would hinder getting to the truth. There was a Dutch group that sent a commission to investigate the cause of beriberi, which was rampant in the Dutch Indies. Among that group was a scientist named Christian Eichmann. At that period, during that time, bacteriology was a young and coming science. And the infective nature of the disease was paramount in the thinking of clinicians and scientists. So Eichmann, as part of this commission, was not able to accept such a conclusion for the cause of beriberi. So he broke with the mainstream in that. And he eventually recognized that the type of milling undergone by the rice was an all-important factor in producing beriberi on a rice diet. These conclusions were confirmed in a human study. So first they tested things on animals and then on humans. But in spite of the fact that he was able to do trials on prisoners in his human study, thousands of cases occurred among those inmates who received white polished rice, but the disease was almost absent when lightly milled rice was consumed. But unfortunately, these results and Eichmann's earlier observations were not appreciated for many years. So there you have some hindrances. You have wrong ideas, wrong theories, commissions being sent out to investigate on a completely wrong premise. And then you have a guy who advances the correct idea, but his work was not appreciated. His results were not taken seriously.

Steve:
Yeah. It says in the article, although the nutritional origin for beriberi had been established by the early work of Eichmann, Braden, and others, the idea that a deficiency might be at fault was not even considered. The cause of this new disease was sought in terms of a positive agent, a poison, a toxin. And that's, again, all of that discovery was also in its infancy. So it was met with bias. It can't be that.

Jennifer:
And so what you end up having is a lot of unnecessary suffering, as the people who have the ability, I mean, if you have an ability to send out a Dutch commission, then you also have the ability to put policies in place to reduce suffering amongst the people groups where those ideas should be handed down from. It wasn't happening. They were completely closed to the idea, which was actually where the truth was found.

Steve:
So yes, we have this example of groundbreaking work that just simply can't be accepted, can't be recognized, and then even just completely forgotten until someone comes along, brings it back up, and it's realized, and many lives are saved.

Jennifer:
So the cause of beriberi is a vitamin B deficiency. And even as vitamin B was being discovered, it was found out that there are different forms of vitamin B, and we won't get into all those technicalities today. But those eating the diet primarily comprised of polished rice were being deprived of essential B vitamins and were suffering in these horrific ways.

Steve: 
All right, our third vitamin that we are going to discuss is, if there's one that's most familiar, it's going to be this one, vitamin C, which of course, the deficiency that one contracts if they do not have vitamin C is what we call scurvy. A disease that affected so many people over so many years, horrible conditions. 

Jennifer:
This is undoubtedly the most dramatic of any of these accounts that she gives. And in fact, Harriette Chick in the article, in the introduction and in the conclusion, she references vitamin C as the classic illustration of the arduous path of discovery for these vitamins.

Steve:
This disease has been recorded continuously since the time of the Crusades. People contracting this disease, they didn't know what it was, causes being put forward. Many things accepted that were not true. Harriette Chick talks about theories about the seasons of the year being blamed, the nature of the climate, type of air that's being breathed, whether you're on the ocean or on land. All of these theories being put forward. But Harriette Chick mentions that even throughout all the discussion, all the writings, the journals, there has also been repeated mention of a lack in the diet of fresh vegetables and fruits as a cause. People would put this down, people would write this down. If you give them this to eat in their diet, then they get better, swift cures even, not just getting better a little bit, but quickly getting completely restored again.

Jennifer:
Here are the signs of scurvy. Spongy inflamed gums with loosened teeth, hemorrhages appearing in all parts of the body, painful joints, intense weakness, and often sudden death on movement. This was most prevalent, at least it's most well known amongst the sailors that would go out on these ships and take these months long journeys. And then so many of the men getting sick and perishing at sea with this horrendous dread disease called scurvy. And like Steve said, I mean, the theories abounded and some of the captains of the ships believed this sea air is just bad for these guys. Let's get them back to land, get them breathing the air on land again, and they'll be okay. That and many other types of ideas about what was going on. But I can't even imagine, you know, what if I was a mom back at that time and one of my young men said, you know, I'm going to go out on Captain Cook's ship. And I was scared half to death that he was going to get struck with this mysterious, horrible illness called scurvy. And what actually was it? It's just incredible.

