CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS

Christopher Columbus brought Sweet potatoes, cacao, pumpkins, pineapple, tomatoes, turkey, and corn from the Caribbean back to Europe in 1493.

Corn is an example of the great degree to which Christopher Columbus affected all of Europe with these new foods,

Corn had been eaten for thousands of years by native Americans who had over time devised the safest way to consume corn. Christopher Columbus knew nothing about the proper way to prepare corn so as to be nutritious rather than toxic.

The native Americans, by trial and error, found that cooking corn in the ashes of fire resulted in good health as opposed to just boiling corn. The ashes of a fire create an alkaline cooking environment and result in destroying the phytates in the corn which are bound to the niacin in the corn. Once the phytates are destroyed during cooking (called nixtamalization), niacin is available in the food. Europe loved the new foods such as corn but suddenly were becoming ill from a disease called Pellagra which is a niacin deficiency. Hundreds of thousands of people were sickened by corn not being cooked properly over the next several hundred years. It was not until the 1940s in the South of the United States that the reason was discovered as to why the corn was making them sick from a niacin deficiency.