Romm: So how did vitamins get from the realm of science to something that consumers were concerned about?

Price: The first vitamin to actually be chemically isolated didn’t happen until 1926, with thiamin, B1. People suspected [there were] vitamins before then, but they had never separated one entirely from food. But what’s really fascinating is that starting as early as the late 1910s, and early 20s, food marketers started to latch on to this term vitamin as just a really great word. It was inspired by combining the Latin word for life, vita, and amine, which is the chemical structure that the scientists thought all the vitamins would be proven to be, which they’re not. And so it originally was vitamine, and then the e got chopped off when it became clear that they actually weren’t all amines.

So food marketers recognized that this was a brilliant term, and they started to use it to sell their products. What was particularly appealing about it was that you had these invisible compounds that scientists were increasingly discovering that we need in order to stay alive. But no one knew how to measure them in food, and you couldn’t see them, so you could kind of go crazy with your marketing claims and no one could disprove you. They became this incredibly useful marketing idea.

Romm: Were vitamins marketed more for their health benefits, or in terms of what would happen if people didn’t get enough of them?

Price: Both, actually. On the one hand, you had advertisers warning you of what would happen if you were deficient. Some of the early researchers were writing for the popular press, and they would write these terrifying columns saying how your teeth would fall out if you didn’t have enough vitamin C—which is true, but most Americans don’t have scurvy. That’s extreme deficiency. So a lot of it was this fear-mongering, and I thought that was fascinating because we still see it today all the time. And then there was this flipside, where the idea of optimization started to take hold—if vitamins were necessary to prevent a deficiency in a small amount, then if you had more of them, you’d be like a superhero. So yeah, they were doing both. Vitamins, more than any other dietary chemical, really established that two-sided relationship, where we’re driven both by fear and by the hope that we’ll become superhuman, that we can optimize ourselves if we just eat the right things.

Romm: So how did “vitamin” become shorthand for “healthy”?

Price: I think that that started early. The word itself has this aura—it means “life,” but health and life often go together. So I think that’s the reason it appealed so much to food marketers, is that the word itself had that connotation to begin with. Even Casimir Funk, the guy who came up with that word, thought it was brilliant. He was very into his own creation. And what I found really funny was, if you consider some of the other suggestions of the time—people were saying, “Oh, we shouldn’t call it a vitamin, we should call it a food hormone, or a food accessory factor.” It’s just funny to think about how our attitude towards these 13 unrelated dietary chemicals would be different if we called them “food accessory factors.” You’d never have ad campaigns or parents insisting that their children have their food accessory factors. It’s just not as catchy.