Impact Of Diet On Health

Impact of Diet on Health
There’s a disease called Pellagra, it is caused by the lack of vitamin B3 (niacin) in the body. Niacin can be either ingested through food, it can be found in nuts, cheese,pork and fish among many others, or it can be synthesized in the body after the ingestion of the amino acid tryptophan. Pellagra occurs when the amount of B3 given to the body is low, when the bodyis unable to convert tryptophan into niacin or when there’s an excess of leucine (another amino acid) in the organism. The word pellagra comes from the Italian rough skin, which is one of the symptomsto this disease, the rest of the symptoms may include sensitivity to sunlight, aggression, insomnia, ataxia (paralysis of the arms and legs), mental confusion, dilated cardiomyopathy (heart can’tpump blood correctly to the body), loss of hair, accumulation of fluids, glossitis (inflammation of the tongue) dementia and in some cases even death.
During many years this disease was endemic amongpoor workers in Europe and Southern United States. For a long time people thought pellagra was contagious and the ones affected by this disease were segregated by the society form the rest of thecommunity. A long time passed until in 1902, Dr. Joseph Goldberg a member of the US Public Health Service studied the disease and related it to the diet, making it non-infectious. He saw that diet hadinfluence in both causing and curing pellagra. Then after more tests and experiments, he realized that the main risk factors for the disease were a corn based diet and poverty. That’s how pellagra wasassociated with corn in Southern United States and part of Europe.
Years later in 1937, Conrad Elvehjem, a chemist who worked at the University of Wisconsin discovered a cure for black tongue, adisease similar to pellagra but that attacked dogs. He saw that when nicotine acid (a derivative of niacin) was administrated to dogs, it cured black tongue. After further experiments and human trials,...