Vitamins & Alcohol

Most physicians are convinced that alcoholism is, at bottom, a psychological disorder. Roger John Williams, famed biochemist of the University of Texas, had a different theory. The trouble, he argued might have a physical basis. Now, in Nutrition and Alcoholism (University ol Oklahoma; $2), Williams suggests that vitamins have achieved history's first honest-to-goodness cure in a case of alcoholism, making the patient truly able to take a drink or leave it.

Williams believes that while all men need the same vitamins and minerals, they do not need them in the same amounts or the same proportions. Many human disorders, he thinks, arise because some people (partly because of heredity) need some life-essential substances in far greater quantities than normal diets supply.

Drunken Rats. Dr. Williams' theory is that the craving for alcohol is one such disorder. (He does not explain why a need for vitamins should produce a craving for alcohol which contains no vitamins, and actually increases the need for them.) He tried the theory on rats, turning them into drunkards by deficient diets and curing them with walloping doses of vitamins.

Then along came a heavy drinker for whom psychiatry and group therapy had done no good. No physician, Biochemist Williams suggested that he be treated with massive doses of 15 vitamins--A, C, D and E, and eleven of the B complex. The patient shunned alcohol for a while. Williams and his colleagues thought that the patient should remain a total abstainer. The patient went them one better. He showed that he could drink two or three bottles of beer, then quit.

"This individual," says Williams, "probably constitutes the first case on record in which an alcoholic has become a moderate drinker." There were others among the few alcoholics treated with vitamins by the time Williams wrote his book. Since then, doctors at Boston's Peter Bent Brigham Hospital have tested the method with 85 alcoholics, giving some of them dummy capsules to rule out the psychological factor, and report at least one-third better results in the vitamin-treated cases.

No "Average Man." No man was better equipped than Roger Williams to show what vitamins could do. The younger (58) brother of Robert Runnels Williams of B1 and beriberi fame (TIME, April 30), he identified pantothenic acid and helped to discover folic acid, two of the vitamins in the B complex, did pioneering work on several of the others. Along the way, Roger Williams became distressed by the way science tends to deal with the nonexistent "average man," plumped for a science of "humanics" in which differences among men, rather than similarities, would be emphasized.

In his quiet way, Williams is determined to extend the biochemical humanics approach to other fields. He even thinks it might be applied to the problem of marriage and divorce.

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