Steve:
Right. Well, there were men who were putting it down and trying to tell people. Names maybe you've heard of like James Lind or Backstrom. If you're familiar with the vitamin discovery you've heard of these names. And they would say, you know, doing their own experiments in the 1700s, you know, James Lind, you give people an orange or a lemon and they get better. But it can't be accepted. This is conflicting with what I believe, and distrust of it, and the stories abound.

Jennifer:
Yeah. I mean, it's not like one person found it and found the reason. Oh, fresh fruits and vegetables. They got to get this. And then everybody just heralded, and what a hero and yes, yes. Now we know. No, hundreds of thousands of men kept dying because there was no consensus and there was false rabbit trails, false ideas. One sea captain said in 1962, he wrote, "In 20 years since I have used the sea, I dare take upon me to give account of 10,000 men consumed with the disease. That which I have seen most fruitful for this sickness is sour oranges and lemons." Now that was well into the 1900s when that man made that statement. But listen to Backstrum, which you mentioned, and this was back in 1734 came down strongly for the truth when he asserted, this is Harriette Chick writing this, "Backstrum came down strongly for the truth when he asserted lack of vegetable food to be the true cause of scurvy, which he declared can occur under this condition, whether on sea or land." So it wasn't the ocean doing it. It wasn't the ship, you know, it wasn't the air. It didn't matter where you were. You could get this sickness. He said, "From want of proper attention to the history of scurvy, its causes have been generally though wrongfully supposed to be cold in Northern climates, sea air, the use of salt meets, etc. Whereas this evil is soul owing to a total abstinence from fresh vegetable foods and greens, which is alone the primary cause of the disease." And this was in the 1700s, he said that.

Steve:
It's wild, and an interesting story that Harriette Cook relays is the sea voyage of Captain James Cook, who readily adopted the theories of these men like Lynn and Backstrom and went and put it into practice. And he took a voyage around the world in a ship where of course we understand sailors were getting scurvy like crazy, but he was three years at sea, and he lost only one man from sickness because he put these things into the diet of the people on the ship. He would use fresh vegetables and fruit, sauerkraut. You can read the story. And on his return, Cook was honored with a great award, the Copley Medal of the Royal Society because of the fact that he lost, what was it again? How many men?

Jennifer:
Only one man, but it actually, I believe it says, was not from scurvy that the man died.

Steve:
So no one died from scurvy, no one.

Jennifer:
Good job, Captain Cook!

Steve:
But here's the rest of the story, as Paul Harvey says, right? The rest of the story, after his decisive human experiment... now this is where we need to learn, this is why we're giving this, the whole reason we're giving this episode today, after James Cook's decisive human experiment, Lind pressed energetically for an official regular issue of lemon juice in the British Navy. But it took 42 years before this reform occurred in 1795. The evidence is sitting right in front of them. But because of biases, conflicting theories, prejudices, preconceived ideas, it could not be accepted for 42 years.

Jennifer:
Yeah, just delay for no good reason. I mean, what in the world would have taken 42 years to make that an official policy? Once again, this is your Navy. So whatever country you are, you have jurisdiction over what's going to happen on those ships. Why in the world would you delay implementing something so simple, so un-risky, no risk at all, just eat your lemons on the ship where you can get the vitamin C or the limes. But it takes so long for no good reason. It's just delay, official delay.

Steve:
How many people needlessly died because of that unacceptance of what was sitting right in front of them. We're going to get into that at the end of our podcast that the theory we have here is that potentially we could be saving 6,000 people every single day because there's something sitting in front of us that can't seemingly be accepted. So what an example of this was scurvy. The regular issue of lemon juice in the Navy, once it was finally accepted, some of the results are just amazing. I mean, thousands of sailors die year after year, but once it was accepted between 1806 and 1810, there were recorded two sailors who died from scurvy.

