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Eating Too Much Rice Almost Doomed Japan's Imperial Navy

steve_adams_86 7y ago
I find it fascinating that at the time, a holistic diet-based solution was considered flakey and rooted in ignorant traditions. And yet here we are almost 200 years later and many common illnesses are still closely related to diet, and many still feel as though treatment through diet is flakey or inferior to modern drugs or surgery. It turns out one of the best things we can do for ourselves is eat well and strive to prevent disease before it occurs. If I recall correctly, this is a core tenant of many traditional medicines including traditional Chinese medicine. I'm not saying we should all start practicing traditional medicine. I just find it fascinating that we have and still often discount traditional knowledge, even after it's been virtually proven for milennia. It's like we throw out the baby with the bathwater. I hope modern science can find more concrete conclusions around health and diet such that more people might have faith in food as a preventative medicine. To many of us it seems obvious, but to much of the world I suspect it isn't... Just like it wasn't in the Japanese Navy.
- hdfbdtbcdg 7y ago
  > many still feel as though treatment through diet is flakey or inferior to modern drugs or surgery. This advice literally (using the word in the correct sense) kills people. > I just find it fascinating that we have and still often discount traditional knowledge, even after it's been virtually proven for milennia Check out the infant mortality rates for milennia. I agree prevention is better than cure. That is why I and my family are up to date on all our vaccines. Meanwhile a holistic diet will do nothing to prevent most infectious diseases. The reason we have the luxury to entertain wellness bloggers, traditional medicine and faith healers is that we discovered antibiotics and vaccines. Traditional medicines that work get incorporated into modern medicine. For example if you have a dietary deficiency you will be given supplements and told to eat better. If you have a headache you may take a compound first derived from Willow bark. Modern medicine has even resulted in flour being fortified with vitamin B1 preventing the disease the article refers too! Even modern understanding of healthy eating is derived from modern medicine not traditional 'healing'...
  - kranner 7y ago
    Antibiotics, vaccines and a well-balanced diet are not mutually exclusive, nor did GP imply so.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - ericd 7y ago
    Having a good diet isn't in any way competitive with being up to date on your vaccines. And a good diet absolutely will do something to prevent most infectious diseases - if your immune system is stressed/compromised due to a shit diet, you're much more likely to be infected when you're exposed. You're exposed to infectious disease constantly, and the reason you don't get sick the vast majority of the time is because you're successfully fighting those off.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - nextlevelwizard 7y ago
    I don't think he is arguing against vaccination or using modern medicine just that people see things like obesity and type-2 diabetes as issues that need to and maybe even should be cured with medicine or surgery while the actual answer is radical change in diet. While I remain skeptical about long term effects of the new fad carnivore diet there is no doubt it has helped a lot of people with inflammation to regain control of their lives. You can look up Mikhaila Peterson's blog or interviews about the subject.
    - JamesBarney 7y ago
      Why is this the actual answer? Most RCTs show the best obesity cure we currently have is surgery, and it wildly outperforms diet on an intention to treat basis. Diets do terribly in long term RCTs.
- bad_user 7y ago
  I would add more ... when it comes to chronic diseases, modern medicine is about treatment after the fact, after the damage has occurred and not about prevention. And while it’s incredibly efficient at treating acute conditions, it fails miserably at chronic ones because it’s treating symptoms instead of underlying causes. And sometimes those symptoms might actually be part of the body’s defenses against inflammation, which doctors suppress with pills. The perfect example is elevated LDL cholesterol. This is a marker for heart disease, however it can be high due to hypothyroidism or due to inflammation. LDL cells are actually part of the body’s immune system and by suppressing their synthesis or by accelerating their clearance, the body could be less effective at fighting infections or at repairing arterial walls that have been damaged. Plus pills are a blunt tool with many unintended side effects. It is no wonder then that people taking statins don’t have a reduction in all cause mortality and personally I’d rather die of a heart attack than die of cancer or dementia. Also the DASH diet, the one that is supposed to prevent CVD, is effectively poison as it’s encouraging people to eat ultra-processed food and oils high in omega-6, due to encouraging a big chunk of energy to come from “whole grains” (i.e. products which are often a lesson in chemistry and that might not even contain whole grains due to weak regulation), plus the phobia for saturated fat.
  - PhantomGremlin 7y ago
    it fails miserably at chronic ones because it’s treating symptoms instead of underlying causes I'm not sure if "fails miserably" is the proper characterization. It's just simple capitalism. Just look at statins. They're something that they want to sell you for the rest of your life. Because statins treat symptoms, they're not a cure. But antibiotics? Just 10 days and you're done. Hmmm. Which is more profitable? It it any wonder that the US government is looking into how to fund development of new antibiotics? Same with vaccines. The government has had to step in to fund them.
    - refurb 7y ago
      Yet one of the most profitable drug launches ever was a cure for hepatitis C.
- wukerplank 7y ago
