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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.
Well, not so much the cannibalism part, but the dementia part.
Corn cell walls separated mostly by Hemicellulose, and breaking down this tough molecule is necessary to access the nutritional compounds found within, including niacin. Humans can't do it very easily. Mesoamericans figured out the way a long, long time ago how to break apart hemicellulose by mixing a little ash into the water used to boil the maize kernels, breaking apart the hemicellulose and freeing up the niacin, a process called nixtamalization.
When Europeans landed in the 15th and 16th centuries, they took corn back to Europe, but not the nixtamalization process. As a sort of crude justice for all the pain and suffering Europeans inflicted on the natives, the European cultures that adopted corn as their cereal crop suffered greatly from pellagra, a disease brought about from the absence of niacin. A disease which includes among its symptoms dementia.
What's happening with these hamsters sounds eerily similar.