Jennifer:
In this one particular hospital, right.

Steve:
Once it was accepted. I mean, that's wild.

Jennifer:
Listen to this, by Harriette Chick. "One might imagine that these happenings would have been followed by the end of scurvy at sea, but it was not so. Lessons were forgotten with tragic results and the reasons were not clear until more than 100 years later when scurvy was studied experimentally." How foolish we can be and how easy it is to come down on the wrong side of history. Now we got to tell at least a couple of stories here. Scurvy has the most shocking stories. This one, this is the top of anything I read in this article by Harriette Chick. Okay, listen to this, Backstrom, we're way back in the 1700s with the guy that had it pegged early, early on. He tells the dramatic tale of one helpless sailor on a ship somewhere in Greenland, so sick with scurvy, just in a horrible state. His companions put him on shore, basically to perish because they didn't know what to do with this poor man. And my heart just, I can't stand to think about these things. This fellow had lost the use of his limbs and he could only crawl. The scurvy was so bad he couldn't even walk around on the island, or the land that they put him off on. The ground that he was crawling around on was covered with a specific plant, and he started grazing on the plant. He started eating it like a beast of the field. He started eating it with his teeth. And listen to this, what she says, "In a short time he was by this means perfectly restored. And upon returning home was found to be the herb scurvy grass."

Steve:
That's what they called it.

Jennifer:
Scurvy grass and a concoction made from it are frequently recommended in old records as a cure for the disease. This little plant, which grows on the muddy seashore, belongs to the natural botanical order of such and such, and the article goes on to talk about it, to which also belong most of our cultivated green vegetables. So I mean, that doesn't even sound like that could even be true. You know, it sounds like something you read and somebody's made up tale of some kind of strange adventures. This man's really, really sick, put him off on the land. He starts eating some plant that he can barely crawl around and get to and then all of a sudden he gets better. That is just, it's just incredible to me. So there you go.

Steve:
There's that story. Well, there's a story too in here. They already had realized that lime juice was preventative of scurvy, but yet there grew a distrust of that as history went along.

Jennifer:
You want to know why? You know why, because you've read the article, do our listeners want to know why? Why did they start to distrust the very thing that actually fixed the problem?

Steve:
This was in the 1800s and these ships had gone out to reach the North Pole. That was what was going on. And they were supplying lime juice to prevent scurvy, but in this particular case, it didn't work. The sailors got scurvy instead and so a complete distrust arose over supplying lime juice for scurvy, and new theories crept in, all kind of rabbit trails. People started going down from scurvy once again. Long story short, come to find out they had obtained their lime juice from a completely different source coming from a completely different part of the world, which apparently didn't have the vitamin C in it that traditional lime juice, that they normally would have used, had in it. They didn't understand it, but the distrust came in and threw everybody for a loop.

Jennifer:
Right. They switched their source of limes basically that they were getting, and in that somehow the anti scurvy properties of that fruit was just not as strong.

Steve:
It was coming from West India, the West Indian lime.

Jennifer:
Right. As opposed to a Mediterranean lemon or something. But in the minds of the general public and really everybody, oh, this has stopped working.

Steve:
It doesn't work. It doesn't work.

Jennifer:
Okay. Time to figure something else out. There had to been certain people who would have known they had switched the source, but sometimes it's so obvious in hindsight, but when you're dealing with it at the time, it's not obvious at all. Again, tremendous loss of life. Captain Scott that was taking the men to the North Pole and the Antarctic in 1910, there is little doubt that the explorers were suffering from scurvy when overcome by exhaustion and death.

Steve:
Vitamin C is an amazing one to study. That's what Harriette Chick says as well, probably the most dramatic and greatest example for us today to look at in our own quest, as we continue on this track of vitamin discovery.