  One anecdote (not diet related): Last winter I developed knee pain, which turned out to be an inflamation. The typical doctor's response: rest, inject cortisone and apply warming creams. After three months the pain was still there. I went to a kinesiologist. She acupunctured the leg (with added electricity) and cupped the knee. After one treatment (~30 min) the pain was gone for good. I'm sure modern science can find ways, but those must be taught to doctors too. The doctors I've met in my life only treat symptoms (with chemistry) and rarely have a holistic look at what's going on in your body. The ones digging into a problem are rare breed.
  - dc_gregory 7y ago
    Its not surprising that the doctor suggested those things, as its not really the domain they focus on. If you have bio-mechanical pain, its often better to see a physiotherapist, who can better diagnose the underlying reason and help you resolve it properly.
    - wukerplank 7y ago
      > Its not surprising that the doctor suggested those things I saw an orthopedist who claimed to specialize in sport injuries. He immediately understood which part of the knee was affected. Also I'd expect a doctor who's out of his depth to suggest a specialist, not a "meh, try this".
      - smacktoward 7y ago
        As with engineers, the three least commonly uttered words among doctors are “I don’t know.”
        HeWhoLurksLate 7y ago
        Apparently, I'm not an engineer.
  - LunaSea 7y ago
    Because holistic looks have systematically been proven as being non medically effective ...
- powerapple 7y ago
  The traditional medicine has worked in the past probably won't work in the future. The reason is that human has been travel a lot, and our fixed diet has changed. Traditional medicine relies heavily on the local environment, local produce and work on local people. These assumption is not true any more. Not only I see the kind of produce grow locally has changed, also the people are different. To my understanding of Chinese medicine, the treatment is personalized. It is not the medicine treating people, it is the doctor. He has a brain full of local knowledge, what water you drink, what season is now, what's going on in your village. These thing does not exist in current culture. Personalized medicine will take its place however. We can then treat people with minimal side-effect.
- onetimemanytime 7y ago
  If you get stomach cancer, a holistic diet is not gonna help. And, I don't think there's a doctor that doesn't suggest we exercise, eat the right things etc etc. So the science is there, but people...are people, until it hits them.
  - glastra 7y ago
    All doctors recommend eating well. But none of them actually knows what eating well means. Or, rather, they might think they know, and still you get ten conflicting answers.
    - Mirioron 7y ago
      Diet and health is incredibly complex. Not only is it about which nutrients we get for our body, but also which bacteria live in our gut and which nutrients they need and in what concentration, so that the balance stays the same. A healthy diet is basically about trying to feed an ecosystem.
      - glastra 7y ago
        Definitely. However, this has been used to market a myriad of so-called health products that are far from ideal. I follow a carnivore diet and have always been a bit scared of messing up my microbiome, while finding it quite strange that I defecate non-negligible amounts of waste, once a day on average. Only recently has my knowledge gap been filled when I found out that our microbiome can survive solely on amino acids. In fact, all this "gut-brain axis" stuff regarding the production and/or catabolism of neurotransmitters by gut bacteria only makes sense if bacteria can ferment amino acids. Thinking that some bacteria strain can produce neurotransmitters from fibre is an insult to intelligence: where does the nitrogen come from?
    - onetimemanytime 7y ago
      in most cases it's nitpicking. While an apple might be 6.48% better than a pear for a certain person at a certain time, eating an apple is still way better than an order of french fries. We're talking about basics, getting all the vitamins and nutrients needed for a healthy body. Exercise, eat about 5 servings of fruit and veggies a day etc ....
- arvinsim 7y ago
  > And yet here we are almost 200 years later and many common illnesses are still closely related to diet, and many still feel as though treatment through diet is flakey or inferior to modern drugs or surgery. It certainly doesn't help that the science on diets nowadays contain so many contradicting studies. Moreso that some of them are pushed by powerful corporations for their own vested interests. No one wonder people don't trust them.
  - adrianN 7y ago
    Nutrition is just a really difficult field for robust studies. There is an enormous amount of variables you have to control for and the effects you're looking for are likely small or only appear after decades. Strict adherence to the experimental protocol usually can't be supervised, leaving you with observational studies or self-reported data. Blinding is pretty much impossible. Funding is very limited, especially if you don't want to take money from "powerful corporations".
  - leksak 7y ago
    As a side-project me and a friend have been trying to formalize a set of different rules and models from which to establish a diet. But, as the consumption of certain micronutrients drive the need for others up it's pretty hard to beat just eating a varied diet of mostly clean food. Some people on here mention organ meats, but that does not mean that it's safe to eat liver everyday either.
    - nradov 7y ago
      "Clean food" is such a vague term as to be nearly meaningless.
    - steve_adams_86 7y ago
      To make matters worse, varying gut biomes and environments tend to yield different nutritional requirements. Amongst other things. I'm not sure we'll ever nail that down. Again though, traditional medicines were aware of this and it was typically recognized that diet was specific to an individual and their environment. There were (and still are) complex systems outlining how foods may affect different people and what it could mean. Still, I'm not claiming anything here other than that it's interesting and worth considering. I take advil when my head hurts and I go to the hospital when I'm sick, and I'm not going to start treating cancer with fungus from my back yard. I just suspect there's a lot of useful knowledge in this tradition.
laser 7y ago
