Vampires are real!

Forget Edward Cullen—the first time I felt the seductive lure of the undead was when I saw Tom Cruise on the movie poster for “Interview with the Vampire.” It was 1994, and I was not quite nine years old. Cruise starred in the film as the vampire Lestat, the dark anti-hero of Anne Rice’s classic horror novels. Lestat’s electric blue eyes seemed to stare out at me and pierce my soul, the same way his fangs pierced a succession of necks in the movie. Edward Cullen, the brooding young hero of the “Twilight” vampire sagas, didn’t come along until later. Cullen captivated my little sister’s generation, while I stayed stuck on Tom Cruise’s Lestat and his blood-sucking protégé, Louis, played by Brad Pitt in “Interview.”

Women love vampires, that much is certain. Vampires seem to have universal appeal, both as undead antagonists who haunt our imaginations and sexy romantic heroes who make us weak in the knees. Our love of vampires is remarkable, considering they don’t exist.

Or do they?

Most cultural myths have some basis in truth. Vampires are no different. But instead of attaining immortality by drinking human blood, it seems real-life vampires were merely victims of eating corn.

Yes—corn, that plant that Jimmy cracked. It grows like weeds in my home state of Ohio. Although we often associate it with the Midwest, corn has always grown in abundance throughout the Americas. Indigenous people from Maine to Peru lived on corn, which they called maize. Corn was so plentiful in the New World that European explorers hauled shiploads of it back to their home countries. In Italy, bakers ground corn into a grainy mush known as polenta. In the United Kingdom, cornflour and cornbread replaced the hearty brown wheat loaves of the Middle Ages. Corn was cheap, it was tasty, and it was versatile—and it was also making people sick.

A few years after corn began replacing wheat as a dietary staple in Europe, the first vampires emerged near the Transylvania region of Romania. Petrified witnesses described a rash of nocturnal, spectacularly pale people who bit the heads off bats and attacked innocent bystanders. Who were they? What was wrong with them?

No one could provide a definitive explanation. They could only identify the telltale signs of vampirism: sufferers tended to have pallid skin, extreme sensitivity to sunlight, and cracked, bloody lips—which stoked rumors they survived off human blood.

As the condition spread throughout Europe, people feared that vampires were creating new victims by biting them. The name “Nosferatu,” first used by Bram Stoker in his classic novel “Dracula,” comes from the ancient Greek word nosophorous, or “plague-carrier.” (It’s also worth noting that “Nosferatu” is the name of an excellent seasonal beer brewed by Great Lakes Brewery in my hometown of Cleveland, Ohio. Naturally, there’s a vampire on the label.) Only Satan could be behind such a wicked plot: the vampires had clearly cut a deal with the Devil in order to achieve immortality. The short life span of vampires, however, undercut this theory, leaving doctors throughout Europe baffled.

It took centuries for scientists to discover that malnutrition was to blame for the scourge of vampires stalking Europe during the Age of Empires. After ruling out rabies and tuberculosis as the culprit, as well as genetics, scientists realized the cause was dietary. By switching from wheat to corn, Europeans had virtually eliminated niacin from their diet. A severe deficiency of niacin, also known as Vitamin B3, causes a disease called pellagra, known to 17th-century Europeans as Vampirism.

The novelist Bram Stoker’s vampire, Count Dracula, had all the symptoms of pellagra. He avoids the sun, describing himself as “a blot on the face of God’s sunshine.” He tells a guest, “I love the shade and the shadow.” It turns out that Dracula, severely deficient in Vitamin B3, didn’t have much choice: pellagra causes severe photosensitivity, so sufferers avoid the sun. Stoker also describes Dracula as a man of “extraordinary pallor,” who doesn’t have “a speck of color about him”—due to the blood loss that pellagra victims experience, which also explains their cracked, bleeding lips. In its late stages, pellagra progresses from the first two Ds—diarrhea and dermatitis—to the third and fourth Ds, dementia and death. This explains why Eastern Europeans reported bizarre, violent outbursts amongst the vampires.

But if pellagra is the natural result of eating corn instead of wheat, how did the indigenous people of the Americas avoid the disease? It turns out that Europeans, unfamiliar with corn, overlooked the crucial step of soaking it in slack lime. This process, known as nixtamalization, makes the niacin in corn available to the body. This is how native cultures in North and South America prepare cornmeal and tortillas.

The Native Americans who introduced European explorers to corn probably did teach them about nixtamalization. But the Europeans, arriving home after months at sea, either disregarded this critical step or forgot about it. As one researcher said, Europeans unfamiliar with the crop “grew corn, sold it, ate it, and became sick—all because of a lost recipe.”

Now you know. Vampires were real, although their true need was more Vitamin B3, not a continuous supply of mortal blood. Does it make me lust any less for Lestat and other dead-sexy vampires? Not at all. Although, if I ever meet one in person, I’ll be sure to bring tortillas soaked in slack lime.