Lack of preciousss vitamin made Gollum a loser
Think kindly of the dragon Smaug. Shed a tear for Gollum. And give an orc a hug.Well, it's a little more complicated than that- lack of Vitamin D alters immune response and facilitates infection. But still... gotta love their correlational creativity! Raising Awareness. Ha.
If only they had tucked into the occasional quiche and salad or a touch of smoked salmon, or had a few sessions on a sunbed. How much kinder history would have been to them.
So suggests an offbeat study, released on Sunday, which concludes that the evil characters in J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Hobbit" lost their battle against men, elves and dwarves because they suffered from vitamin deficiency.
Shunning sunlight, surviving on a sketchy or unbalanced diet based on rotten meat or (in Gollum's case) the occasional blind fish, they lacked vitamin D, a key component for healthy bones and muscle strength.
The idea is proposed by Nicholas Hopkinson, a doctor at Imperial College London and his son Joseph, in the Christmas edition of the Medical Journal of Australia.
