Alkali cooking practices released corn niacin preventing pellagra across the Americas

Evidence

In the Americas before 1500 CE, corn was the stable crop for many farming societies. However, relying heavily on corn presents some tricky nutritional issues. A diet based on corn can leave one short on niacin (vitamin B3). Failure to get enough niacin results in a disease called pellagra, a horrible condition characterized by diarrhea, lesions, hair loss, tongue inflammation, insomnia, dementia, and then death. There is actually niacin in corn, but it’s chemically bound and cannot be freed by normal cooking. To release this niacin, populations throughout the New World culturally evolved practices that introduced an alkali (a base) into their corn preparations. In some places, the alkali came from burning seashells (generating calcium hydroxide) or the ash of certain kinds of wood. Elsewhere, there were natural sources of lye (providing potassium hydroxide). Mixing the alkali into the recipe in the right way chemically releases the otherwise unavailable niacin in the corn, which stops pellagra in its tracks, and allowed corn-based agricultural populations to grow and spread. — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success, 336

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Relates to the ‘Grafting & Growth: On Trees as Infrastructure’ article’s interest in pre-modern practical technologies people adopted without causal understanding.
• XREF: connects to: Europeans got pellagra because they lacked alkali corn processing — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture…, 338

Broader Connections

• Europeans got pellagra because they lacked alkali corn processing #corroborates (0.95) — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success, 338