Niacin. A no more dramatic disease has ever come to the medical profession than pellagra, according to Dr. Tom Spies, one of the world’s greatest medical authorities in the field of nutrition. Pellagra has been known throughout the world for centuries, yet, it was not until the early 1930s, that Dr. Spies and several others managed to cure severely ill pellagra patients. The cure was a simple one: enormous doses of brewer's yeast, combined with a diet “high in calories, protein, minerals and vitamins.” By 1935, Dr. Spies had found that the one ounce of brewer’s yeast he had been giving was not enough, and, when he doubled and tripled this amount, the cure was almost miraculous, symptoms of pellagra are a red, sore tongue, skin troubles, digestive troubles, along with diarrhea and nerve disorders so severe that patients may become insane, Said Dr. Spies: “No tissues of the body are entirely exempt if the disease is permitted to run its natural course, untreated.” Pellagra can be induced in laboratory animals by giving them a diet deficient in niacin.
It can also be induced by giving them a diet consisting largely of corn products, because corn, although it is an excellent food in other respects, is deficient in one amino acid (tryptophan) and niacin. Although this does no harm in a diet including other protein-rich foods, someone who is living mostly on foods made from corn is risking pellagra. The disease was widespread during the Depression of the 1930s in the southern part of the U.S., where cornbread, hominy, grits, and other corn products formed a large part of the diet. Dr. Spies writes in Clinical Nutrition, that there are three groups of people who are most likely to be susceptible to pellagra.
First, those who do not eat a nourishing diet, either because they do not have enough money to buy nourishing foods, because they do not know which foods to eat, or because they have peculiar notions about food and put themselves on diets that are deficient in the B vitamins. The second group consists of those who have organic diseases which have changed their eating habits or have made their needs for certain foods much greater. People with tuberculosis, disease of the digestive tract, cirrhosis of the liver, heart disease, certain. kinds of kidney disease, diabetes, amoebic dysentery, pneumonia, hookworm, influenza, typhoid fever, malaria, and other diseases interfering with the eating of foods containing the B vitamins and the absorption of these vitamins from foods.
The third group are chronic alcoholics who neglect all food and try to live on alcohol. Often the sufferer from pellagra is piteously thin and starved-looking. But it is just as likely that he is overweight, for, if he is eating a diet high in refined carbohydrates and fats, he is not getting enough of the B vitamins to protect him from pellagra, although he may be getting enough calories to make him fat. Many modern American mothers who make little effort to study nutrition and allow their children to live on soft drinks, potato chips, and candy are guaranteeing a future for these children in which they will be threatened with pellagra—if they manage to escape such diseases as TB, diabetes and heart trouble.
Mothers and children must be made aware of the overwhelming importance of foods high in protein, vitamins, and minerals. How can you cure pellagra? In the words of Dr. Tom Spies: “113 grams of wheat germ daily (about one-fourth pound), 57 grams of brewer’s yeast daily (about 4 tablespoons) or a concentrate of niacin which would, of course, have to be given by a physician.” In cases where the patient cannot absorb food effectively from his digestive tract, the B vitamin can be injected. Unfortunately, pellagra did not pass into oblivion in the 1930s. It is still very much with us in the 1970s. A headline in the Washington Post for April 2, 1971, read: “Mental patients hit by pellagra.” The article went on to say that “Maryland’s health chief said that he personally discovered in December that patients at state mental hospitals were receiving inadequate daily amounts of vitamins in their meals, causing many of them to contract pellagra.
The deficiencies apparently had existed for years and years,” stated Dr. Neil Solomon. The patients were immediately given vitamins, but Dr. Solomon explained that, because of budget cutting, there would not be enough money to feed mental patients properly during the coming years. There were, at the time, 10 - 300 patients in mental hospitals in the state. Dr. Solomon, a specialist in nutrition, said he had noticed a tremendous number of patients “had red, swollen tongues and lesions (sores) on exposed parts of their bodies.” The hospital attendants—and presumably all the doctors and psychiatrists in attendance had not noticed anything wrong with the patients, the Post article continued. When Dr. Solomon visited the hospital Kitch ens and studied the menus, he found that meals were deficient not only in niacin but also protein, iron, and calcium, “An unspecified number of patients had pellagra,” he noted, He went on to say that he had no idea how many mental patients had gotten pellagra in the past or how many had died of it.
The same could be said for other deficiency diseases. The state had been spending 72 cents per day per patient to feed the mentally ill in six institutions, and An additional 28 cents per day had brought the menus to at least a nutritionally sound basis. Dr. Solomon is, apparently, just one of a handful of doctors in the entire medical profession who is concerned about what patients eat Speaking at a symposium on hunger and malnutrition sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Dr. Jes Mayer, professor of Nutrition at Harvard University, and President Nixon’s advisor on nutrition, said: “Our studies at Harvard among residents suf gests that the average physician knows a little more about nutrition than the average secretary —unless the secretary has a weight problem, and then she probably knows more than the average physician.” He said that only a half dozen or so medical schools in the country include a nutrition course for their students.
