The domestication of livestock for food occurred very recently in time. In most regions of the world it coincided with grain and vegetable farming, which commenced, in most cases, anywhere from 10,000 to 4,000 years ago depending on the region of the world one studies. Yet as recently as the Twentieth Century there were still small isolated pockets of people here and there who were still Hunter Gatherers. But the Peace Corp., missionaries, and others driven to do good deeds worked rapidly to eliminate those few remaining pockets of healthy people by teaching them "modern" gran farming methods to improve their food supplies.
The following quoted excerpts from the Software Toolworks Multimedia Encyclopedia regarding scurvy illustrate how fast man reacted to the first recognized nutritional deficiency disease. From our perspective today we can only assume that folks of that era must of been very ignorant. But actually they were no different than folks are today in what we call the “Information Age.”
The modern-day fatty acid imbalance of the American diet is a nutritional deficiency disease that will go down in history as one of the worst (most costly) known to man. Some American bee producers want to do something about it.
There you will find short essays with substantiating links to scientific sources and additional commentary. Subscribers to the SGFM newsletter are notified about additional postings to the "Columns" section as they occur.