WANTED: A VITAMIN MUCKRAKER

...I don't have any over-all figures on the profits of the vitamin medicine men—that's one reason I suggest this assignment for a modern muckraker—but Bread & Butter, a weekly consumers newsletter, doesn't hesitate to call the profits "exorbitant" and to blast vitamin pill prices as "actually much higher than five times the costs...

...Chester Bowles, OPA administrator, said in his explanation, "The industry asserts that competitive conditions in this particular industry are such that the consumer will receive increased potency values, or further reduced prices, if the possibility of a compulsory reduction were eliminated...

...The same amount of money," claims the FTC, "would be sufficient to' purchase food that would insure against any vitamin deficiency besides providing significant quantities of other valuable nutritive substances and supplements...

...However, the FTC charges that to provide the minimum daily nutritional requirements of riboflavin, an individual would have to consume 10 cakes a day, at a cost of 30 cents...

...it has goaded and persuaded people to buy the pills...

...OPA Backed Down Machine guns have been popping on the vitamin front...

...The cubes do contain Vitamin Bl and G, or riboflavin and nicotinic acid...

...For the public is vitamin crazy and hungry, but mainly crazy...

...On a third front, research, scientific investigations are revealing that gardens, cows, butchers, and human machines produce man's vitamin requirements, without benefit of the pill factories...

...One brief encounter, where the enemy won, was the OPA's weak withdrawal on the vitamin price front...

...Vitamin pill sales talk has been effective...

...For that 30 cents you could buy food instead...

...Advertisers of vitamin pills say the easiest way to acquire and maintain buoyant health and radiant energy is by buying and swallowing their capsules...

...The Fleischmann advertisements have quoted tests—tests sound so authoritative—of city workers disclosing that less than half received sufficient Vitamin Bl daily, but its yeast tablet contains all the B complex vitamins, including Bl, G, or riboflavin and nicotinic acid, together with a dozen other important vitamins...

...Evidence indicates that soybeans makes carotene inactive (carotene is the substance from which the body makes Vitamin A), that liver, so rich in Vitamin B, contains something that kills Vitamin A, and that intestines both destroy and generate vitamins...

...Everyone, I suppose, except hypo-chrondriacs and masochists, would like to feel better and look it...

...Recent scientific experiments reveal that the intestines produce vitamins on their own account...

...On the advertising front in vitamin pills, the Federal Trade Commission has just firedra complaint at Standard Brands, which sells Fleischmann's Compressed Yeast, charging false advertisements of the therapeutic powers of the yeast cake and its alleged powers in treatment of vitamin deficiency...

...The Commission comments flatly that the B vitamins are "readily available in whole grain cereals, enriched bread, lean meats, leafy vegetables, beans, nuts, cooked liver, milk, and other customary items in the ordinary diet...

...From what I have read on the subject, OPA's action indicates that the vitamin industry sold it a bill of goods by hinting that consumers would get more for their money if the roll-back weren't enforced...

...The obvious answer is a well-balanced diet, not a bottle of vitamin pills...

...Recently 14 big producers of package vitamins sought a court injunction to block the OPA's proposed 15 per cent roll-back in their retail prices...

...The ads also chant that those Fleischmann yeast cubes and raw liver are the only abundant natural sources of Vitamin B complex, that the vitamins in the B group are difficult to obtain, that Amer-cans suffer from malnutrition and lack sufficient vita-mins, particularly the Bs, to maintain buoyant health...

...Discover New Vitamin Source Those claims, the FTC charges, are false...

...You've read them in newspapers, magazines, booklets and heard them over the radio...

...No doubt the vitamin pill roll-back issue is complicated, but I find it hard to believe that it can't be explained to the public more clearly than it has...

...That isn't all...

...benefited the pocketbooks and health of consumers...

...Nor is that all...

...To refresh your memory, these ads claim— and claim falsely, according to the FTC—that daily consumption of its yeast (my idea of mild torture) will prevent or correct Vitamin A, B, and G deficiencies...

...Despite OPA's own reports that the raw material costs of packaged vitamins are about 75 per cent less than in 1939, while retail prices are only five per cent less, the OPA has withheld its roll-back order pending "further study...

...Fleischmann tests, the FTC charges, indicated that less than 25 per cent of city workers were deficient in daily Bl requirements...

...The FTC is not impressed...

...Your Money's Worth Wanted: A Vitamin Muckraker By MARY SHERIDAN SOME modern muckraker, by investigating the claims and the profits of the vitamin pill makers, might find, if he wrote a short, simple, and readable book, that he had written a best seller as well as...

...As advertised, "an inexpensive way" of adding the Bs to the diet is daily consumption of two yeast cakes, at a cost of six cents...

...There is probably no need to refer to those widely disseminated Fleischmann ads...