A few days ago, a “progressive host” made the claim that before the progressives came along and forced government to require all flour to be enriched, people were suffering from a disease called Pellagra – so those ignorant Tea Party people who want less government are going to cause you to die because of their stupidity about science. [I’m pretty sure the host was Thom Hartmann, but not 100% sure]
Wow, that’s pretty convincing stuff – it’s hard to argue with scientific evidence like that, especially from such an erudite well-educated man.
Now the truth:
- The government does not require bread and other food products to be made from enriched flour – other than that which the government buys
- Pellagra is caused by a long term lack of vitamin B3 (Niacin) or tryptophan.
- Pellagra causes skin lesions, gum disease, and diarrhea. If the condition is untreated for 4 or 5 years, dementia, neurological problems and mental confusion can result, ending ultimately in death. The disease gets worse with exposure to direct sunlight. Half of the 100,000 people who died from the disease in the U.S. were black Southerners – sharecroppers and poor people living in cotton mill towns
- Pellagra is common in areas where people’s diet is mostly based on corn and corn wasn’t historically part of their diet
- Pellagra is commonly seen in chronic alcoholics and people with little food intake (prisoners in Soviet gulags, refugees during wartime)
- Niacin occurs naturally in meat, poultry, eggs and dairy products – if you have the money to eat quality food and have a niacin deficiency, you are probably a vegetarian who didn’t know the importance of including sources of B vitamins in your diet
Pellagra was first recognized as a disease in the 1700s in Europe, as Europeans started to eat a diet heavy in corn that had recently arrived from the New World. The origin was not understood and was assumed to be a contagious disease somehow spread by corn.
Pellagra hit its peak in the United States around 1912 and spiked up in 1930 at the start of the Depression. The discovery of the connection between Pellagra and vitamin B3 intake was mostly the result of a Hungarian immigrant named Dr. Joseph Goldberger who figured out the diet connection and that the disease was not transmitted by an infection.
By 1921, the connection between the disease and the diet of poor Southerners was strong enough that President Harding launched a campaign to deal with the disease. His effort was somewhat ineffective, as the post-reconstruction Democrats running the South resisted any suggestion from a Republican Yankee President telling them that the diet was killing its poor black citizens.
If you don’t know much about Warren G Harding, he was a Conservative Republican from Ohio. He took office after Woodrow Wilson and the Progressives were voted out of office. He died in 1923 from a heart attack, which is why we probably don’t know that much about him.
Dr. Goldberger hadn’t quite pinned down the exact nutrient when he died in 1929, but had proven that a diet with fresh meat or dairy products would prevent and reverse the disease.
The main reason for the government getting involved in enriched flour in 1942 (not just Niacin) – conditions in Europe were horrible – Russians were starving to the point that they would eat almost anything (like bread made from sawdust) in order just to survive. Enriching flour meant that food aid sent to Europe would quickly solve some of the serious nutrient deficiencies that are not normally seen with ordinary food intakes.
Isn’t it nice that today the “progressives” are demonizing production agriculture – the very sector that provides beef, pork (a primary source of niacin and other B vitamins) and dairy, and pushing ‘vegetable-based diets’ and a cure-all. Think that we’ll see an upturn in pellagra cases among libs who buy into this delusional thinking in next ten years?
This might fall into the category of believing things you want to believe but… in the course of testing, I came across someone making the point that this drive to force animal fat out of diets and replace them with vegetable oils is removing certain nutrients from our diets without having health benefits. Cholesterol in the diet is unrelated to cholesterol levels in the blood, and cholesterol levels in the blood have a less than convincing relationship to heart disease. The strongest correlation is your genetics, which you can’t change.
After I wrote this piece, I thought about it some more (it was all news to me), I began to wonder “What was it that happened from 1913-1920 (the era while Woodrow Wilson was president) that changed that caused this outbreak of disease in the South?
Here are some of my theories:
– the disease was not new, but reporting requirements made it more visible
– perhaps poor people were given corn to “help” them, not realizing a diet heavy in corn induces pellagra
– World War One was going on…. was the govt buying up all the meat for the war effort? Were white farmers pulled out of the South to fight the war? (Wilson was a virulent segregationist, which Glenn Beck has already explained)
– changes in technology (automobiles, rural electrification, refrigeration) change the economics of food distribution
The disease came under control long before the government put pressure on flour producers (that started in 1938). As soon as the cause was figured out, brewer’s yeast was a cheap way to provide niacin.
The real point Hartmann could have made without conflating the two things was that this disease was figured out by the agency that would become the National Institute of Health in 1930 – an example of something the Federal Government did that isn’t clearly an enumerated power in the Constitution (one might say it is part of “providing for the common welfare”). Disease doesn’t stop at State boundaries – when he started his research, the assumption in the medical community was that it was a disease transmitted by a germ present in corn.
It’s probably also worth pointing out that the end of the epidemic of pellagra correlates with the “Great Northern Migration” when 2 million Southern blacks moved to the North to work at Fords and other industries which had a shortage of workers due to the War in Europe.
I appreciate sharing your info on this subject.
Scientific facts and politicians seem to be mutually exclusive.
After all the research you did on this I’m sure you are thankful for Al Gore and his contribution to science – the Internet.
You mentioned the “Great Northern Migration.” The FBI’s list of “Most Dangerous Cities” has St. Louis at the top, and cities like Camden, NJ, and Detroit and Flint, MI in the top 4. What do these cities have in common?
Yes, they voted in large numbers for Obama-Biden, but there’s a more obvious commonality. Hmmm. Industrial decline? Could be, but I think there’s an even more glaring choice. This one is a noodle scratcher. Oh, that’s right. “Great Northern Migration.”
Unlike today’s mythology, the KKK was most active in the North as a reaction to the influx of blacks from the South. Indiana was the most active area, but Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Chicago had very active groups – basically anwhere whites were facing competition from the influx of Southerners looking for work. This migration was also very influential in the formation of labor unions. Whites used seniority and control over the hiring process to keep blacks out of the work force. Jobs went first to the people who were relatives or the same ethnic group as the people who already had jobs.
It’s probably worth mentioning that it wasn’t just blacks who were recruited to come north to the big cities to work in the factories – one of the things that surprised me when I arrived at Lansing Michigan to work at Oldsmobile in the 1980s was the popularity of Country music on the radio and in the culture. Multiple generations have gone North to work in the car factories and when production was slowed down, the workers return “home” to the South until they get called back to work. However, those factories are now just empty lots.