Jennifer:
All right. Moving on to our next vitamin in the list is vitamin D and the deficiency disease, which results from a lack of vitamin D is called rickets. It is known as the English disease, and it was described as early as 1650. Mostly in young children is where this disease would be seen. What's happening with the disease of rickets is the failure to calcify the cartilage in the growing joints of the bones so that the bones lack stability and bend under the weight of the body. The spine becomes curved, the leg bones are bent and the joints are swollen. In severe cases, deformities may occur that will last for a lifetime. Although it was known as the English disease, it was found in other countries and interestingly enough found more in the cities than those in the country side.

Steve:
This was again similar to the other things we talked about. Theories were starting to be advanced that yeah, it was happening more in the cities, possibly faulty diet, lack of sunshine and fresh air was a theory. Now we're all pretty familiar with vitamin D. How do you get vitamin D? Well vitamin D is in your milk that you drink, but also in the sunshine. We know that now. They didn't know that then. But all these theories were being presented in advance. However, just like in the other vitamins, it was seemingly inevitable that it was going to be thought that there was an infective agent going on, that something was happening, that they were getting some kind of an infectious disease, that that was what was to blame for this rickets.

Jennifer:
A scientist named Trousseau in 1861 blamed both a sunless climate as well as a faulty diet as responsible for rickets and also for osteomalacia in adults, which he said was the equivalent of rickets in the children. He said both could be cured by cod liver oil, but other vegetable oils were useless. Now this to me is the most chilling statement in this entire article. It just strikes fear in me. Four words right here. "Trousseau's conclusions were forgotten." Forgotten, completely. He's saying it is diet and it is sunshine. 

Steve:
They kept giving kids cod liver oil. We've all heard about that. It seems like an old wives fable, but they knew there was some benefit in this and they kept giving it to children.

Jennifer:
I think even Dr. Aardsma remembers his mom wanting to give cod liver oil to them when they were children. So yeah, some of these things did take hold.

Steve:
But his conclusions for it were completely forgotten. Amazing.

Jennifer:
And for no good reason. I mean, I don't know the circumstances that he was under and if he was completely independent, if he was working with a group, all these things could be researched, but the fact of history is his conclusions were forgotten. Now an interesting little note here on rickets. How many of our listeners, raise your hand, although we cannot see you, if you have seen Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol or read the novel, A Christmas Carol. In that story, there is a character called Tiny Tim. And in fact, what Charles Dickens is describing there with Tiny Tim and his health condition, which was very poor, could very likely have been rickets, which was very prevalent in British life during that time period. So interesting. And it kind of brings it home, you know, because Tiny Tim, I mean, he strikes our emotions and we remember him. We remember that name. We remember his part in the story. And then to think, was that little boy afflicted with a serious vitamin D deficiency? Like, wow. But yet that's just that's the life he's living. I think he's crippled or something like that.

Steve:
Another twist on vitamin D. And we talked a minute ago about God putting puzzles into his creation. And why these things were so confusing to the people who were researching them. Vitamin D, of course, you can get it through your diet, but you also get it through... light, through sunlight. Well, there were theories coming out that experiments were done on animals. I believe puppies was one experiment that was being done in the 1900s and bitter controversies that no, you give them the right diet and it cures this disease. No, you give them fresh air and exercise outside and it cures this disease. And they were going back and forth and back and forth.

Jennifer:
They were doing experiments with with lamps and didn't understand.

Steve:
And can you imagine how they would have thought, What? Are you crazy? Put them under a lamp? Light? You think that's gonna cure this?

Jennifer:
What are you, Aladdin? Rub your magic lamp. And we'll just get some light here and we'll be we'll be cured.

Steve:
Of course, that would sound insane. Well, what do we find out? They're both right. They're both right that these two things actually work together and come together. Wow. What a puzzle to try to solve. What an amazing story.

Jennifer:
And I thought it was so interesting, not only, you know, okay, the lamp, the light that they were experimenting with, but the child's whole body was afflicted with rickets. Okay. All the limbs. But put one arm under the light and see what happens. And guess what? The whole body gets better. Not just the one arm. So this is how they're having to figure out what's going on here. And here's something Harriette Chick says. "The fact that the agent preventing rickets was present in certain fats or could be absorbed equally by exposure to certain light rays presented a notable mystery and seemed a little short of fantastic." You're crazy. Stop it.

