Is Vitamine A Related To Animal And Vegetable Pigments?
Dr. Steenbock was the first to suggest a relationship between pigments and vitamine A: wherever there were pigments, particularly such as are found in abundance in the plant world, there was vitamine A. He even went so far as to suggest that the two – pigment and vitamine A – were possibly identical. This view has been very strenuously opposed by a number of investigators, and if one is to judge by one of his latest papers, Dr. Steenbock himself has modified these views. Dr. Drummond, among others, put the pigment-vitamine A idea to a thorough test. He tried the following animal and vegetable oils, the vitamine content of which is roughly given, based on butter as 10: cod liver oil 10;1 dog-body fat, 6-7; beef fat, 1 This is undoubtedly much too low, as the reference to Dr. Zilva’s work in a previous section will show. If the sample of cod liver oil is crude – one that has not been refined, perhaps 250 would be nearer the mark than 10; on the other hand, a specially refined cod liver o