My favorite part was on the last page, which I’ll include below as I assume most won’t read to the end. After 4,000 people died in the army from beriberi, the navy, which had eradicated the disease with better diet, criticized the army’s resistance to changing their diet. The article says: ‘Under attack by navy doctors, the Army Medical Bureau struck back with an article published under a pseudonym. “The army does not need traditional medicine, statistical speculation or 1,890-year-old theories to solve its beriberi problem,” the article stated. “It needs scientific knowledge based on experimental medicine.”’ After this, 26,000 more army men died from beriberi before the Emperor forced them to add barley to their rice... As wonderful as scientific knowledge from experimental medicine is and has been, it seems this sort of belligerence towards pre-scientific human knowledge causes enormous damage that we’re still continuing to reckon with over a hundred years later. While ineffective traditional knowledge has caused plenty of unnecessary suffering too, it is often unwise to dismiss purely on the basis of having not yet been investigated with modern scientific rigor.
- hyperpallium 7y ago
  The two training ships seemed like pretty suggestive experimental evidence. Just not fully controlled laboratory evidence.
  - dalbasal 7y ago
    In purely philosophical terms, you could say it's "scientific." But... in practice science is an institution as much as it is a method. In that sense "unscientific" means that something doesn't come from the scientific institution/culture.. regardless of who is on what side of a Karl Popper test of science.
    - mannykannot 7y ago
      I would say that on very practical terms, one could call it scientific, taking advantage of a situation that made possible an trial that could not have been approved as a fully-controlled clinical experiment, given the official opposition to Takaki's ideas. Takski's hypothesis also met Popper's criterion for falsifiability, and the Tsukuba could have suffered similar beri-beri rates as did the Ryujo.
baron816 7y ago
Page crashed twice while I was trying to read this and only made it a few paragraphs in. My phone also got very hot. Too bad sites like these have to rely on shady adware to produce interesting content like this.
- hackits 7y ago
  They have to pay the bill somehow.
- mistahenry 7y ago
  they didn't even make the content. The original article is https://medium.com/war-is-boring/eating-too-much-rice-almost-sank-the-japanese-navy-f985772c81a6 https://medium.com/war-is-boring/eating-too-much-rice-almost...
ezoe 7y ago
It's easy to laugh the old incidents. But it's pointless without considering the situation at that time. Otherwise, it's like laughing at old movies, saying: "Why don't they use cellphone to communicate each other?". The cellphone haven't invented at that time. Japanese navy suffered beriberi for eating milled white rice and nothing else. Because milled rice only diet lacks essential vitamins. But the first vitamin hasn't been found until 1913(Vitamin A). Nobody in the world had a correct knowledge about healthy diet. In this case, eating un-milled brown rice. At that time, majority of them believed that beriberi was caused by some kind of bacteria. So Japanese navy did everything they could do to prevent infection. It was not like they were trying. They didn't know the correct solution. So your next question would be, why didn't they test it scientifically? Well, in 1880, Statistics hadn't been developed like today. So not many people, even the scientists didn't have a proper statistic knowledge like modern scientists today must has or else they are doomed to be called unscientific idiot. You must also consider that at that time, the brown rice was for poor. It's taste aren't that good compared to white rice. Rich people was enjoy eating white rice everyday. Now imagine you were drafted for military, serving for the country, and you can't get a delicious and enough meal. That' a shame. So Japanese navy serve the best meal the traditional Japanese soldiers want, a lot of white rice.
- DuskStar 7y ago
  ...because no other navy had encountered issues from feeding their crew a monotonous diet before. Maybe not this specific set of issues, but issues nonetheless.
  - ezoe 7y ago
    Until very recently, traditional Japanese meal was consists of a bowl of rice, miso soup with some vegetables, and some vegetables. Because of religious and cultural reason(it was not that strong ban but most people follow it), Japanese at that time rarely eat meat.
    - DuskStar 7y ago
      And what relevance does that have? That's not the diet the sailors in question had or the replacement diet that was proposed.
hackerbabz 7y ago
> Takaki fought hard to institute fixed diets—but the navy resisted, saying it would double the cost of feeding crews. The navy made this argument while facing 1/3 to 1/2 rates of total crew loss due to the disease.
LyndsySimon 7y ago
It's odd that the article doesn't mention curry. The whole purpose of the introduction of curry to the IJN was to prevent beriberi, and it's become one of Japan's best-known dishes.
sandGorgon 7y ago
There's another story - the Japanese Curry was invented by the British to prevent scurvy [1] The earliest recipe for "raisu kari" is from the "Beeton's Book of Household Management" [4] which in turn uses "INDIAN CURRY-POWDER, founded on Dr. Kitchener’s Recipe" The Brits got curry from India (duh!) One of the leaders of India's freedom struggle against the British - Rash Behari Bose - escaped to Japan and created the "Indo-karii" Nakamuraya curry [2] . You can still eat it [3]. the Japan Maritime Self Defense Force still serves curry every Friday as a tradition. And each ship has its own recipe [5] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_curry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_curry [2] https://www.thebetterindia.com/109063/rash-behari-bose-ina-nakamuraya-curry-japan/ https://www.thebetterindia.com/109063/rash-behari-bose-ina-n... [3] http://www.nakamuraya.co.jp/ http://www.nakamuraya.co.jp/ [4] https://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2011/08/26/food/curry-its-more-japanese-than-you-think/#.XOzffXUzais https://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2011/08/26/food/curry-its-... [5] https://www.mod.go.jp/msdf/formal/family/recipe/archive/currey.html https://www.mod.go.jp/msdf/formal/family/recipe/archive/curr...
- joncrane 7y ago
  When I lived in Japan as a kid my two favorite foods were miso soup and that curry. It came in a box with gold writing and I think it was called S&B Golden Curry. It was amazing.
