A Stingy Cook and the Discovery of Vitamins
- Eijkman demonstrated that the cause of beriberi was related to a component contained in brown rice (rice bran), paving the way for the discovery of vitamins.
- Eijkman visited Indonesia to study beriberi.
- The chickens he used in his experiments developed symptoms of beriberi, but after some time they unexpectedly recovered.
- Finding this strange, he investigated the cause and discovered that the hospital cook had been replaced by a meticulous and frugal person (a stingy cook).
- The cook had begun feeding the chickens brown rice instead of the polished white rice they had previously been given.
- Eijkman realized that the chickens recovered from beriberi because they had been fed brown rice.
- Prisoners who ate white rice in prisons often developed beriberi, whereas the native people who ate brown rice had a much lower incidence of the disease. (In Japan, Kanehiro Takaki had similarly noticed that prisoners fed brown rice suffered less from beriberi.)
- Although few people believed this at first, Hopkins accepted the idea and later confirmed it through experiments with mice.
- In 1911, Funk discovered that the substance contained in rice bran responsible for preventing beriberi was Vitamin B1.