Ill
THE “В” FAMILY—VITAMIN B1, MOTHER
OF THE “B” FAMILY
NO animal on earth except man, and on rare occasions
the animals which he has made dependent upon him
for food, suffer from lack of the vitamins which were for-
merly grouped together under the letter “B.” The vitamin
which is now known as B1, particularly, is so widely dis-
tributed in natural foods that only the diabolical ingenu-
ity of man could develop a diet seriously lacking in it. But
at least twenty-six hundred years ago man’s ingenuity accom-
plished this very thing. In many parts of the Orient the
human animal restricted his agricultural efforts largely to
the production of rice, and then developed a method of im-
proving the rice for his consumption by polishing it, i.e.,
removing the outer coat and germ. In so doing he incident-
ally removed all the vitamin B1, which is richly present in the
polishings. From that day to this, beri-beri has been one of
the principal scourges of mankind in southeastern Asia, and
it is no mean distinction to be a principal scourge in that
hotbed of human scourges.
In 1879, human beings discovered another process by
which to deprive themselves of vitamin B1—the making of
white flour. However, white flour rarely forms nearly so
large a part of the diet as is the case with rice in some parts
of the world, so the elimination of the wheat germ with the
bran was not so serious a matter. Bread may be the staff of
life, but fortunately it is not often too exclusively leaned
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