  - JimiofEden 7y ago
    S&B Golden Curry can be found in America as well, luckily. I make a big pot at least once a month and have leftovers for the whole week. It's possibly one of my favorite meals that I can prep in bulk. The only next step I'm really interested in taking would be trying to make a curry roux from scratch, but I can't deny how amazing the prepackaged stuff is.
  - seszett 7y ago
    Not sure where you are, but it's easy enough to find in western Europe at least.
jokowueu 7y ago
This is why they have VERY interesting vitamin B1 analogues https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_B1_analogue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_B1_analogue
kozak 7y ago
I recently have accidentally learned that my entire family is seriously deficient in vitamin D (even despite it's summer). A big surprise, and one that could have stayed undetected for many more years.
- napsterbr 7y ago
  My almost 90 years old grandmother was having episodes of demency. She would see stuff that didn't exist, talk to people that weren't there, and not recognize her own relatives. After weeks of doctor visits, and we all being 100% sure she was having something serious like Alzheimers, turns out it was vitamin D deficiency. Just sharing this here because I had no idea vitamin D deficiency could cause this.
- lenticular 7y ago
  Vitamin D deficiency actually really common, especially with dark skinned people living at higher latitudes. Most office people could do with a bit more UV.
zhte415 7y ago
Very related HN posting from 7 months ago on the supplementation of white rice (with curry): How Curry Became a Japanese Naval Tradition. HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18305211 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18305211 Linked article: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/japanese-curry-history https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/japanese-curry-history
turk73 7y ago
There are so many lessons from reading this. The biggest one is that soldiers and sailors are considered "cannon fodder" people and the military commanders didn't really care who lived or who died, so they would feed them the most minimal rations they could get away with until they lost so many that they had to actually do something. I have witnessed this same style of thinking in governments and in large corporations. Also, it reminds me of how the US treats its veterans--as soon as they are used up, they are forgotten about, written off, and "someone else's problem." The US Govt. pays lip service to veteran care but then cuts as many corners as possible and tries to deny benefits to as many as they can get away with denying in order to cut costs. One ought to question one's loyalty to any such system.
brookhaven_dude 7y ago
Somehow this is not a problem in Indian rice.
vfc1 7y ago
Beriberi was mostly caused by the replacement of whole rice by white rice. White rice is not a whole grain and has most of its fiber and many nutrients removed. If they had eaten whole rice instead, the disease is then easily prevented. But eating whole rice was apparently not socially well seen, as it was a food associated with the very poor. Later some of the nutrients have been sprayed back into the white rice, with the recommendation to not wash the rice before cooking, not to wash away the nutrients.
w0mbat 7y ago
Vitamin B1 deficiency causes beriberi, and white rice lacks B1. The article says that Japanese ships actually made a variety of food available but only white rice was free. It was the economic incentive that killed them. Similarly, corn lacks vitamin B3, and a corn-only diet causes a disease called "pellagra", which was once common in the US among the poor. If you read the ingredients on say a packet of corn flakes, you'll see thiamine and niacin (B1 and B3) are now added to prevent both kinds of disease. Casimir Funk, who basically discovered vitamins, helped find the role of thiamin in the etiology of beriberi, and also investigated pellagra. Funk said that pellagra was caused by B3 deficiency in 1912, but nobody listened and pellagra continued to devastate parts of the US into the 1940s.
thorwasdfasdf 7y ago
Spoiler alert, they were not getting enough Vitamin B1. I have a tool that breaks down nutritional densities on a per calorie basis. You can, for instance set the slider to B1 and see what foods contain the highest concentrations of B1: https://kale.world/c https://kale.world/c You'll notice that unenriched rice noodles only contain 3% of your Vitamin B1 needs in a 200 calorie serving. Note: that these days the issue is less likely to come up because white rice and white flours are often enriched with those Vitamins (similar to the way that cereals often are enriched with the vitamins they're missing) But, they also seem to suggest it might be lack of protein which I find harder to believe. Rice is 9% protein which is significantly more than the WHO's minimum recommendation of protein. I know some countries like the US state 10%, but that's double what the World health organization recommends.
- stevenhuang 7y ago
  That's a very useful site! Thanks.
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I find it fascinating that at the time, a holistic diet-based solution was considered flakey and rooted in ignorant traditions. And yet here we are almost 200 years later and many common illnesses are still closely related to diet, and many still feel as though treatment through diet is flakey or inferior to modern drugs or surgery. It turns out one of the best things we can do for ourselves is eat well and strive to prevent disease before it occurs. If I recall correctly, this is a core tenant of many traditional medicines including traditional Chinese medicine. I'm not saying we should all start practicing traditional medicine. I just find it fascinating that we have and still often discount traditional knowledge, even after it's been virtually proven for milennia. It's like we throw out the baby with the bathwater. I hope modern science can find more concrete conclusions around health and diet such that more people might have faith in food as a preventative medicine. To many of us it seems obvious, but to much of the world I suspect it isn't... Just like it wasn't in the Japanese Navy.

