Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Science/2021 September 30
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September 30[edit]
What is the mechanism that white rice consumption causes thiamine deficiency?[edit]
What is the mechanism that white rice consumption (for a long time), causes thiamine deficiency? --ThePupil (talk) 05:55, 30 September 2021 (UTC)
- White rice is produced by milling and polishing the grains from "brown" to "white". The process removes the husk, bran, and germ of the rice grains, and thereby the component that contains thiamine. Consumption of white rice does not by itself cause thiamine deficiency. It only does so when a person or population has no other dietary source of thiamine, as was the case in the Dutch East Indies where rice is the staple grain, and where Christiaan Eijkman determined that the endemic occurrence of beriberi was caused by dietary deficiency, specifically related to a substance that was present in unpolished rice but absent from polished rice. --Lambiam 06:40, 30 September 2021 (UTC)