>That is why America’s pellagra outbreak was unusual. Americans knew what nixtamalization was. [...]
So the narrative in the article seems to be: "the elites in the us knew what was causing Pellagra, but they didn't bother solving it because it suited them.". This seems to be contradicted by the wikipedia article on pellagra[1] and its cited work[2]:
>In 1914, the commonly held opinion was that pellagra was an infectious and communicable disease [...]
>The year was 1921; it was 7 years since Goldberger had started his pellagra research.He now began in earnest to study the pellagra-preventive action of various foods and to identify the specific nutritional deficiency that was etiologic for pellagra [...] By 1926, on the basis of animal experiments, Goldberger and his colleagues concluded that P-Pfactor was the heat-resistant part of “water soluble vitamin B.”