Category: Military Medicine

• The Vitamin Draft

  This theory claimed that vitamins or vitamin-enriched supplements given to American soldiers during World War II secretly contained sterilizing agents or other compounds intended to reduce the future reproductive capacity of men deemed physically or socially unfit. In its strongest form, the rumor fused military nutrition science with older eugenic ideas, arguing that the wartime state could use ordinary health measures to shape the postwar population. The historical backdrop included real Army concern over nutrition, deficiency disease, and the use of vitamin therapy and supplementation in some military contexts. The stronger sterilization claim, however, is not supported by the official medical record and belongs to the conspiracy tradition built around state control of bodies during wartime mobilization.