hdfbdtbcdg 7y ago
> many still feel as though treatment through diet is flakey or inferior to modern drugs or surgery. This advice literally (using the word in the correct sense) kills people. > I just find it fascinating that we have and still often discount traditional knowledge, even after it's been virtually proven for milennia Check out the infant mortality rates for milennia. I agree prevention is better than cure. That is why I and my family are up to date on all our vaccines. Meanwhile a holistic diet will do nothing to prevent most infectious diseases. The reason we have the luxury to entertain wellness bloggers, traditional medicine and faith healers is that we discovered antibiotics and vaccines. Traditional medicines that work get incorporated into modern medicine. For example if you have a dietary deficiency you will be given supplements and told to eat better. If you have a headache you may take a compound first derived from Willow bark. Modern medicine has even resulted in flour being fortified with vitamin B1 preventing the disease the article refers too! Even modern understanding of healthy eating is derived from modern medicine not traditional 'healing'...
- kranner 7y ago
  Antibiotics, vaccines and a well-balanced diet are not mutually exclusive, nor did GP imply so.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- ericd 7y ago
  Having a good diet isn't in any way competitive with being up to date on your vaccines. And a good diet absolutely will do something to prevent most infectious diseases - if your immune system is stressed/compromised due to a shit diet, you're much more likely to be infected when you're exposed. You're exposed to infectious disease constantly, and the reason you don't get sick the vast majority of the time is because you're successfully fighting those off.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- nextlevelwizard 7y ago
  I don't think he is arguing against vaccination or using modern medicine just that people see things like obesity and type-2 diabetes as issues that need to and maybe even should be cured with medicine or surgery while the actual answer is radical change in diet. While I remain skeptical about long term effects of the new fad carnivore diet there is no doubt it has helped a lot of people with inflammation to regain control of their lives. You can look up Mikhaila Peterson's blog or interviews about the subject.
  - JamesBarney 7y ago
    Why is this the actual answer? Most RCTs show the best obesity cure we currently have is surgery, and it wildly outperforms diet on an intention to treat basis. Diets do terribly in long term RCTs.
bad_user 7y ago
I would add more ... when it comes to chronic diseases, modern medicine is about treatment after the fact, after the damage has occurred and not about prevention. And while it’s incredibly efficient at treating acute conditions, it fails miserably at chronic ones because it’s treating symptoms instead of underlying causes. And sometimes those symptoms might actually be part of the body’s defenses against inflammation, which doctors suppress with pills. The perfect example is elevated LDL cholesterol. This is a marker for heart disease, however it can be high due to hypothyroidism or due to inflammation. LDL cells are actually part of the body’s immune system and by suppressing their synthesis or by accelerating their clearance, the body could be less effective at fighting infections or at repairing arterial walls that have been damaged. Plus pills are a blunt tool with many unintended side effects. It is no wonder then that people taking statins don’t have a reduction in all cause mortality and personally I’d rather die of a heart attack than die of cancer or dementia. Also the DASH diet, the one that is supposed to prevent CVD, is effectively poison as it’s encouraging people to eat ultra-processed food and oils high in omega-6, due to encouraging a big chunk of energy to come from “whole grains” (i.e. products which are often a lesson in chemistry and that might not even contain whole grains due to weak regulation), plus the phobia for saturated fat.
- PhantomGremlin 7y ago
  it fails miserably at chronic ones because it’s treating symptoms instead of underlying causes I'm not sure if "fails miserably" is the proper characterization. It's just simple capitalism. Just look at statins. They're something that they want to sell you for the rest of your life. Because statins treat symptoms, they're not a cure. But antibiotics? Just 10 days and you're done. Hmmm. Which is more profitable? It it any wonder that the US government is looking into how to fund development of new antibiotics? Same with vaccines. The government has had to step in to fund them.
  - refurb 7y ago
    Yet one of the most profitable drug launches ever was a cure for hepatitis C.
wukerplank 7y ago
One anecdote (not diet related): Last winter I developed knee pain, which turned out to be an inflamation. The typical doctor's response: rest, inject cortisone and apply warming creams. After three months the pain was still there. I went to a kinesiologist. She acupunctured the leg (with added electricity) and cupped the knee. After one treatment (~30 min) the pain was gone for good. I'm sure modern science can find ways, but those must be taught to doctors too. The doctors I've met in my life only treat symptoms (with chemistry) and rarely have a holistic look at what's going on in your body. The ones digging into a problem are rare breed.
- dc_gregory 7y ago
  Its not surprising that the doctor suggested those things, as its not really the domain they focus on. If you have bio-mechanical pain, its often better to see a physiotherapist, who can better diagnose the underlying reason and help you resolve it properly.
