Corn and Pellagra

Corn and Pellagra

Corn is a food eaten throughout the world. It is easy to produce and cheap so that in the past it has composed a large part of the diet of the poor who could not afford other foods. The consumption of corn as ones main food source can cause health problems due to a deficiency of the B vitamin niacin that if not treated can lead to insanity and even death. This paper will attempt to present a brief history of pellagra, concentrating primarily on the twentieth century American south, and discussing the causes of the disease, its progression in the human body and treatment.

The first documented description of pellagra was 1735 in Europe by a Spanish physician, Gaspar Casal. He wrote, “Since I never saw a more disgusting indigenous disease, I thought I should explain its characteristics.”(Etheridge 9). Called mal de la rosa, this was a major source of sickness and death among the very poor. In the following years the disease was described many times by Italian physicians and was soon recognized throughout Europe, Egypt, and South Africa. In the early twentieth century it was common in the United States, especially in the south (Roe 1). The disease attacked the poor who were unable to afford only the cheapest diet that had little variety such as meal, molasses, and “fat back” (Harkness 434). Most of these poor were farmers, in the United States it was often found in sharecroppers (Roe 1) or those who lived in industrial communities with little income (Middleton 1209). Statistics indicate that pellagra was the most severe nutritional deficiency disease recorded in United States history (Park et al. 727).

Pellagra is caused by a deficiency of the B vitamin niacin in the diet. Niacin refers to both ni...

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...ungmee K., Christopher T. Sempos, Curtis N. Barton, John E. Vanderveen, and Elizabeth A. Yetley. 2000. Effectiveness of food fortification in the united states: the case of pellagra. American Journal of Public Health, 90:727-738.

Rhoads Jonathan E. 1984. The history and development of nutritional assessment of the hospitalized patient. In Wright Richard A., Heymsfield, Steven and McManus, Clifford B., editors. Nutritional Assessment. Boston, Oxford: Blackwell Scientific Publications, Inc. p3-11.

Roe Daphne A. 1973. A plague of corn: the social history of pellagra. Ithaca, London: Cornell University Press.

Selhub Jacob, and Irwin H. Rosenberg. 1984. Assessment of vitamin depletion. In Wright Richard A., Heymsfield, Steven and McManus, Clifford B., editors. Nutritional Assessment. Boston, Oxford: Blackwell Scientific Publications, Inc. p209-238.