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 ri

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.