  - wukerplank 7y ago
    > Its not surprising that the doctor suggested those things I saw an orthopedist who claimed to specialize in sport injuries. He immediately understood which part of the knee was affected. Also I'd expect a doctor who's out of his depth to suggest a specialist, not a "meh, try this".
    - smacktoward 7y ago
      As with engineers, the three least commonly uttered words among doctors are “I don’t know.”
      - HeWhoLurksLate 7y ago
        Apparently, I'm not an engineer.
- LunaSea 7y ago
  Because holistic looks have systematically been proven as being non medically effective ...
powerapple 7y ago
The traditional medicine has worked in the past probably won't work in the future. The reason is that human has been travel a lot, and our fixed diet has changed. Traditional medicine relies heavily on the local environment, local produce and work on local people. These assumption is not true any more. Not only I see the kind of produce grow locally has changed, also the people are different. To my understanding of Chinese medicine, the treatment is personalized. It is not the medicine treating people, it is the doctor. He has a brain full of local knowledge, what water you drink, what season is now, what's going on in your village. These thing does not exist in current culture. Personalized medicine will take its place however. We can then treat people with minimal side-effect.
onetimemanytime 7y ago
If you get stomach cancer, a holistic diet is not gonna help. And, I don't think there's a doctor that doesn't suggest we exercise, eat the right things etc etc. So the science is there, but people...are people, until it hits them.
- glastra 7y ago
  All doctors recommend eating well. But none of them actually knows what eating well means. Or, rather, they might think they know, and still you get ten conflicting answers.
  - Mirioron 7y ago
    Diet and health is incredibly complex. Not only is it about which nutrients we get for our body, but also which bacteria live in our gut and which nutrients they need and in what concentration, so that the balance stays the same. A healthy diet is basically about trying to feed an ecosystem.
    - glastra 7y ago
      Definitely. However, this has been used to market a myriad of so-called health products that are far from ideal. I follow a carnivore diet and have always been a bit scared of messing up my microbiome, while finding it quite strange that I defecate non-negligible amounts of waste, once a day on average. Only recently has my knowledge gap been filled when I found out that our microbiome can survive solely on amino acids. In fact, all this "gut-brain axis" stuff regarding the production and/or catabolism of neurotransmitters by gut bacteria only makes sense if bacteria can ferment amino acids. Thinking that some bacteria strain can produce neurotransmitters from fibre is an insult to intelligence: where does the nitrogen come from?
  - onetimemanytime 7y ago
    in most cases it's nitpicking. While an apple might be 6.48% better than a pear for a certain person at a certain time, eating an apple is still way better than an order of french fries. We're talking about basics, getting all the vitamins and nutrients needed for a healthy body. Exercise, eat about 5 servings of fruit and veggies a day etc ....
arvinsim 7y ago
> And yet here we are almost 200 years later and many common illnesses are still closely related to diet, and many still feel as though treatment through diet is flakey or inferior to modern drugs or surgery. It certainly doesn't help that the science on diets nowadays contain so many contradicting studies. Moreso that some of them are pushed by powerful corporations for their own vested interests. No one wonder people don't trust them.
- adrianN 7y ago
  Nutrition is just a really difficult field for robust studies. There is an enormous amount of variables you have to control for and the effects you're looking for are likely small or only appear after decades. Strict adherence to the experimental protocol usually can't be supervised, leaving you with observational studies or self-reported data. Blinding is pretty much impossible. Funding is very limited, especially if you don't want to take money from "powerful corporations".
- leksak 7y ago
  As a side-project me and a friend have been trying to formalize a set of different rules and models from which to establish a diet. But, as the consumption of certain micronutrients drive the need for others up it's pretty hard to beat just eating a varied diet of mostly clean food. Some people on here mention organ meats, but that does not mean that it's safe to eat liver everyday either.
  - nradov 7y ago
    "Clean food" is such a vague term as to be nearly meaningless.
  - steve_adams_86 7y ago
    To make matters worse, varying gut biomes and environments tend to yield different nutritional requirements. Amongst other things. I'm not sure we'll ever nail that down. Again though, traditional medicines were aware of this and it was typically recognized that diet was specific to an individual and their environment. There were (and still are) complex systems outlining how foods may affect different people and what it could mean. Still, I'm not claiming anything here other than that it's interesting and worth considering. I take advil when my head hurts and I go to the hospital when I'm sick, and I'm not going to start treating cancer with fungus from my back yard. I just suspect there's a lot of useful knowledge in this tradition.

