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All-Corn Diet Turns Hamsters Into Cannibals
An anonymous reader quotes Engadget:
A new paper outlines the efforts of scientists at the University of Strasbourg to determine why the European hamster has been dying off at an alarming rate... Previously, the rodent's diet consisted of grains, roots and insects. But the regions in which its numbers were dropping have been taken over by the industrial farming of corn... Researchers in France have discovered that a monotonous diet of corn causes hamsters to exhibit some unusual behavior -- cannibalism.
âoeImproperly cooked maize-based diets have been associated with higher rates of homicide, suicide and cannibalism in humans," the researchers point out, and they believe it's the absence of vitamin B3 which is affecting the hamsters' nervous system and triggering dementia-like behavior. Hamsters are already an endangered species in Western Europe, so this is being heavily-researched. And they obviously won't improve their chances of survival with cannibalism.
âoeImproperly cooked maize-based diets have been associated with higher rates of homicide, suicide and cannibalism in humans," the researchers point out, and they believe it's the absence of vitamin B3 which is affecting the hamsters' nervous system and triggering dementia-like behavior. Hamsters are already an endangered species in Western Europe, so this is being heavily-researched. And they obviously won't improve their chances of survival with cannibalism.
Grains are only somewhat harmful.
The problem is not eating grain, but eating ONLY grain. This leads to deficiency in B3, B12, and lysine.
If we had evolved to eat grains we would have four stomachs).
Ruminants don't have four stomachs to digest the starch in grain, but the cellulose in leaves and stems.
The Aztecs knew about vitamin B3, and how make it more readily available for consumption? Citation needed. I doubt they even knew some foods and preparations of foods could prevent pellagra.
Don't be dense. The Aztecs (or rather the entirety of the Americas before Columbus) knew that corn as-is was not fully edible. It had to go through a process of nixtamalization (pretty much soak the corn or corn flour in an alkaline solution.) This is no different from how other cultures have dealt with otherwise toxic food items like taro and manioc.
MesoAmerican diets were in fact quite well-rounded until the conquest. For whatever stupid reason the Conquistadors prohibited nixtamalization for a while (work of the devil or some shit). We know from records of the time (as well as bones) of levels of malnutrition that resulted from this until the locals could again do this process on their primary food source: corn.
Old cultures didn't have a modern lab. Sure, no motherfucking surprise. But they had thousands of years of Darwinian trial and error with which to notice what combinations of foods provided the best results as well as how to prepare them for best results (be them nutrition or storage.)
Just because cultures were not modern (or even literate) that does not mean they were not intelligent enough to gather knowledge from empirical observation.