three cheers for brown rice

We grow organic brown rice. It is healthier: more vitamins, more fiber, and no chemical contamination.

But it costs more to grow (weeding by hand instead of herbicide for example) so the poor will continue to eat white rice, much of which is imported form places like Vietnam where they grow three crops a year.

Historically, eating mainly white rice but not supplemented by other foods was not healthy. 

Indeed, White rice led to hundreds of thousands dying... not just in Japan, China, and in India, but in the time of the original Philippine fight for independence and the early occupation which caused disruption of society,and the usual disasters (Taal) much of the rice eaten was imported white rice, so many died of this disease

the epidemic was stopped by using other foods and later fortifying rice with vitamins.

This is an excellent book examining the problems of disease in the early American occupation. It is on Scribd.

I should point out: white rice was considered better in Asian countries because the rich ate it, but it also has a longer shelf life (the oil in brown rice tends to spoil after six to 12 months).

Poor people originally did their own threshing and milling so essentially ate brown rice...but as they moved into cities or to uniculture plantations in rural area, they imported white rice to eat, (either from local farms or from overseas countries who produced it cheaply) and the disease, which was first described by Chinese physicians 4000 years ago, became epidemic.

there are a lot of more intellectual (i.e. boring) lectures on you tube about this disease. 

But this video is shorter and puts the disease into perspective by discussing how white rice almost destroyed the Japanese Navy 

Atlas Obscura has a short article on the history of the disease in Japan LINK and explains why this disease suddenly became epidemic: mechanical milling machines

Machine-milling made polished rice available to the masses, and as the government invested in an army and navy, it fed soldiers with white rice. (White rice, as it happened, was less bulky and lasted longer than brown rice, which could go rancid in warm weather.) Inevitably, soldiers and sailors got beriberi.

 and here, during her travels in rural Japan, Isabelle Bird, who was an adventuress but did have an interest in hospitals and illnesses, describes it thus in one of her letters (numberXX)

In the two villages of Upper and Lower Innai there has been an outbreak of a malady much dreaded by the Japanese, called kak’ké, which, in the last seven months, has carried off 100 persons out of a population of about 1500, and the local doctors have been aided by two sent from the Medical School at Kubota.

 

I don’t know a European name for it; the Japanese name signifies an affection of the legs. Its first symptoms are a loss of strength in the legs, “looseness in the knees,” cramps in the calves, swelling, and numbness. This, Dr. Anderson, who has studied kak’ké in more than 1100 cases in Tôkiyô, calls the sub-acute form.

 

The chronic is a slow, numbing, and wasting malady, which, if unchecked, results in death from paralysis and exhaustion in from six months to three years.

The third, or acute form, Dr. Anderson describes thus. After remarking that the grave symptoms set in quite unexpectedly, and go on rapidly increasing, he says:—“The patient now can lie down no longer; he sits up in bed and tosses restlessly from one position to another, and, with wrinkled brow, staring and anxious eyes, dusky skin, blue, parted lips, dilated nostrils, throbbing neck, and labouring chest, presents a picture of the most terrible distress that the worst of diseases can inflict. There is no intermission even for a moment, and the physician, here almost powerless, can do little more than note the failing pulse and falling temperature, and wait for the moment when the brain, paralysed by the carbonised blood, shall become insensible, and allow the dying man to pass his last moments in merciful unconsciousness.”

Sigh.

there are a lot of more intellectual (i.e. boring) lectures on you tube about this disease.

In the USA, we rarely see the entire syndrome but we do see brain damage from thiamine deficiency in chronic alcoholics:

with all the chronic druggies and alcoholics among the homeless in the USA, one wonders how many of them are developing these diseases, along with other vitamin deficiencies like scurvy, pellgra, or simple protein deficiency.

Sigh.