[An] absorbing and meticulously researched history of the beginnings and causes of our obsession with vitamins and nutrition." -- The New York Times Most of us know nothing about vitamins. What's more, what we think we know is harming both our personal nutrition and our national health. By focusing on vitamins at the expense of everything else, we've become blind to the bigger picture: despite our belief that vitamins are an absolute good--and the more of them, the better--vitamins are actually small and surprisingly mysterious pieces of a much larger nutritional puzzle. In Vitamania , award-winning journalist Catherine Price offers a lucid and lively journey through our cherished yet misguided beliefs about vitamins, and reveals a straightforward, blessedly anxiety-free path to enjoyable eating and good health. When vitamins were discovered a mere century ago, they changed the destiny of the human species by preventing and curing many terrifying diseases. Yet it wasn't long before vitamins spread from labs of scientists into the realm of food marketers and began to take on a life of their own. The era of "vitamania," as one 1940s journalist called it, had begun. Though we've gained much from our embrace of vitamins, what we've lost is a crucial sense of perspective. By buying into a century of hype and advertising, we have accepted the false idea that particular dietary chemicals can be used as shortcuts to health--whether they be antioxidants or omega-3s or, yes, vitamins.