In episode 4 of Nutrition History from Parts Unknown, we are taking it back 500 years to the glory days of bread, a time when Europe’s medical community was unanimous in its praise of bread as a health food.

Bread became Renaissance Europe’s most widely celebrated dietary staple. It was thought to promote wellness through a number channels:

• Its sticky and elastic gluttinous proptires were considered essential to a well-functioning digestive tract
• its warm, moist thermic properties were perfectly suited to, and promoted, an ideal moist and warm human body temperament,
• and finally it placed second only to meat in terms of providing pure nourishment.

A complex and convoluted dietetic system, highly influenced by the medical thinking of Ancient Greece and Rome, informed these pro-bread takes, which we are going to delve into on today's show.

For more than 300 years, scurvy was the greatest menace to maritime exploration and long-distance seafaring. The true cause of the disease-Vitamin C deficiency-eluded physicians and medical thinkers until the early 20th century. In episode 4 of Nutrition History From Parts Unknown, we're delving into history's many zany theories on why scurvy occurred, how to treat it, and why it took so long for science to come around to the reality that scurvy was a disease resulting from a lack of access to fresh fruits and vegetables, and the vitamin found found therein.

If you came across it in its natural environment, you might dismiss spirulina as pond scum, but this subtropical autotroph is gram for gram among the most nutritious foods on Earth. Hot take alert? Not so much. Spirulina is an evidence-based stud, a food supplement packing an incredibly rich nutritional resume and a robust body of research endorsing its therapeutic benefits. Get scum.

Every society gets the remedy it deserves.

This is the story of how Soviet Russia birthed the modern adaptogen, a class of herbal tonics unrivalled in their ability to confer protection against all manners of stress. Discover the beginnings of eleuthero, rhodiola and schisandra, and other herbal adaptogens, and how they fuelled the economic, athletic, and interstellar endeavours of the USSR.