Sick chickens fed leftover rice revealed the first known vitamin

In 1890s Java, Christiaan Eijkman noticed lab chickens fed polished white rice developed a paralysis resembling the disease beriberi — but recovered once a cost-cutting cook switched them back to unmilled brown rice. Eijkman had accidentally shown that beriberi came from a missing nutrient rather than a germ, cutting against the era's obsession with infectious causes. His work led directly to the discovery of vitamins and a shared 1929 Nobel Prize.

— Christiaan Eijkman, Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1929 — Awarded for the discovery of the antineuritic vitamin