[Nutrition and individual defense--historical considerations].

The first scientific understandings on the value of nutrition and the assimilation of food, in the Greek language "metabole" (metabolism), are published in the Corpus Hippocraticum. But the conception of metabolism was introduced in scientific literature not earlier than 1839 by Theodor Schwann (1810-1882) and 1842 by Justus von Liebig (1803-1873). The antique ideas were completed in the 17th century by the theory of ferments, introduced by the iatro-chemist Johann Baptist van Helmont (1577-1644), and the Italian priest Lazzaro Spallanzani (1729-1799) could proof the existence of such processes in the living organism by animal experiments in 1776. Then Schwann could discover in the gastric juice a substance in 1835 which he called "pepsin". In the time of the voyages of discovery new, not yet known malnutritions on the ships were known as scurvy, beriberi and in the northern countries rickets. Then it became clear that not only the three groups of food, but also supplementary materials, known in 1912 as vitamines by Casimir Funk (1884-1967), could develop determined effects. The starvation in the first and the second world war showed clearly, that deterioration of food supply diminished the condition of immunity. Failed food experiments with gelatin, synthetically produced citric acid and the discussions of malnutrition diseases, based on a deficiency of zinc, of toddlers, are discussed as the malnutrition illness kwashiorkor in the third world. In conclusion a citation of the famous American physiologist Graham Lusk (1866-1932) is mentioned from the year 1906, who praised the scientific priority of the German medical research.