Pellagra in the United States

https://www.theelephant.info/op-eds/2021/09/03/hunger-in-the-heart-of-empire-pellagra-in-the-united-states/

by Avshalom • 5 years ago

10 4 5 years ago

gruez2• 5 years ago

It's hard to take this seriously when it takes liberties with the facts to push a narrative.

That is why America’s pellagra outbreak was unusual. Americans knew what nixtamalization was. [...]

So the narrative in the article seems to be: "the elites in the us knew what was causing Pellagra, but they didn't bother solving it because it suited them.". This seems to be contradicted by the wikipedia article on pellagra[1] and its cited work[2]:

In 1914, the commonly held opinion was that pellagra was an infectious and communicable disease [...]
The year was 1921; it was 7 years since Goldberger had started his pellagra research.He now began in earnest to study the pellagra-preventive action of various foods and to identify the specific nutritional deficiency that was etiologic for pellagra [...] By 1926, on the basis of animal experiments, Goldberger and his colleagues concluded that P-Pfactor was the heat-resistant part of “water soluble vitamin B.”

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pellagra

[2] http://www.jmcgowan.com/pellagra.pdf

gHosts• 5 years ago

Except in France they had already eliminated it in the previous century...

gruez2• 5 years ago

You mean this?

In the 19th century Roussel started a campaign in France to restrict consumption of maize and eradicated the disease in France

I fail to see how:

1. that's a viable solution in the US, where corn is the dominant grain in many regions

2. it benefits "the elites" to keep growing corn. Surely it's bad for business if your workers' skins were falling off and couldn't work?

meristohm• 5 years ago

Edit: Oops, I made this all about me, when what matters more is regulation that helps prevent this sort of nutritional abuse and exploitation. See also what England did to Ireland, taking land and selling off the good produce and leaving the Irish to subsist on potatoes, leading to famines.

Original post: I read about this awhile back and have since stopped buying cornmeal (not that I’m at much risk of pellagra), instead buying masa. With the cornmeal I had I soaked it days in baking soda water, which turned some of the bits a lovely orange and made the polenta taste even better. I rinsed it well enough, not too concerned since I then added some of the semi-nixtamalized corn to my sourdough, as I usually add baking soda to cut the acid (I take a lazy route and make flatbread/pancakes using mostly starter) and salt is added as a result.

It feels like we’re churning too fast along the tech tree, losing healthy practices in the process. I’m not a luddite, I just don’t like waste and exploitation. I stopped playing the Civilization series in part because of how little attention is paid to supporting a healthy ecosystem based on reciprocity (see book Braiding Sweetgrass). One of the stories in The Overstory is about such a game. The game I enjoy instead is growing food, along with improving the diversity of life in and around the nearby soil.

Pellagra in the United States

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