Rinkoku kara Kita Yome ga Kawaisugite Doushiyou - Vol. 2 Ch. 11

[Amariithynar]

Well, that’s probably because the author skimmed on the historical parallels between how beriberi came to be a thing in Meiji era Japan and how it was eventually eradicated.

See, back in the days rice was a staple food, but poor people had brown rice which had its bran coating intact. Polished white rice was considered a luxurious food meant for the rich back in the days, but polishing the bran off the rice also meant that it can be stored longer, so the military will pay to have the rice polished so it can be stored in the warehouses. Similarly, in major Japanese cities the warehouses of local merchants tend to be stocked with polished white rice since it’s much more shelf-stable, and they can pass the price increases onto their customers.

The ability to store polished rice for long periods of time meant that the Japanese military gave their soldiers and sailors as much white rice as they wanted, but charged for other foods. For poorer sailors during voyages, many of them ended up eating nothing but white rice and salt (so they can send money from their paychecks home). At least army soldiers can theoretically forage for extra ingredients..but not always. It was observed that during longer campaigns or voyages, poorer soldiers and sailors who had nothing but polished white rice and salt developed beriberi, while their richer officers didn’t, despite them being in close proximity with each other. The only difference is that the officers also ate other things paid out of pocket sold from the mess halls and galleys. When those poorer soldiers and sailors returned back to their families out in the countryside, their condition seemingly improved or went away. Why was that? Their families at home can’t afford polished white rice so they had to have barley or locally grown unpolished rice (which is brown rice). Where’s the B1 stored in rice? Within the bran coating that was polished off.

How did the Japanese Navy fought off Beriberi? They started mixing barley onto their white rice (which was resisted by some sailors due to its “poor folk kibble” image), but the army didn’t follow suit and suffered from it for 15 more years. The Japanese emperor eventually ordered the army to add barley to their rice rations as well.

In the manga, the victims tend to be single men on exile who were on the fish-and-polished rice diet and little else. This is similar to the diets of day laborers in large Japanese cities like Osaka and Tokyo. For the urban lower and middle class, there was a folk remedy…which was to mix beans into the white rice, which also boosted its nutritional profile.

The author is also making a big point of pointing out that these are people in exile, so likely the karris they get is not locally grown but shipped to them, which is why it's polished like rice.

 

[Kuroku]

But I don't think this makes any sense. If the disease is a vitamin deficiency, and these people have been there for a while and have been eating rice and dried fish the whole time, shouldn't this "epidemic" be a longstanding problem and not something that's just happened recently?

It’s that the rice they get here isn’t like the rice they had in their homeland. The rice is cleaned of most of the nutrients. This difference caused the issue with the combo of dried rice. The people who weren’t exiles or just originally from there didn’t consume just polished rice and dried fish.

This was why they kept emphasizing the region the men were from and that it was their pride.

 

[prospero021]

Thanks for the chapters!

 

[CrabTable]

Weirdly enough i think this is the second time i've read a series that directly diagnosed someone with beriberi but i dont quite remember the name of it

 

[Psychronia]

Nutritional imbalance-type malnourishment can be a real menace, but it's often got a surprisingly simple solution.

Well. In concept, anyway. Actually procuring the dietary need and mass-distributing it can be rough depending on your authority and resources. What foods have a lot of vitamin B1? I think some fish have lots of it, so that might be their best bet for a long-term solution. If barley and unprocessed rice also have it, then I assume the prince can import certain grains for it as a stopgap.

 

[blablablub]

Without a doubt, she's the reincarnated.

Was there any doubt left?

 

[Axelord]

I think the translator was looking for the word quarantine in multiple spots.

 

[RollOmega]

I don't think I've ever read a fantasy-setting story where one of the characters whose brain we don't have direct access to is implied to have been isekai'd into that world, but no one native to the world can even conceive of that idea, so from their perspective the otherworldly interloper is just a native that says really weird shit sometimes and/or knows things they probably shouldn't know. It's a fascinating and refreshing take on the genre.

 

[Kaito57]

Page 30 : SHUT THE FUCK UP AND LET THEM BE LOVEY-DOVEY ALL THEY WANT !!!

 

[YamiRi]

Whoa beriberi mentioned! Been a while since I heard about that disease.
Nobel prize in Medicine 1929

 

[Haydrion101]

Imagine if she was reincarnated from someone who wrote and developed an otome as an homage to a partner who passed away, into her own game.

That might actually break me.

See, back in the days rice was a staple food, but poor people had brown rice which had its bran coating intact. Polished white rice was considered a luxurious food meant for the rich back in the days, but polishing the bran off the rice also meant that it can be stored longer, so the military will pay to have the rice polished so it can be stored in the warehouses. Similarly, in major Japanese cities the warehouses of local merchants tend to be stocked with polished white rice since it’s much more shelf-stable, and they can pass the price increases onto their customers.