Steve:
We study history so we can, it can help us for today. Right? Things that might seem fantastical. Well, let's take a look at it. Let's learn from our past and say, you know what? Maybe it does seem fantastical, but let's open our minds. Let's take it in and solve this problem. It can be solved, but it may be something that we never imagined or dreamed. When we take it seriously.

Jennifer:
And eventually a harmonious theory that incorporated all these results was found. And today it's common knowledge. Of course we all know, you need sunshine. You got to get your vitamin D. And otherwise, you know, drink your vitamin D fortified milk and get it through your diet in different ways. And you know, we don't even know like what is rickets? If you tried to ask that to a person on the street, most people would not know. In fact, I listened to a podcast by some Australian girls in preparation for ours here, and they were talking about Harriette Chick, some on there and rickets. And these Australian girls, young ladies, college students, I believe, trying to give forgotten pieces of history. And so the one started to talk about the terrible suffering of rickets. And one of the other hosts just innocently asked, well, how do you get rickets? And the other host said, do you honestly not know? And then she went on to describe, you know, it's a vitamin D deficiency, and completely unknown to us today. But yet take vitamin D completely out of somebody's diet and guess what they're going to get? Rickets.

Steve:
Well, for hundreds of years, people suffered from a terrible disease they called pellagra. And pellagra is, we now know, a deficiency disease of our last vitamin we're going to talk about today, niacin, which is a form of B3, B3 vitamin.

Jennifer:
Pellagra is horrible. Dementia, diarrhea, and one other D in there somewhere. It's been called the disease of the three D's, notably known for causing mental disorders in people. The horrible suffering. And yet again, trying to figure this out. It became known that it was associated with a maize diet, which is corn. A predominantly corn fed diet would result in pellagra. Why? Why was corn inferior to wheat or something? They didn't know. It remained a mystery until the beginning of the 1900s. And this disease was present even in the Southern United States, even not that long ago. It's pretty sobering really to read these stories. But until the beginning of the present century, she says in the article, no scientific reason existed to show why maize should be inferior to other cereals in nutritive value. In order to explain the observed connection with maize, recourse was had to a theory, listen to this, okay, here's our best idea, it's some kind of toxin in the grain, or a toxin is developing in the grain in the corn, like a mold or a fungus or something. Then they advanced their theory further to say, you know what, these people with pellagra are getting this horrible skin condition. And you know what it is? There's something poisonous in that corn that's causing them to be really, really sensitive to the light. And it's causing their skin to be so afflicted.

Steve:
Well, you mentioned the 3Ds. It's actually dermatitis, diarrhea and dementia. So yeah, it was showing itself on the skin. And so these theories were abounding.

Jennifer:
And then it was advanced even more into protein and the quality of the protein. If you got bad quality protein, you'd probably get pellagra. But if you didn't, if you got good quality protein, you wouldn't get to pellagra. You know, in all of these things, they're working their way to the truth. They're trying to figure it out, but they're not there yet. And these wrong theories take time to get over.

Steve:
Well, in this case with pellagra, even in 1914, now listen, the pellagra Commission of the United States Public Health Service put out a statement and reported that pellagra is, quote, "In all probability, a specific infectious disease communicable from person to person by means at present unknown." Wrong.

Jennifer:
Yep. Thank you for that.

Steve:
That's a statement from the government. Now, if the government puts out a statement about a certain disease people are getting, people are going to believe that, right? I mean, that's pretty much, you've made a conclusion, you've made a statement, you've put it in the public. But as we now can go back and see, they were very wrong. Just because the government says something doesn't mean it's true.

Jennifer:
And we, I think we're aware of that in our culture today. And it's very, very hard to know when to believe the science being told to you and when not to believe it, from the government, et cetera. But yes, I mean, you want to think that, okay, they're saying in all probability this is an infectious disease. So keep your kids away from other kids that have pellagra. You know, don't go near those communities that have it. You might get it. That's the message that I would take from that as a parent. But that's the completely wrong advice. That is not anything to do with the actual cause of pellagra.

