BERI-BERI

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 54, Issue 3898, 7 May 1937, Page 7

BERI-BERI

A LESSON IN DIETIC FOLLY. Now that the subject of nutrition has come to be a matter of national interest, perhaps the story of Vitamin El may serve not only to introduce new knowledge, but to indicate how civilisation has interfered with ageold and proved methods of feeding. It may not be out of place to recall the history of the discovery of vitamin B, as it was termed before it d.>-came subdivided, or the anti-beri Leri factor. " In the eighties of last century, Pekelharing and Winkler were sent out to the Dutch East Indies to investigate tho cause of death from beriberi among the natives sentenced to periods of imprisonment for periods of three months or over. Even a local war had been made impossible by the spread of this condition among native levies! Those were the days when the bacterial causation of disease was just coming into its own recognition, and these men naturally took that line ol thought, and even believed that they had isolated the causal organism itself. They recommended disinfection as a preventive measure. Eijkman, a younger army surgeon on the commission, pursued his investigations sufficiently carefully to disclose an unexpected cause of the condition. He -fed domestic fowls on material to W which was added blood and urine "'■from the beriberi patients, and found to his astonishment that his control birds, i.e., those receiving the same food, but without the addition of the M suspected infectious matter, also con f tracted the disease! He traced it to the use of polished white rice, the remains from the hos pital kitchen—for when the latter was quite accidentally changed to the brown unpolished variety, the beri beri disappeared spontaneously. It was not until 1896 that Vorderman, an inspector of prisons, found . that where the convicts polished their own rice, beriberi did not occur; it was associated therefore with the use tf machine polished rice, which was more effectively deprived of its pericarp. Grijns was able later (1901-1910) to isolate from this pericarp a concentrated extract of what he called “ protective stuff," to which, in 1911, Funk gave the name of vitamin quite erroneously believing that he had purified it, and that it contained a certain grouping. The word “vitamin" has, however, come to stay—whatever its pronunciation! HAIN SYMPTOMS OF BERI BERI. Under the able direction of Jansen, the work of concentration and isolation of the anti-beriberi vitamin proceeded, until in 1926 it was isolated in crystalline form, and preliminary analysis of its chemical constitution conducted. Williams, who had studied beriberi in the Philippines, returned as director of the chemical laboratory of the Bell Telephone

Company in New York, and owing to his quite independent and, for one in his new position, unexpected researches, we learned that the vitamin contained two identifiable chemical compounds, i.e., a pyramidine and a thiazol derivative. Almost simultaneously, at the beginning of this year, Williams, Windaus and Horlein, quite independently, have reported the synthesis of the vitamin B, as it is now known. So passes another chemical mystery. The main symptom of beriberi in man or in animals is a poly neuritis, cr general inflammation of nerve sheaths, and what has puzzled observ- \ ers is the extremely rapid recovery that is produced by administration of the vitamin. There is, too, a remarkably swift recovery of lost body A weight. \ These phenomena led to the belief that vitamin B—or aneurin, as it has been termed by Jansen —is a catalyst or accelerator of living processes. Peters of Oxford has shown this to be the case with nervous tissue, for lie observed that the brain of the pigeon suffering from experimentairberi beri uses oxygen at a much diminished rate, the normal rate being restored by’ administration of vitamin B. In America it lias again been shown that the vitamin specifically affects the gastric secretion, which does not take place in its absence. Here lies the explanation of its effect on appetite as well also as its rapid action in restoring weight to subjects suffering from beriberi. When it is realised how long it is since Eijkman and Grijns did their work, it might well be supposed that beriberi had disappeared from the midst of mankind. Not so. Prejudice dies hard, especially among authorities. Shuffner in Delhi, was the first / to utilise the new knowledge, and at 1 one stroke swept beriberi from the ' list of d,.,orders of the plantation workers. On the other hand, ten years after Eijkman’s discovery, the tin mine workers of Bankas were suffering a 50 per cent continuous depletion of their numbers owing to beri beri alone. HEALTH VERSUS THE MACHINE. Wherever either the State authorities or the directors of estates have interested themselves in the problem, and have insisted on the use of raw rice beriberi has been completely controlled. Elsewhere, when the popu- ( lace, be it noted, have free choice, beriberi is endemic, excepting those instances where the people grow, har-

vest, and polish their own grain, for then, owing to less effective polishing, vitamin B remains. Elsewhere, independently of climate where white, polished rice is the staple food, beriberi is present, and it is worth remembering that it is now 25 years since Mosskowski, by living on white rice in Berlin, proved this to be the case by himself contracting beriberi. In Europe, potatoes, peas and beans, as well as wholemeal bread, provide the main source of vitamin B. White bread, though not so deficient as white rice, contains inadequate quantities of the vitamin to counteract the deficiency in the rice. Acocrding to Jansen, Katjang idjoe, a green pea in the Indies must form 50 [-er cent of the diet in order to compensate for the defective white rice; while 5 per cent suffices to compensate for a diet consisting mainly of white bread. Sago and manioc are both as deficient as white rice, which means for us sago and tapioca, both of which nowadays are prepared from manioc. So, in the Dutch Indies beriberi. though absent from the prison population, is endemic in this year of grace among the people, because they insist on using white rice. “ Whom the Gods wish to destroy they first make mad,” runs the ancient proverb, and the invention of the rice polishing machine was, in this case, the first symptom. The lesson, however, is not to be confined to Javanese. Our favourite human weakness is to laugh at the other fellow, but we commit precisely’ tlie same type of dietetic error. Fantastic as the story sounds, we find the Dutch Government spending vast sums of money on scientific research into ways and means of distributing concentrated vitamin Bl among the natives to prevent disease introduced by European inventiveness. In 1934 aione 6,000,000 tablets, 30 litres of extract, and 7000 ampoules of the same were distributed in the struggle against machine-made folly. So Jansen looks forward to the discovery of :■ cheap method of manufacturing vitamin 81, now that science has discovered its true nature. Surely the lesson is a striking one. White rice keeps better than raw rice —that is the fundamental matter; and it points the moral that man’s dietic ills arise largely from the use of other than fresh food. We save labour to gain more monetary return, or more alleged valuable leisure —and bartei Ihe health of the race for this mess of potage.—The Melbourne Age.