Continued Dr. Mayer: “Nutrition education should be centered on foods—their size, shape, color, caloric value, etc. We must relate such vital information to the everyday uses of people.” In 1963, the Council on Foods and Nutrition of the American Medical Association issued a report on nutritional education in medical schools in which they opined that the medics were not really learning anything much about food and nutrition, and they suggested hiring one professor in each school whose main interest might be nutrition. Even Dr. Fredrick Stare of Harvard, writing in Nutrition Reviews, said that very little attention is directed to nutrition teaching in medical schools. In the American Journal of Public Health in June 1966, Dr. Robert Shank stated that the situation was very bad. In 1967, Dr. J. F. Mueller said that there is great dissatisfaction among nutritionists in general with “the quality of nutrition education in medical schools.” Dr. Robert H. Barnes of the University of Washington concurred.
Writing in Nutrition Today, 1968, Dr.-Barnes, after studying what. went on in a local hospital, said that he found that the terms by which doctors order diets for their patients are completely meaningless and indicate that the doctors have no idea of what the diets are supposed to do for the patients or why they should be put on such diets. Said Dr, Barnes: “No portion of the human body seems to confound physicians more than the gastrointestinal tract, Writing a diet for a patient ailing in this dark and mysterious region seems to Fill us with bewilderment.” Cancer researchers bave often used vitamins A, C, and E in their search for a cure for this mysterious disorder.
We now have a report from the University of California at Los Angeles, where six researchers have determined that the abnormal growth of cancer cells may be due to a lack of niacin. Dr. Robert A. Smith and his co-workers have not as yet used animals or humans in their research, however, they indicate that animal studies will be begun. Working in tissue culture with cells derived from colon and kidney cancers in humans, the UCLA team found that there is a marked difference between cancer and normal cells. The cancer cells were depleted of nicotinamide, the physiologically active form of niacin, they said. A Montreal, Canada professor believes that niacin is important for improving memory in af ing people, He also gave them carbon dioxide to inhale.
In all cases, the Jarge doses of niacin brought about a reduction in cholesterol without any change in diet. If you are bothered by large amounts of cholesterol deposits, why not ask your doctor to investigate the use of niacin? Taking an isolated B vitamin on your own in large quantities sometimes produces slight side effects because it is being used as a drug. Idiopathic hypogeusia is the unlikely name given to a new condition that doctors have recently uncovered. It means the inability to taste anything. Several articles in medical journals have reported on this disorder, and they are mystified as to what could possibly cause such a condition, in a letter to the editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, Dr. R. P Green of Saskatchewan, Canada announced thy the condition is “part of a very old disease which, causes the perception to change—perception dysfunction, as a result of a niacin deficiency. The disease produced is pellagra and “the cur is niacin.”
Dr. Green goes on to point out that lack of taste is only one possible effect on sensation caused by a lack of this B vitamin. In his expert experience with 800 cases, impairment of the senses of taste and smell are problems, he said. He told his physician readers that many patients come to a doctor with complaints for which there seems to be no physical basis. Ask them questions about their sense of taste, smell, sight, hearing, and touch and you can diagnose the disorder, he said. He gives his patients a perceptual test that reveals their impairment of one sense or another. Then he suggests a diet, that includes plenty of niacin. “The results in cases of recent! onset is nothing short of miraculous,” he said “Patients whose aberrations have extended over! months and even years respond more slowly but yet very satisfactorily in the main.”
Laboratories used to report considerable work with animals on the effects of vitamin dosage on the symptoms of old aye. But this kind of pre-season has rather gone out of style, especially since our official scientific bodies make pronouncements that old people need no more vitamins than younger folks, and taking more vitamins than you “need” will do nothing for health. We are, therefore, glad to find in a European scientific journal the account of some convincing research along these lines. The scientists used three groups of rats and placed all of them on the same diet. Then they gave the first group a vitamin preparation containing twice the minimum daily requirements for rats. The second group received only niacin.
The third group got no vitamins at all. However, all these rats were eating the customary good, nourishing diet that is fed to valuable laboratory animals to maintain the best possible health. The first group of animals showed better food assimilation, better health, and growth than the rest of the rats. The first group and the group that got the B vitamin were more active physically than the others. The first group had a higher fertility rate and lowest blood cholesterol. Those who received the multiple-vitamin had the longest lifespan. Next came those who got only the niacin, while the rats that had no vitamin supplement had the shortest life span. After the animals died, their tissues were examined in the laboratory.
There was also “improvement in their general condition,” even though 80 days is not a very long time for such a study. This research was reported by V. V. Efremov in the Journal Vestnil Akademii Meditsinskikh Nauk, USSR, Volume 21 (10), 1966. It was abstracted in Chemical Abstracts, 1968, on page 9111. As far back as 1925, J. Goldberger had determined that pellagra is a deficiency disease. In 1937, C. A. Elvehjem and his associates discovered that nicotinic acid (niacin) is involved in preventing the disease. In the chart on page 236, we give you the main sources of niacin in the human diet. The recommended dietary allowances are infants (5 to 8 mg, daily); children (8 to 15 mg, daily; males (17 to 20 mg. daily); and females (19 to 15 mg. daily). Pregnant women (15 mg daily); lactation (20 mg, daily).
