1996 Volume 60 Issue 10 Pages 1660-1666
We investigated the effects of feeding various types of nicotinic acid-free, tryptophan-limiting diets on the conversion ratio of tryptophan to niacin in rats. Various tryptophan-limiting diets were made by adding zein, gelatin, glycine, threonine, methionine, or glycine+threonine+methionine to a nicotinic acid-free, 9% casein diet. When the rats were fed with the tryptophan-limiting diets, the conversion ratio of tryptophan to niacin was markedly decreased. However, the ratio recovered after the addition of tryptophan to the tryptophan-limiting diets. These results clearly prove that the conversion was lowest when the rats were fed with the tryptophan-limiting diets. Therefore, we think that the pellagragenic factor of corn is simply due to a low content of tryptophan, but the adverse effect is due to a low conversion ratio of tryptophan to niacin.
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