Strictly speaking, toxicology deals with dose to effect, not with the absence of a dose or an agent. However, nutritional toxicology has broadened to include studying the effects of dietary deficiency (Hodgson et al., 1998). If a toxic agent must be presented in order to make a toxicologic case here, then the poor Southern corn could serve as one. After all, pellagra had been described as a plague of corn (Roe, 1973).

The pellagra epidemics experienced in the early years were not caused by the poor corn diet alone. The European incidents in the late nineteenth century would have been reduced substantially, if people accepted the thesis that poor social conditions could cause pellagra. The American epidemic in the early twentieth century would also have been contained much sooner, had the medical community not been obsessed with infectious disease but accepted Goldberger’s study results (as mentioned in Slide 8).

The hypothesis that the corn diet was the causative agent was confirmed as soon as niacin was identified as a pellagra-preventative factor. This important piece of toxicologic information also soon got rid of the medical community’s obsession with infectious disease, as well as the political world’s resistance that they were still living in poverty. The war with pellagra as an epidemiologic plague was soon over, when such toxicologic information was confirmed with subsequent treatments of pellagrins with niacin supplement.