I’ve always been intrigued how scurvy has been “cured” several times but only really got figured out in the 20’s after Shackleton’s expedition. And then even still, scurvy is back in the news with people being too poor to afford food.
In the book How to Spend $75 Billion to Make the World a Better Place, a team of economists finds the most effective use of money to improve humans’ lives is to buy and distribute vitamins in malnourished areas.
These are areas where people have sufficient calories, but lack certain nutrients in their local diets. It’s relatively cheap to just buy and distribute tons of vitamin supplements to fill in those gaps, allowing kids there to grow up without developmental deficiencies.
That book’s scope is the whole world, but I’m sure it would be very helpful to do the same in the US in food desert areas too.
I’ve always been intrigued how scurvy has been “cured” several times but only really got figured out in the 20’s after Shackleton’s expedition. And then even still, scurvy is back in the news with people being too poor to afford food.
In the book How to Spend $75 Billion to Make the World a Better Place, a team of economists finds the most effective use of money to improve humans’ lives is to buy and distribute vitamins in malnourished areas.
These are areas where people have sufficient calories, but lack certain nutrients in their local diets. It’s relatively cheap to just buy and distribute tons of vitamin supplements to fill in those gaps, allowing kids there to grow up without developmental deficiencies.
That book’s scope is the whole world, but I’m sure it would be very helpful to do the same in the US in food desert areas too.