This valuable book is one of the Food Science and Technology series of monographs, textbooks, and reference books. The stated objective of the book is to promote an understanding of vitamins as being the prerequisite for good health. The scope of this book is indicated by its more than 800 pages arranged into two parts, namely, properties of vitamins and analysis of vitamins. The author George Ball has accumulated many years of commercial and research laboratory experience in pharmaceutical, clinical, biological, and food analysis. The author's aim was to provide a context in which chemical structure, biopotency, physiochemical properties, stability, effect of food storage and processing, absorption, bioavailability, methods of assessing, applicability of analytical techniques, nutritional aspects, and deficiency disorders can be understood.
The book composed of 23 chapters that are written in a popular, assertive style, with long lists of references at the end of each chapter. It highlighted the knowledge of vitamin stability toward postharvest handling of food, processing, storage, and preparation for consumption. Chemistry and how vitamins are absorbed and metabolized are discussed. Suitable analytical methods for each vitamin are presented and thoroughly evaluated.
The first 15 chapters of the book deal with properties of vitamins and the remaining 8 chapters cover the analysis of vitamins. The reader is introduced in the first chapter to an understanding of the different nutritional aspects of vitamins, with an overview of the nutritional vitamin deficiency, requirements, stability, kinetics, and retention.
The themes of the first chapter are continued throughout the next 14 chapters included in part one discussing the properties of vitamins in more details, beginning in the second chapter with an introduction to the intestinal and bioavailability of the different vitamins. Chapter three concentrated on vitamin A, retinoid and the provitamin A carotenoids, and their roles in human health, with a comprehensive literature review and references. Chapter four to six introduced the other three fat soluble vitamins, D, E and K, and discussing their bioavailability, requirements, and deficiency in a constructive and simple fashion.
Chapter seven to fourteen in part one of the book describe the biopotency, physiochemical properties, absorption, transport, metabolism, role in human health, and methods of assessing of each B vitamin in a simple scientific approach. The last chapter in part one discusses vitamin C in a similar manner as for the B vitamins.
Part two of the book which comprises more than half of the book and contained seven chapters deals with analysis of vitamins and a final chapter to summarize the evaluation of the analytical techniques. Chapter 16 discusses the analytical considerations of the different vitamins including sample extraction, method evaluation, and quality assurance. Chapter 17 evaluates extraction techniques for the water-soluble vitamins, and their microbiological methods are discussed in chapter 18. Assessing of the different physiochemical analytical methods (excluding HPLC) of each vitamin have been covered in chapter 19. Determination of both fat-soluble and water soluble vitamins by HPLC method are explained in chapter 20 and 21. These two chapters occupied more than one-third of the book because of the practical importance of HPLC as one of the most accurate and accredited analytical procedure. The list of references by the end of these two chapters is of great important for any reader. Chapter 22 deals with biospecific methods for some of the B-group vitamins. The final chapter focused on summarized appraisal of analytical techniques. The author stated that the purpose of this chapter is to make some inferences from the analytical methodology described in previous chapters and to illustrate the application of current analytical techniques. Although an effort has been made to cover the vitamin's bioavailability, stability, and analysis, the focus on vitamins and human metabolism are too limited for this purpose. If used in a course for advanced nutrition and health students, it should be supplemented with additional material.
All in all a well laid out book, and scientifically explained. It is a valuable text that provides timely, comprehensive, and well-referenced and-indexed information. I enjoyed reading the book. It is compact, well illustrated with useful figures and tables, and can be warmly recommended to food scientists and nutritionists, whether they are students, teachers, or research workers.