Steve:
And the statement was made in the face of all kinds of evidence that it wasn't even true. But it was just based on what the top scientists of the day were saying. And biases, preconceived ideas.

Jennifer:
"In the fashion of the period, difficulty was felt in accepting a negative cause or a deficiency in the etiology of the disease. Theories were not wanting that pellagra was due to infection or some pathological agent." So there you have the fads of the day, the prevailing mainstream ideas, which were important in their own right, but they were overshadowing the truth when it came to pellagra. And you know, there were asylums that they put these people in. I remember researching this in the past, people who were mentally afflicted because of a niacin deficiency, which they didn't know, which what it was, these people are just going crazy. These people are losing their mind. These people are insane. Lock them away in an asylum somewhere. So, horrific amounts of human suffering going on as these things are trying to be figured out.

Steve:
Harriette Chick ends her article talking about how history just teams with conflicting theories and gives us many cautionary tales showing how often the theories gave wrong advice, wrong counsel and horribly delayed progress. So many lives were lost. So many people suffered because lessons were forgotten, horrible. Lessons that had been learned. Or because of prejudices, people just couldn't accept it. Particularly Harriette Chick mentions against scurvy and what a lesson that is for us to learn today. The slow acceptance that deficiency in a certain nutrient could cause disease was something that really took a long, long time to get over. So she says, "The course of vitamin investigation has been torturous and very difficult."

Jennifer:
She concludes by saying in two instances concerned specifically with rickets and pellagra, "Different and apparently opposed theories have been warmly contested by their several advocates to find ultimately a harmonious solution. And those stories are among the most fascinating tales in medical research." And I do have to agree. It's a fascinating but weighty path to traverse down as we look down through the history and the corridors of time, back to these, one by one laborious discoveries that were made.

Steve:
But what a blessing it is to live in the day we live in, and to be able to say, wow, now we can look back and see and understand that, wow, we are blessed. We don't suffer with those horrible diseases that we just talked about. We have found out so many things in science, and now understand how to prevent so many diseases. And there's much suffering we don't experience. Having said that, what are we suffering with that we don't even recognize yet could be cured? What prejudices are we holding on to and preconceived ideas that could be relieving suffering, could be preventing death? Are there still vitamins yet to be discovered? Where are we going now in our future? What lessons have we learned from our past? 

Jennifer:
Well, I mean, it's 2025.

Steve:
Have we reached it? Have we figured it all out? Are we at the top?

Jennifer:
We know all the stuff now. We don't live in the time of scurvy and pellagra and we're too smart for that. We would never have been so confused. We would have figured it out a lot quicker and now here we are 2025 and these kind of things are behind us and we're not going to make these foolish mistakes. We're not going to have this trouble that people before us had.

Steve:
Of course, this is not true. Let me give you a quote by another individual who is a very big name in vitamin discovery.

Jennifer:
We got to tell who this guy is real quick.

Steve:
Well, we've been talking about Harriette Chick, this man's name is Casimir Funk.

Jennifer:
Casimir Funk also worked at the Lister Institute and did so much pioneering work in vitamin discovery. And in 1949, listen to what Casimir Funk said.

Steve:
In 1949, Casimir Funk said, "The study of degenerative pathological changes of old age may well belong to a future chapter of vitamin research." Now Casimir Funk is the name. When you think of vitamins and you think of the advancement of vitamins, vitamin discovery, if someone would say who's key, you know, you're on Jeopardy or whatever and you get that question, it would be the name would be, who is Casimir Funk? That's the guy. He said, "The study of degenerative pathological changes of old age may well belong to a future chapter of vitamin research." Well, no. Oh my goodness. We can't accept that. We have to put that away. That's an unbelievable idea. That's crazy.

Jennifer:
Old age. I mean, that's everybody. Come on. People have been getting old and dying for thousands of years.

