Eating Too Much Rice Almost Sank the Japanese Navy

The Japanese problems with beriberi are entirely consistent with other medical problems.

The essay touched on the British navy problems with scurvy, but left how how for centuries people thought it was the acid in citrus which had the curative properties, not the vitamin C. Limes were a solution, but they switched to another lime tree that wasn't a good source of vitamin C, and used processing techniques that destroyed the vitamin C.

Nor are the problems limited to Japan. In general, the introduction of mechanized rice-milling, which made it cheaper to store and transport rice, meant that cultures with large rice component to their diet were no longer getting the nutrients they needed. Beriberi was also a significant problem in India, under British rule in the 1800s and very early 1900s.

Then there's the miasma theory which "explained" diseases like malaria and yellow fever. It took a lot of convincing to overturn 2,000 years of medical orthodoxy.

So on the one hand you could laugh as the misfortunes of other.

Or you could take it as an object lesson on the difficulties of paradigm change. How can you tell if you yourself aren't blinded by strong but unjustified beliefs?