laser 7y ago

My favorite part was on the last page, which I’ll include below as I assume most won’t read to the end. After 4,000 people died in the army from beriberi, the navy, which had eradicated the disease with better diet, criticized the army’s resistance to changing their diet. The article says: ‘Under attack by navy doctors, the Army Medical Bureau struck back with an article published under a pseudonym. “The army does not need traditional medicine, statistical speculation or 1,890-year-old theories to solve its beriberi problem,” the article stated. “It needs scientific knowledge based on experimental medicine.”’ After this, 26,000 more army men died from beriberi before the Emperor forced them to add barley to their rice... As wonderful as scientific knowledge from experimental medicine is and has been, it seems this sort of belligerence towards pre-scientific human knowledge causes enormous damage that we’re still continuing to reckon with over a hundred years later. While ineffective traditional knowledge has caused plenty of unnecessary suffering too, it is often unwise to dismiss purely on the basis of having not yet been investigated with modern scientific rigor.

hyperpallium 7y ago
The two training ships seemed like pretty suggestive experimental evidence. Just not fully controlled laboratory evidence.
- dalbasal 7y ago
  In purely philosophical terms, you could say it's "scientific." But... in practice science is an institution as much as it is a method. In that sense "unscientific" means that something doesn't come from the scientific institution/culture.. regardless of who is on what side of a Karl Popper test of science.
  - mannykannot 7y ago
    I would say that on very practical terms, one could call it scientific, taking advantage of a situation that made possible an trial that could not have been approved as a fully-controlled clinical experiment, given the official opposition to Takaki's ideas. Takski's hypothesis also met Popper's criterion for falsifiability, and the Tsukuba could have suffered similar beri-beri rates as did the Ryujo.

baron816 7y ago

Page crashed twice while I was trying to read this and only made it a few paragraphs in. My phone also got very hot. Too bad sites like these have to rely on shady adware to produce interesting content like this.

hackits 7y ago
They have to pay the bill somehow.
mistahenry 7y ago
they didn't even make the content. The original article is https://medium.com/war-is-boring/eating-too-much-rice-almost-sank-the-japanese-navy-f985772c81a6 https://medium.com/war-is-boring/eating-too-much-rice-almost...

ezoe 7y ago

It's easy to laugh the old incidents. But it's pointless without considering the situation at that time. Otherwise, it's like laughing at old movies, saying: "Why don't they use cellphone to communicate each other?". The cellphone haven't invented at that time. Japanese navy suffered beriberi for eating milled white rice and nothing else. Because milled rice only diet lacks essential vitamins. But the first vitamin hasn't been found until 1913(Vitamin A). Nobody in the world had a correct knowledge about healthy diet. In this case, eating un-milled brown rice. At that time, majority of them believed that beriberi was caused by some kind of bacteria. So Japanese navy did everything they could do to prevent infection. It was not like they were trying. They didn't know the correct solution. So your next question would be, why didn't they test it scientifically? Well, in 1880, Statistics hadn't been developed like today. So not many people, even the scientists didn't have a proper statistic knowledge like modern scientists today must has or else they are doomed to be called unscientific idiot. You must also consider that at that time, the brown rice was for poor. It's taste aren't that good compared to white rice. Rich people was enjoy eating white rice everyday. Now imagine you were drafted for military, serving for the country, and you can't get a delicious and enough meal. That' a shame. So Japanese navy serve the best meal the traditional Japanese soldiers want, a lot of white rice.

DuskStar 7y ago
...because no other navy had encountered issues from feeding their crew a monotonous diet before. Maybe not this specific set of issues, but issues nonetheless.
- ezoe 7y ago
  Until very recently, traditional Japanese meal was consists of a bowl of rice, miso soup with some vegetables, and some vegetables. Because of religious and cultural reason(it was not that strong ban but most people follow it), Japanese at that time rarely eat meat.
  - DuskStar 7y ago
    And what relevance does that have? That's not the diet the sailors in question had or the replacement diet that was proposed.

hackerbabz 7y ago

> Takaki fought hard to institute fixed diets—but the navy resisted, saying it would double the cost of feeding crews. The navy made this argument while facing 1/3 to 1/2 rates of total crew loss due to the disease.