Steve:
Are you trying to say old age is a vitamin deficiency disease?

Jennifer:
Casimir Funk is not with us today, but even back in his day, 75 years ago or more, was connecting the idea of old age and the changes that happen in the body...

Steve:
What we call old age.

Jennifer:
In what we call old age, in his mind as a visionary for the future, in his field that he had devoted his life to, connecting the changes in the body that happen in old age with a future chapter of vitamin research. Fascinating. I would like to make the bold assertion that the future chapter is here.

Steve:
With that bold assertion, we are going to have to close out this section of our podcast for today. Many of you know what we're talking about, the connection here, the connecting the dots between what we have talked about today on our episode with the history of vitamin research, and where we're at here at Aardsma Research and Publishing and The Biblical Chronologist. We are going to get into that in our next episode. We're going to bring in to the picture here, give a rundown, try to organize our thoughts and share with you where we are in our research, and Dr. Aardsma Research and vitamin discovery, and tie it into where we are with the United States government. And some things that have recently transpired and taken place with the FDA.

Jennifer:
Just a couple months ago, some interactions with the FDA were reestablished after many years of silence from them as an organization. We want you as our listeners to be up to date and informed with where things stand with these two newly discovered vitamins and our efforts to bring them to the world as the anti-aging vitamins. Just like Harriette Chick and her article, the anti-scurvy vitamins, the anti-pellagra vitamins. Well, Casimir Funk projected a future time when aging and vitamin discovery were going to come together. We're going to bring you up to date on that in November, because there's only so much you can process at one time. There's only so much your podcast hosts can intelligently deliver to you at one time. So, that's enough for today on this very important, very enlightening topic.

Steve:
We are now going into Helen's view and Helen's going to give us another view behind the scenes.

Jennifer:
Today her topic is growing strawberries, which is something that they have done for many years. Of course, strawberries are part of those fresh fruits and vegetables that we need to be able to get all of the traditional vitamins that we are so aware of today.

Helen:
The title for Helen's view this time around is Strawberry Fields Forever. Those of you that recognize that name may reveal your age because Strawberry Fields Forever, a song was written by Lennon McCartney of the Beatles. The song was inspired by Strawberry Field, a Salvation Army children's home near Lennon's childhood home in Liverpool. He used to play in the garden there as a child. It was recorded by the Beatles in late 1966 and released in 1967 when I was 13 years old. So yes, I am revealing my age. Strawberry Fields Forever.

Gerald loves working the land and growing things. For him it is a hobby, a break from the many long hours he spends doing Bible science research. When we lived over at the farm, we grew strawberries as well as many other crops to help feed our growing family. We eventually started selling to the public and built a small store for this purpose on the farm.

Over a 30 year period, we have learned a lot about what to do and what not to do in regards to growing strawberries. Some years were complete failures due to a disease called bronzing. Over years the strawberries got too much rain. One year we had nearly 100% loss of our strawberry beds due to winter kill. In February we had a warm spell which melted all of the snow and made the strawberry beds soggy wet, and then we had a hard freeze which killed the plants. Gerald solved many of these problems and others by building portable tunnels to house the strawberries. Some call them hoop houses or greenhouses. The tunnels Gerald builds are 150 feet long by 13 feet wide.

We stopped growing strawberries in 2019 when we bought the old Loda Grade School. We were swamped with renovating the school building and just didn't have time to do strawberries. We eventually built an apartment at the school and moved over there in October 2020.

Gerald still talked about growing strawberries and I sighed and listened to him dreaming about it. The workload was already very heavy and growing strawberries is hard backbreaking work. Over time however we felt that in order to help support the research and to have a more varied source of income we should get back into growing strawberries. Gerald was very excited about doing strawberries again. I was more "well, we'll see how it goes."

