The truth is in the details

A few weeks ago a very, very interesting story was explained on the program QueQuiCom?.

It is about the history of Beri-Beri disease. It is a disease very common in East Asia during much of the 20th century.

The most curious thing is how small changes can generate major alterations.

Let me explain the story.

In East Asia, their diet was based on rice, it was their main food. During industrialization, people began to fall ill with Beri-Beri. No one knew why. It mainly affected people from the lower class, with little purchasing power.

They did not know whether it was a disease transmitted by air, by contact, or through food… until one day a doctor started feeding chickens the same food that the sick people were eating… and these chickens also contracted Beri-Beri.

Then he concluded that it must be the food, specifically it should be the rice. Perhaps it carried some type of contaminant or toxin that made it harmful to people.

To ensure that the transmission was through food, he separated two groups of healthy people: one group continued eating rice and the other was not given rice. It turned out that the group that ate rice got sick and some died, while the group that did not eat rice hardly got sick and no one died.

He even moved the patients to another location to repeat the same test and thus rule out that they were getting infected by something in the environment. But no… those eating rice continued to fall ill… therefore it was clear that the culprit was the food.

But no matter how much they analyzed it, they couldn’t find any toxic component or how the rice could be contaminated, if for thousands of years it had been the main diet of that people, what was different now?

Until they found the solution.

During industrialization, machines allowed, in a very easy way, to remove the natural husk of the rice, a husk very rich in fiber. (It turns out that rice is not white, but it has a sort of bran.)

This made the rice look better, be easier to cook and boil much faster, and in no time everyone was eating white rice.

But it turns out that the rice bran contained elements, essential vitamins for a people like that who only ate rice… and besides, when the bran was removed, a small “heart” of the rice that contained many nutrients was also removed.

If you notice, classic white rice does not end with a rounded tip; it has a small hole at one end… that is where this nutrient-rich “heart” went, which disappeared when the rice bran was removed.

A curious story, which I did not delay explaining to the children and which they found very funny, as I made them investigators to discover on their own the reason behind the disease. Since they already knew some stories of sailors who got sick from being too long on a ship, without all the necessary vitamins, they eventually deduced the reason.

I also took the opportunity to explain the obsession humans seem to have with white foods… we bleach sugar so it doesn’t stain, we bleach flour so it doesn’t stain… therefore, in some way, we also remove its natural bran to make it look nice but less nutritious…

And since we are talking about vitamins, here’s a curious definition:

VITA-MINA = Vital Mineral