LyndsySimon 7y ago

It's odd that the article doesn't mention curry. The whole purpose of the introduction of curry to the IJN was to prevent beriberi, and it's become one of Japan's best-known dishes.

sandGorgon 7y ago

There's another story - the Japanese Curry was invented by the British to prevent scurvy [1] The earliest recipe for "raisu kari" is from the "Beeton's Book of Household Management" [4] which in turn uses "INDIAN CURRY-POWDER, founded on Dr. Kitchener’s Recipe" The Brits got curry from India (duh!) One of the leaders of India's freedom struggle against the British - Rash Behari Bose - escaped to Japan and created the "Indo-karii" Nakamuraya curry [2] . You can still eat it [3]. the Japan Maritime Self Defense Force still serves curry every Friday as a tradition. And each ship has its own recipe [5] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_curry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_curry [2] https://www.thebetterindia.com/109063/rash-behari-bose-ina-nakamuraya-curry-japan/ https://www.thebetterindia.com/109063/rash-behari-bose-ina-n... [3] http://www.nakamuraya.co.jp/ http://www.nakamuraya.co.jp/ [4] https://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2011/08/26/food/curry-its-more-japanese-than-you-think/#.XOzffXUzais https://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2011/08/26/food/curry-its-... [5] https://www.mod.go.jp/msdf/formal/family/recipe/archive/currey.html https://www.mod.go.jp/msdf/formal/family/recipe/archive/curr...

joncrane 7y ago
When I lived in Japan as a kid my two favorite foods were miso soup and that curry. It came in a box with gold writing and I think it was called S&B Golden Curry. It was amazing.
- JimiofEden 7y ago
  S&B Golden Curry can be found in America as well, luckily. I make a big pot at least once a month and have leftovers for the whole week. It's possibly one of my favorite meals that I can prep in bulk. The only next step I'm really interested in taking would be trying to make a curry roux from scratch, but I can't deny how amazing the prepackaged stuff is.
- seszett 7y ago
  Not sure where you are, but it's easy enough to find in western Europe at least.

jokowueu 7y ago

This is why they have VERY interesting vitamin B1 analogues https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_B1_analogue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_B1_analogue

kozak 7y ago

I recently have accidentally learned that my entire family is seriously deficient in vitamin D (even despite it's summer). A big surprise, and one that could have stayed undetected for many more years.

napsterbr 7y ago
My almost 90 years old grandmother was having episodes of demency. She would see stuff that didn't exist, talk to people that weren't there, and not recognize her own relatives. After weeks of doctor visits, and we all being 100% sure she was having something serious like Alzheimers, turns out it was vitamin D deficiency. Just sharing this here because I had no idea vitamin D deficiency could cause this.
lenticular 7y ago
Vitamin D deficiency actually really common, especially with dark skinned people living at higher latitudes. Most office people could do with a bit more UV.

zhte415 7y ago

Very related HN posting from 7 months ago on the supplementation of white rice (with curry): How Curry Became a Japanese Naval Tradition. HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18305211 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18305211 Linked article: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/japanese-curry-history https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/japanese-curry-history

turk73 7y ago

There are so many lessons from reading this. The biggest one is that soldiers and sailors are considered "cannon fodder" people and the military commanders didn't really care who lived or who died, so they would feed them the most minimal rations they could get away with until they lost so many that they had to actually do something. I have witnessed this same style of thinking in governments and in large corporations. Also, it reminds me of how the US treats its veterans--as soon as they are used up, they are forgotten about, written off, and "someone else's problem." The US Govt. pays lip service to veteran care but then cuts as many corners as possible and tries to deny benefits to as many as they can get away with denying in order to cut costs. One ought to question one's loyalty to any such system.

brookhaven_dude 7y ago

Somehow this is not a problem in Indian rice.

vfc1 7y ago

Beriberi was mostly caused by the replacement of whole rice by white rice. White rice is not a whole grain and has most of its fiber and many nutrients removed. If they had eaten whole rice instead, the disease is then easily prevented. But eating whole rice was apparently not socially well seen, as it was a food associated with the very poor. Later some of the nutrients have been sprayed back into the white rice, with the recommendation to not wash the rice before cooking, not to wash away the nutrients.

w0mbat 7y ago

Vitamin B1 deficiency causes beriberi, and white rice lacks B1. The article says that Japanese ships actually made a variety of food available but only white rice was free. It was the economic incentive that killed them. Similarly, corn lacks vitamin B3, and a corn-only diet causes a disease called "pellagra", which was once common in the US among the poor. If you read the ingredients on say a packet of corn flakes, you'll see thiamine and niacin (B1 and B3) are now added to prevent both kinds of disease. Casimir Funk, who basically discovered vitamins, helped find the role of thiamin in the etiology of beriberi, and also investigated pellagra. Funk said that pellagra was caused by B3 deficiency in 1912, but nobody listened and pellagra continued to devastate parts of the US into the 1940s.

thorwasdfasdf 7y ago

Spoiler alert, they were not getting enough Vitamin B1. I have a tool that breaks down nutritional densities on a per calorie basis. You can, for instance set the slider to B1 and see what foods contain the highest concentrations of B1: https://kale.world/c https://kale.world/c You'll notice that unenriched rice noodles only contain 3% of your Vitamin B1 needs in a 200 calorie serving. Note: that these days the issue is less likely to come up because white rice and white flours are often enriched with those Vitamins (similar to the way that cereals often are enriched with the vitamins they're missing) But, they also seem to suggest it might be lack of protein which I find harder to believe. Rice is 9% protein which is significantly more than the WHO's minimum recommendation of protein. I know some countries like the US state 10%, but that's double what the World health organization recommends.

stevenhuang 7y ago
That's a very useful site! Thanks.

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