Professor Luke O'Neill
speaker
1,535 appearances
7 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 3 Sep
Professor Luke O'Neill’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 7 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 3.
Appearances
And scurvy is caused by a lack of vitamin C, for instance.
Rickets, that's a bone disease that's caused by lack of vitamin D.
So some of the research on this was done to try to explain these strange diseases.
And they all turned out to be quite simple in the end.
We'd love if all diseases were like that, some kind of deficiency that you can replace.
But certainly those vitamin deficiencies were causing the disease.
And then you treat the disease by giving people the vitamin.
It's quite simple, you know.
So that goes back, I guess, the early days of biochemistry.
In many ways, people were studying these vitamins.
But because they're needed for health and for your body to work properly, of course people began taking them as supplements.
Uh the best example of all would have been in the Royal Navy, the most famous experiment at the time.
Uh a guy called Lind gave sailors vitamin C and it didn't get scurvy.
And that was a great example of giving someone a vitamin to stop something happening.
At that time Lind had no notion of vitamin C hadn't been discovered.
He'd no notion of how it worked either, so
It was basically observational, but it was a remarkable finding that stopped this horrible thing called scurvy simply by giving someone lemon juice and lime juice very rich in vitamin C.
And that research was going on for decades, I suppose.
But nowadays the big question is you go into your health food shop or indeed your supermarket, the shelves are groaning with vitamins.
And they can be expensive, and should you take them and should you not.
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