Beriberi: Finding the Cause and Cure

Beriberi: Health Tips

Beriberi was one of the leading causes of death in North America from 1600 to 1920. Most people do not even know what it is because it is infrequent nowadays, but the detective work to find the cause and cure have lasted for centuries and countries.

Beriberi is a condition in which people first lose the sensation in their fingers and feet, followed by progressive weakness, heart failure, and death. The people of Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) called it Beri, the Sinhala word for a gap, and later became known in European circles as beriberi, which means weakness. In 1850, doctors in England reported that beriberi was very common among affluent Asians and very rare among inferior Asians, but it was only forty years after the first reports were published asking whether beriberi caused beriberi could be a nutrient deficiency. It happened among the rich and not among the poor. The only nutrient the poor Asians got, which the rich did not understand, was in the rice bowls. The rich ate large quantities of flaky and tasty white rice, while the poor could not afford refined rice, so they had to eat the disgusting brown rice.

In the early nineteenth century, Japanese doctors noticed that almost all of their sailors had died with beriberi. In 1887, a Japanese doctor named Takaki claimed to have cured beriberi by serving the sailors milk and meat in powder form. The most significant breakthrough came when the Dutch doctor Eijkman announced that he had cured beriberi by feeding people with thrown rice balls. The rich were the only ones who could afford to throw away the Food. In 1912, the Polish biochemist Casimir Funk prepared crude extracts of rice husks that cured beriberi. It took hundreds of years for all doctors to find the cause and rectify a prevalent disease. In 1934, Robert Williams of the University of Texas produced large quantities of thiamine powder (vitamin B1). Nobody hears beriberi in the United States because all the refined flours added thiamine after they were eliminated in the grinding process.