8.1 Niacin Vitamers and Nomenclature 201
whenmaize was introduced from the New World as a convenient high-yielding
dietary staple. By the nineteenth century, it was widespread throughout
southernEuropeandnorth Africa.The disease was unknowninsouthernAfrica
until the outbreak of rinderpest in 1897, which led to widespread death of cattle
and a major change in the dietary habits of the Bantu.
From being a meat- and milk-eating community, they became, and have
remained, largely maize eaters, and pellagra continued to be a major problem
of public health nutrition in South Africa throughout much of the twentieth
century. The other region where pellagra was a major problem at the beginning
of the twentieth century was the southern part of the United States. The
social and economic upheaval of the American CivilWar led to a poor maizebased
diet for large sections of the population, and it was not until the entry of
the United States into the secondWorldWar that increasing employment and
a rise in the general standard of living solved the dietary problem. Although
Casal had considered pellagra to be due to a dietary deficiency, investigations
at the beginning of the twentieth century started from the assumption that,
like other diseases, it was an infection. It was the pioneering studies of Goldberger
and coworkers in the United States that showed that the condition was
neither contagious nor infectious, but could be prevented or cured by dietary
means.
After it had been established that pellagra was a nutritional deficiency disease,
the next problem was to discover the missing nutrient. Additional dietary
protein was shown to be beneficial, thus it was concluded that pellagra was
because of a protein deficiency. This view, and later that it was more specifically
from a deficiency of tryptophan, was held for some time. In 1938, Spies
and coworkers showed that nicotinic acid would cure pellagra; thereafter it
was gradually accepted that it was a niacin deficiency disease.
The role of additional dietary protein in curing pellagra was elucidated in
1947, when it was shown that the administration of tryptophan to human
beings led to an increase in the urinary excretion of N1-methyl nicotinamide,
the major urinary metabolite of niacin. It is usual to regard pellagra as a niacin
deficiency disease, and tryptophan as a substitute for niacin when the dietary
intake of the vitamin is inadequate. However, this is not strictly correct, and
pellagra should be regarded as being a deficiency of both tryptophan and
niacin.
8.1 NIACIN VITAMERS AND NOMENCLATURE
The term niacin is the generic descriptor for the two compounds that have
the biological action of the vitamin: nicotinic acid and nicotinamide (see
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