The ability to store polished rice for long periods of time meant that the Japanese military gave their soldiers and sailors as much white rice as they wanted, but charged for other foods. For poorer sailors during voyages, many of them ended up eating nothing but white rice and salt (so they can send money from their paychecks home). At least army soldiers can theoretically forage for extra ingredients..but not always. It was observed that during longer campaigns or voyages, poorer soldiers and sailors who had nothing but polished white rice and salt developed beriberi, while their richer officers didn’t, despite them being in close proximity with each other. The only difference is that the officers also ate other things paid out of pocket sold from the mess halls and galleys. When those poorer soldiers and sailors returned back to their families out in the countryside, their condition seemingly improved or went away. Why was that? Their families at home can’t afford polished white rice so they had to have barley or locally grown unpolished rice (which is brown rice). Where’s the B1 stored in rice? Within the bran coating that was polished off.

How did the Japanese Navy fought off Beriberi? They started mixing barley onto their white rice (which was resisted by some sailors due to its “poor folk kibble” image), but the army didn’t follow suit and suffered from it for 15 more years. The Japanese emperor eventually ordered the army to add barley to their rice rations as well.

In the manga, the victims tend to be single men on exile who were on the fish-and-polished rice diet and little else. This is similar to the diets of day laborers in large Japanese cities like Osaka and Tokyo. For the urban lower and middle class, there was a folk remedy…which was to mix beans into the white rice, which also boosted its nutritional profile.

I greatly enjoyed this highly educational comment.

 

[Friendly-Sentence710]

But I don't think this makes any sense. If the disease is a vitamin deficiency, and these people have been there for a while and have been eating rice and dried fish the whole time, shouldn't this "epidemic" be a longstanding problem and not something that's just happened recently?

To make this as short as possible:
The author addresses that by saying the affected ate spoiled dried fish which gave them diarrhea. Basically the population is going into the situation B1 deficient already (and likely deficient in other nutrients as well), then get a mild case of food poisoning. This not only taxes their bodies, but flushes out nutrients and when you have beriberi, if not treated can spiral into being lethal as you become too sick to uptake B1.
Japan/Asia has some of the most well-documented cases of Beriberi but it affects populations in Africa too.

The only part that stretches credibility for me would be poor exiles eating polished rice. But @WANgue covers that with the storage issue which I wasn't aware of.

I mean, Scurvy is an insidious disease, but also super easy to fix- just eat some oranges/citrus. Yet many people died of it on ships until the linkage was discovered.

You can also combat it with collagen (which is what your body turns vitamin C into), but easily intakeable collagen would have storage issues.

and not just ships. It was a serious disease in land-based colonies through the first part of the 1700s as colonies did not trust indigenous species of produce and in caribbean latitudes european crops didn't grow very well, so the primary diet of many colonists was dried meat and flour from Europe.
Imagine your teeth literally dropping out of your head because you didn't want to eat some mango.*

*which I make light of, but back when you had the dual issues of "widespread calorie and nutrient deficiencies" and "disease and effective hygiene being poorly understood", you would have someone try a native plant and then seriously ill and/or die a few days later and you couldn't be sure if it was because the plant was poisonous, if the rest of their food had spoiled, or if some disease had taken them.
People forget that even young and presumably healthy people being found dead in the morning used to be a common occurrence even through the 1800s.

 

[BurgerNoRoti]

 

[WANgue]

Nutritional imbalance-type malnourishment can be a real menace, but it's often got a surprisingly simple solution.

Well. In concept, anyway. Actually procuring the dietary need and mass-distributing it can be rough depending on your authority and resources. What foods have a lot of vitamin B1? I think some fish have lots of it, so that might be their best bet for a long-term solution. If barley and unprocessed rice also have it, then I assume the prince can import certain grains for it as a stopgap.

Well, B1 is water-soluable, so dried fish will have much lower amounts of B1 versus the fresh stuff.

Rigo did mention that because he doesn’t have much money he hadn’t had access to fresh meat until he got married and his wife started feeding him that pork and onion soup with garlic bits…which had enough B1 within to have kept him stabilized. It sounded like that most of the exiled were in the same financial situation. The question was…did they have a more varied diet back in the Mira empire before they were forced into exile? If not, was there a specific ingredient that they had in Mira but not Tidros?

 

[exxeld]

I'm actually quite liking the approach of having the reincarnated person be someone that isn't the immediate mc. Kinda fun to see what it looks like from the sidelines for once.

 

[GutsMansAss]

My Little House M.D. Can't Be This Cute!

 

[popo53414]

 

[BanditHadron]

I knew it was beriberi. The Jin manga showed me all the symptoms, lol

 

[Thecatlord]

There's no way she isn't a reincarnator. I had my suspicions before but this just confirmed them.
I don't see this often, where the the reincarnator isn't the main character. It's still rare enough to be refreshing.

 

[turjsurj]

I had a hunch that it was beriberi, since I remembered an article I read as a kid of a Oceanic country having endemic outbreaks of it, along with another new outbreak which caused outright brain damage and other scary symptoms. Turns out the culprit was feeding only polished white rice to chickens, which can cause catastrophic damage to the body for some reason if eaten