Disclaimer. I am not a licensed health
practitioner. This is just another post on nutritional needs and
deficiencies that you might wish make sure you have covered in your food
storage supplies and plans. No medication or supplement, including
those available
over the counter, should be taken without consulting a physician.
Information shared here is for educational and entertainment purposes
only. It is not medical advice nor a substitute for licensed medical
care. A qualified, licensed physician or other medical provider should
be consulted before beginning any herbal or conventional treatment.
Pellagra. How many of us even know what this really is? We may have heard of it, but heck, it's not a disease that currently affects our society. So we don't pay attention to it.
Sadly, modern public education in the US doesn't teach our children much about nutrition and disease, especially those conditions that the powers that be tell us will never occur again here.
However, as prepared people, we've got a good idea of what's coming, and it isn't going to be pretty. Famine and disease are in the future. Well, hopefully, if we prepare well, they won't be in our future, but we will see the events and consequences around us. It behooves us to prepare well to identify potential problems so that they can be avoided altogether or correctly understood and rectified when we can't avoid them.
Back to pellagra. It caused over 100,000 deaths in the US alone, almost exclusively in the South, between 1906 and 1940. That's a rather substantial number. So why don't we hear more about it? Well, for one, it's a condition that afflicts the poor. Secondly, it isn't contagious. Third, we don't have any deaths from it now in this country; it really only occurs in third world countries. Fourth, the state governments didn't want to admit that it was their greed that caused a lot of these deaths. When the US descends into third-world status, we'll see it again here. So let's learn about it now to prevent it in the future.
A mild niacin deficiency slows the metabolism, causing decreased tolerance to cold. That occurs in many conditions, so decreased tolerance to cold will not necessarily indicate niacin deficiency. A more moderate niacin deficiency may result in nausea, skin and mouth lesions, anemia, headaches, and fatigue. A severe niacin deficiency will cause pellagra (Italian; pelle=skin,
agra=sour), the classic signs of which are the four D's: dermatitis, diarrhea,
dementia, and death.
Where do we get niacin? Foods that have the highest niacin content include meats (specifically tuna, turkey, pork, and venison), plants (ginger, tarragon, sweet peppers, portabello mushrooms, dehydrated apricots), and whole grains (fortified cereals, rice, whole wheat, barley).
Why did pellagra suddenly start appearing in such large numbers in the US in the early 1900's? And why was it called the spring sickness?
Pellagra occurred wherever corn (maize) was the predominant food crop because maize is low in digestible niacin. And if you are thinking, "Gee, wasn't maize a staple food for Native American and South American cultures? Didn't earlier Southerners eat a lot of grits (which are from corn)?", you'd be absolutely right. They most certainly did consume a whole lot of it. And it wasn't a problem then. Because the Southerners and Native and South American populations knew you use a process called nixtamalization (which all word processing programs I have ever used refuse to recognize as a word) to increase the bioavailability of niacin, meaning the niacin becomes nutritionally available.
(For the curious, lye or wood ash is used to nixtamalize corn. Soaking the corn in water alkalinized with wood ash softens the outer covering, the pericarb, and makes niacin available (and the corn easier to grind). Today calcium hydroxide, also known as pickling lime, is used for nixtamalization.)
So why did pellagra suddenly start appearing in the US in the early 1900s? After all, Southerners had been consuming maize for years. What changed?
As the farmland in the South became entirely turned over to cotton production, the poor sharecroppers couldn't raise their own food. It was available more cheaply from the Midwest. The problem was that corn from the Midwest was qualitatively inferior to the traditional cornmeal that Southerners had eaten for centuries. The disease appeared in the spring because the niacin-rich pork was only available to the poor during hog slaughtering season--fall and winter. The pellagra victims were always in a state of moderate niacin deficiency, but when the cheap pork was no longer available in the spring, the pellagra symptoms returned.
What does all this mean for us? We better be sure that we are storing some niacin-rich foods for our family. If we don't have a lot of meat, we had better have whole grains. If we're planning on growing corn (field corn or dent corn, not the sweet corn that we eat fresh, frozen or canned), we better be able to nixtamalize it ourselves. We can't just buy a lot of food and put it on the shelves. We have to know that we are supplying all the essential vitamins and minerals and we need to know about additional sources of each of these nutrients.
There's a whole lot more to the pellagra story in the US. If you have school-age children (and even if you don't), take twelve minutes to watch the following video. Everything that these guys at Extra History produce has been fabulous, and their history on pellagra is no exception.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reYKBgdrZsM
Links to related posts:
Dietary Deficiency and Consequences--Vitamin A
Vitamin B1
Vitamin B2
Vitamin B5, B6, B7
Vitamin B9
Vitamin B12
Vitamin C
Vitamin D
Calcium
Iodine
Iron
Magnesium
Potassium
Zinc
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26 january 2020