An order was placed for a thousand strawberry plants, bare roots, plans for tunnel improvements were made and the tunnel parts ordered. In the fall we tilled down the sod where we would be planting so it had a chance to break down over the winter. A huge job taking several weeks was leveling the ground which was very uneven. There was too much soil in spots and not enough in others. Also it was overall sloped in the wrong direction. The strawberries arrived on a hot day in mid July. When the plants arrive everything stops to get them in the ground as soon as possible.

It takes about four hours to get the plants in the ground. After that week by week the plants require watering, weeding, replanting bare spots and cutting the flowers and runners off. The tunnel is then built to go over the plants. If only it happened as fast as I typed this sentence. This is a big job requiring about eighty man hours. This happens as soon as possible to control the watering, we use drip lines and reduce the growth of the weeds. Gerald has the tunnel set up to open and close automatically by solar power depending on rain and outside temperatures. Flowers and runners are cut off all the way up to frost when they finally stop growing. We cut off all the flowers which of course turn into strawberries. We do this to get all the growth to go into the plants, building them up for heavy berry production the next spring. Once we have had several hard frosts the tunnels are closed for the winter. This is a happy day. No more strawberry work until spring.

The first winter we had a storm with sixty to eighty mile an hour winds. Wind is a tunnel's worst enemy. The wind snapped the structural screws holding the tunnel to its ground anchors and even pulled some of the anchors up out of the ground. All of the hoops got bent out of shape and Gerald had to cut the plastic off the twisted frame for safety. That was a day to forget, let me tell you. These types of setbacks don't seem to phase Gerald very much, but I sat down and cried. The tunnel had to be completely rebuilt starting with straightening all of the hoops, buying and installing new plastic and putting in new ground anchors. Another eighty man hours of work. Hard work to do at once, very hard work to do it twice. When March comes the tunnels open and close automatically depending on the weather. Water start budding in April and the first berries show up the first week in May. Tunnel berries are much earlier than field berries due to the warm conditions in the tunnels. Always exciting to see and taste the first fully ripened juicy strawberry. Gerald usually brings the first one in and puts it on my desk to surprise me.

I begin advertising the strawberries in early April letting people know the dates when the strawberries will be ready. Strawberries begin to put in reserve orders for both already picked and you pick berries. We pick the strawberries to order until there are so many berries we can't pick them all. Then we open up the patches for you pick. People come from miles around to pick as our berries aren't sprayed with pesticides or herbicides and are all natural.

It is so rewarding to provide these beautiful strawberries to our customers. It is always great to hear compliments on our weed free patches and delicious vine ripened strawberries. One young teenage girl came with her mom to pick strawberries. It was worth the long drive to come here just to smell these strawberries. You should bottle the smell up and sell it, she remarked with great enthusiasm.

The life of a farmer is built on faith, sweat, and sacrifice. But the harvest is more than crops. It's a life of quiet strength and honestly achieved reward.

Steve:
All right, well we have a winner to announce from our August giveaway contest.

Jennifer:
The giveaway was if you left us a positive written review of the podcast on our website or Apple Podcasts, we would enter you into a drawing for a $50 Amazon gift card. So we're going to choose a winner. And we are going to select the winner live on air. Steve is going to give us the name of this winner very, very shortly.

Steve:
Grab that out right now and it is... congratulations to Callah Wright. Callah Wright.

Jennifer:
I don't know if it's Kayla or Kala.

Steve:
I guess Callah.

Jennifer:
Callah. What a pretty name.

Steve:
Well congratulations, Callah. You will be receiving a $50 Amazon gift card and we will be getting that to her. If you did leave us a review, we thank you. If you haven't and you haven't left us a review of our podcast, take a minute and do that. It really does help us spread the word to others about the unique Bible science research that's happening here, why it matters. So would you take just a moment, go on and give us a review. Again, that's very helpful.

Jennifer:
We hope that you have been informed today and educated and come to appreciate those tiny little molecules that God built into the puzzle of His creation, those vitamins, in a whole new way. And very excited for our November episode where we bring you up to date with this new chapter of vitamin discovery going on here.

Steve:
Until we talk together again, let's spread life wherever we go and in whatever ways that God allows.